“For our happy childhood…” – a game-playing multi-media programme

Children are forever playing, and it is through play that they discover the world around them. Grown-ups often try to invent games and toys so that with their help children can learn about family values, about rules of behaviour, about the culture of their homeland. Games reflect not only those features of the structure of our lives that have been formed over centuries, but also “infectious trends” bearing the stamp of a particular time.

The character of an age appears in daily life, in culture, in technology, and at times even in ideology. And if, when considering past years, or decades, or centuries, we look at the games played by the children of those bygone generations, we can understand a great deal about those times.

This is the story told by the exhibition “For our happy childhood…” (the title comes from a Pioneers’ slogan: “Thank you, dear Stalin, for our happy childhood”). It opened at the beginning of the new century in the Sergei Kirov Museum in St Petersburg, and continues to this day, in conjunction with the museum’s own exhibition. The exhibition presents the daily life and the amusements of Soviet children in the 1930s. In the exhibition space the children of today can become acquainted with the games on which their great-grandparents were brought up, and even play these games themselves. They have this opportunity thanks to a multi-media programme created using board games printed during the first decades of the Soviet state in children’s magazines and in special books. This programme – like the whole exhibition – immerses the young spectator in the atmosphere of the 1930s with its inimitable style and rhythm.

The programme contains about twenty games, either based on actual printed examples or specially created using re-workings of game procedures. The programme was designed using elements of book printing from the 1930s, as well as music from this time. The computer game “To our happy childhood…” is the result of creative co-operation between the specialists of the Sergei Kirov Museum and the “Mart” multi-media studio. It is set up in the museum exhibition and is also available as a CD-ROM direct from the museum or from the kiosks of the State Museum of the History of St Petersburg.

It is our pleasure to announce that this programme received the “My Fatherland” prize in the All-Russian multi-media programme festival “Kontent-2002”.