靠“小马卡”社交,小学生的童年越来越安静了吗? Socializing with "Little Pony Card", is the childhood of elementary school students becoming quieter?
Author: 魏谜底 Wei Riddle
Length: • 1 min
Annotated by howie.serious
*本文为「三联生活周刊」原创内容 This article is original content by "Sanlian Life Weekly"
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「小学生如何社交? 」
「How do elementary school students socialize? 」
记者|魏倩在从儿童向青少年进化的特殊阶段,小学生们主动建构着自己的社会圈子。原本儿童的天性是活泼好动的,群体性玩耍是最传统、也是最接近本性的需求。但当我们越来越用分数考核孩子,学校因为安全忧患也不鼓励玩耍,孩子们传统游戏的时间、空间都被大大压缩。他们需要一种彼此沟通的语言,也需要自我发展受限时的补偿。
Reporter|Wei Qian In the special stage of evolving from children to teenagers, elementary school students actively construct their own social circles. Originally, children's nature is lively and active, and group play is the most traditional and closest to their nature's needs. But as we increasingly assess children by their scores, and schools discourage play due to safety concerns, the time and space for traditional games have been greatly compressed. They need a language to communicate with each other and compensation when their self-development is limited. The rise of card games is becoming a microcosm of the transformation in children's play methods. Lonely children, quietly playing at their desks, the addictive mechanisms of commercial society infiltrate the children's world. What about us adults? What kind of world should we provide for children to play in?
“小马卡”的世界 "Little Pony Cards" World
对任何一个成年人来说,走进暑假的卡牌店都像误入彼得·潘的异世界。到处都是孩子,最大的看起来也不超过13岁。从半人高的到刚到人肩膀的,斜挎书包的、戴眼镜的。四周很吵,他们很少会控制说话的音量,当然还有动作的幅度,走在人群里,你经常不小心就会被撞到一边。四面墙上花花绿绿的,货架上摆着中性笔、笔记本、塑料挂件,最显眼的则是那些堆叠竖放的闪光小卡包,几乎所有孩子手里都拿着它。这里是北京西单华威大厦里的一家主题卡店,孩子们到这儿的目的是买一种扑克牌大小的卡牌。
For any adult, walking into a card shop during summer vacation feels like stepping into Peter Pan's otherworld. Children are everywhere, the oldest looking no more than 13 years old. From those half as tall as a person to those just reaching shoulder height, with sling bags and glasses. It's very noisy around, they rarely control their speaking volume, and of course, their movements are also large. Walking through the crowd, you often get bumped aside. The four walls are colorful, with shelves displaying pens, notebooks, and plastic pendants, but the most eye-catching are the stacked, upright shiny card packs, almost every child holding one. This is a themed card shop in Beijing's Xidan Huanwei Building, where children come to buy poker-sized cards. The gameplay is simple: players buy a "blind box" of cards for 2 to 10 yuan, from which they can "open" 5 to 10 cards of different suits and levels, mainly for collection or exchange. Depending on the character images on the cards, they can be further divided into dozens of types such as "Ultraman Cards" and "Ye Luoli Cards". In Beijing's Xidan Huanwei Building, parents accompany their children to grab cards (Photo by Huang Yu). The simple rules do not affect its popularity. In 2022, a news story about a parent spending 2 million yuan to collect Ultraman cards for their child but failing to complete the collection sparked widespread discussion on social media. According to media statistics, in the first half of that year, the monthly sales of "Ultraman Cards" on the JD platform alone exceeded 100,000 pieces. In early 2024, another similar card called "My Little Pony" achieved far greater success. On e-commerce platforms, the monthly sales of My Little Pony cards reached 2 million pieces per store, once topping the vertical hot-selling list. Meanwhile, the manufacturer behind these two types of cards, Zhejiang KAYOU Culture Communication Co., Ltd., which occupies 71% of China's trading card market, also submitted a listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. According to its prospectus, during the "explosive period" in 2022, the company sold a total of 2.2 billion cards, with revenue reaching 4.131 billion yuan. However, one piece of information that KAYOU did not clearly disclose in the prospectus is that most of the buyers of these cards are minors. As seen in the current scene, the entire store, less than 40 square meters, is almost occupied by children aged 8 to 12. They either drag their parents to stare at the shelves or inquire about prices at the stalls. There is always a queue in front of the cashier counter, less than a meter high. Tall adults take out their phones to scan and pay, while children without parents pull out pink bills from their school bags. And this is just one of the more than 100,000 terminal stores covered by KAYOU in China. "Bro, are you giving up all these 'Little Pony Cards'?!" With a few exclamations from children, I was squeezed to the table in the store's interactive area. A round-faced boy with a crew cut was sitting here "unpacking," tearing open the plastic pack in his hand and tossing the cards onto the table like garbage after a glance. His school bag on the ground still had nearly half a pack of cards. According to my immature preliminary research, this method of unpacking is called "box opening," where you buy a whole box of cards at once just to quickly draw the "high-level cards" you want. To get these cards, the boy spent a total of 600 yuan on "box opening" that day.
