NEW YORK FOLKLORE QUARTERLY
Vol. XX, No. 4, December, 1964

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ON GAME MORPHOLOGY:
A STUDY OF THE STRUCTURE OF NON-VERBAL FOLKLORE
by Alan Dundes

ARE children’s games, a form of non-verbal folklore, and folktales, a form of verbal folklore, structurally similar? I am suggesting in the following article that they are and also that there are many other non-verbal analogues to verbal folklore forms. Consequently, the definition of folklore should not be limited to verbal materials.

Although structural analysis, as an effective means of descriptive ethnography, has been applied to a number of types of folklore expression, it has not been employed in the study of children’s games. Yet games, in general, and competitive games, in particular, are obviously patterned. In competitive games, the participants are aware that play is governed by definite limiting rules. The application and the interrelationship of these rules result in an ordered sequence of actions by the players, and these action sequences constitute the essential structure of any particular game.

In order to delineate the structure of a game, or any other form of folklore, one must have a minimum structural unit. Only with such a unit can there be any precise segmentation of the continuum of game action. As a trial unit, I propose to use the motifeme, a unit of action which has been used in structural studies of folktales. One obvious advantage of employing the motifeme is that if game action can, in fact, be broken down into motifemes, then it would be relatively easy to compare the structure of games with the structure of folktales....

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