在很多店里,小马宝莉卡被摆放在最显眼的位置(黄宇 摄)
In many stores, My Little Pony cards are placed in the most prominent positions (photo by Huang Yu). Every child clearly understands the rules of the card world. A 10-year-old girl squeezed out of the crowd with a handful of cards, her forehead covered in sweat. She came to Beijing with her mother for a vacation during the summer. Since the spring of this year, in her hometown of Nanchang, Jiangxi, My Little Pony cards have become "the most popular thing in the class." However, before today, the highest-level card she owned was only a "Blackback." Therefore, the boy's "Rainbow Three" made her particularly excited. Many high-level cards in the discard pile were ones she didn't have yet. "I have to show them to my classmates when school starts." "Oh my god! XR, it's 'Princess Cadance'!" The children burst into cheers. The boy finally had a harvest. He changed his previously indifferent expression, pinched the corner of the card, and raised it like a cautious entomologist, putting it into a transparent card sleeve. Everyone around the table was infected, and laughter and screams filled the air. But outside this circle was a group of puzzled and helpless adults. In the past two years, the controversy over such card games has never stopped. There are often news reports online about "high-level My Little Pony cards being speculated to tens of thousands of yuan each." In schools, teachers believe that card trading fosters a sense of comparison among students, and parents are anxious about the "blind draw" game mechanism, considering it a form of "light gambling." "What use are these pieces of paper?" An aunt holding a card album sighed beside me, behind the children frantically grabbing cards. After all, in the world we came from, children's games were far from what we see now. From the "60s" and "70s" rolling iron hoops and playing sandbags, to the "80s" and "90s" playing football and jumping rubber bands, or doing nothing at all, just running and playing aimlessly in the playground. But why have elementary school games become quieter and more complex now?
匮乏制造的真空 The vacuum created by scarcity
“孩子们不知道怎么‘玩’了”,这也是苏珊·林近年来非常担忧的问题。她从上世纪90年代就开始研究儿童的玩耍行为,近两年,她发现,孩子们“主动探索和感知周围世界,从中发现和创造‘好玩’事物的举动”——也就是我们传统意义上的“玩耍”——越来越少,由于平板电脑的出现,他们对声音、光线、味道的好奇,甚至触摸物品的愿望都在减弱
"Children don't know how to 'play' anymore," this is also a concern that Susan Lin has had in recent years. She began studying children's play behavior in the 1990s. In recent years, she has found that children's "active exploration and perception of the surrounding world, discovering and creating 'fun' things"—what we traditionally mean by "play"—is becoming less and less. Due to the advent of tablets, their curiosity about sounds, light, and taste, and even their desire to touch objects, is diminishing. "Games are ready-made, and they no longer need to carefully observe their surroundings, go outdoors, discuss with friends, or use their wild imagination to play games." Susan Lin wonders if children still have the ability to play autonomously. Has their social life been taken over by commercial companies? In Chinese elementary school students, this role is currently played by card games. Cards like My Little Pony cards are classified as "trading card games" in the game. They first appeared in the United States in the 1950s as a purely collectible card "blind box." In the 1990s, "Magic: The Gathering" and "Yu-Gi-Oh!" added combat elements to the cards. The excitement brought by the uncertainty of opening cards, the flow experience of collecting and organizing card decks, and the interaction and competition during peer battles have made TCG card games have a considerable number of core players worldwide. Illustration: Lao Niu TCG cards, which originally belonged to the adult group, have entered campuses and become popular among elementary school students. In our interviews, we found that its popularity is, to some extent, a result of a "scarcity" brought about by a lack of alternatives. The "Card Game" company told us that when their first popular card "Ultraman Card" became popular, it coincided with the implementation of policies to prevent minors from becoming addicted to online games. At that time, the company emphasized "put down your phone, play healthily" in their promotional materials. This was not the first "retreat" in children's entertainment lives. Lina, a first-grade girl in Beijing, is a My Little Pony card expert with many fans on social media. Her mother, Cui Meng, has posted many videos of Lina opening cards online, accumulating over 5,000 fans in less than six months, most of whom are elementary school students three or four years older than Lina. Cui Meng established two fan groups for the children but found that during school days, the groups were always quiet. They had to do homework until eleven or twelve at night and had no time to talk. Children's time is becoming increasingly scarce, which is also observed by many teachers. Li Yujin (pseudonym), a senior Chinese teacher at Tsinghua University Affiliated Primary School in Beijing, told us that children used to be dismissed at around 3 p.m., and parents hadn't finished work, so the children could play freely for a while. In recent years, with the addition of "after-school care" services, the earliest ends at 4:30 p.m., and some at 5:30 p.m., with children spending more than 10 hours at school. They have no opportunity to interact with other environments, moving only between school and home. "Their social interactions used to be very close. After school, I could go find you to play. But now, this is impossible. Children either go to tutoring classes or go home to do homework. Even if they can go out to play, parents won't feel safe letting them go out alone. The scene of several children running and jumping in the community without parental supervision is almost impossible to see." Li Yujin said, "So they start to communicate in this way. For example, exchanging cards or journals, making them at home and bringing them to school to show each other. When they play games at home, they talk to each other through their watches because they can't play face-to-face." Still from "A Little Separation" In school, playtime and space are also compressed. The corridors are very narrow, and it's impossible to walk in four columns. The corridor is about 20 meters long, with six classes in one corridor, each class having 40-45 students, leaving no space for activities. For safety reasons, children are not allowed to run or jump in the corridors. "There are too many children in one class, and the teacher can't watch them all, so they don't go out." Thus, under multiple pressures, "seat games" like card games have almost become the only choice for children. In the past six months, Cui Meng has started to hear about children "getting sick" from the fan groups. Once, she held a lottery in the group, and her daughter packed her handmade crafts to send to the children in the group. When it was time to ship, the recipient sent her a hospital address. It turned out the child was hospitalized for depression.
游戏中的“自我” The "self" in the game
而当作为成人的我们,问出“这些破纸片有什么意义”的时候,其实也不自觉地参与了那个“匮乏”世界的建造。
And when we, as adults, ask "what's the point of these pieces of paper," we are actually unconsciously participating in the construction of that "scarcity" world.
相较于具体的时空的挤压,这种对儿童生活的单一的、效率性的期待,可能会带来更严重的后果。北京交通大学的心理学者叶壮认为,那是一种 “娱乐互动”在儿童世界里的缺失。“打羽毛球是娱乐,玩王者荣耀也是娱乐,于是很多家长都会说,那我家孩子娱乐不少啊,但实际上呢,你带他出去放风筝,就问孩子,‘风筝为什么飞这么高啊,它是在平流层还是对流层啊?我带你出来放风筝,我们回去写一篇日记吧?’孩子听完,再也不想和你放风筝了。”因此,巨细无遗的,如同“管理项目”一般的管教压力,并不一定会具象到报了几个补习班,有多少时间下楼活动。
《我们的日子》剧照
对于小学这个特殊的人生阶段来说,游戏和社会互动,更是他们主动建构自己社会圈子的方式。叶壮告诉我,8~12岁这个年龄段,人的发展会呈现几个特点:首先是同伴社交的发生,同伴的影响力开始大幅上升;其次是知识的体系化学习;第三是快速地融入集体生活,适应团体规则,也就是说,孩子会开始主动地去发展一个新的“自我”。孩子的生活需要这样的一个世界,一个不被父母侵入,完全属于他和同伴的世界,很多简单、轻松,又具有一定群体认知度的玩具和游戏,很多时候就会顺势成为这个世界中的语言。当“自我”发展受阻的时候,他们偶尔也能在游戏中找到平衡和安慰。杨燕是湖南一所小学的老师,她刚刚送走一届六年级的学生,回到一年级任教。她发现,孩子们会在成长的过程中逐渐习得和内化成人世界的等级标准。一个一年级的小男孩或许会在考试后开心得大喊“我有星星耶!”,但到了四五年级,几乎就不再会有孩子说起自己的“星星”,他们慢慢知道高分和低分,知道“好孩子”和“坏孩子”,在老师和学校建立的一套完整又坚固的评价规则——尽管它是相当不公平的——面前,他们只会看向那个拥有最多星的同龄人。而在游戏中,这样单一的标准有时又能出现一点点缝隙。一个学习很好的孩子也可能完全不懂什么是“小马宝莉”的分级体系,一个很受老师喜欢的班干部也做不到烟卡里的“蚊子拍”。而那些在集体中一向不被“看见”的孩子,尽管是无意识的,也有机会在一个新体系里得到补偿,重新找到自己的位置。家长们要“意义”,要成绩,要“高效可见的回报”,孩子们又需要“自我”,需要同伴,需要另一套不那么单一的评价体系,于是,在两个世界参差的缝隙中,他们唯一达成的共识是,有没有一种游戏,能最快速地满足孩子的“快乐”需求?《小舍得》剧照
更多精彩报道详见本期新刊 More exciting reports can be found in this issue
「小学生如何社交?」
「How do elementary school students socialize?」
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本期更多精彩
This issue has more exciting content
| 封面故事 | | Cover Story |
小学生如何社交(魏倩) How Elementary School Students Socialize (Wei Qian)
- 座位游戏,为何流行起来(王怡然) Why Seat Games Have Become Popular (Wang Yiran)
- 我如何“教”孩子玩抽卡(王怡然) How I "Teach" My Child to Play Gacha (Wang Yiran)
- 小学生追星 :在偶像崇拜中寻找自己(吴淑斌) Elementary School Students Chasing Stars: Finding Themselves in Idol Worship (Wu Shubin)
- 追星四年,一个 15 岁女孩的改变(吴淑斌) Four Years of Chasing Stars: The Changes of a 15-Year-Old Girl (Wu Shubin)
- 卡牌生意的奥秘(刘畅) The Secrets of the Card Business (Liu Chang)
- 消费时代的游戏 :谁在控制孩子们的童年?(覃思) The Game of the Consumer Era: Who is Controlling Children's Childhood? (Qin Si)
- 穷养或富养的心理学视角(訾非) The Psychological Perspective of Raising Children in Poverty or Wealth (Zi Fei)
| 经济 | | Economy |
- 市场分析 :央行为什么要警示国债风险?(谢九) Market Analysis: Why is the Central Bank Warning About National Debt Risks? (Xie Jiu)
| 社会 | Society
- 调查 :人蚊之战(袁越) Investigation: The Battle Between Humans and Mosquitoes (Yuan Yue)
| 文化 | Culture
- 艺术 :旷野的边界(薛芃) Art: The Boundary of the Wilderness (Xue Peng)
- 文史 :《通鉴纲目续编》(卜键) Literature and History: "Continuation of the Comprehensive Mirror" (Bu Jian)
| 专栏 | Column
- 邢海洋:防晒市场也凉了? Xing Haiyang: Is the Sunscreen Market Cooling Down?
- 袁越:现代智人与尼安德特人的三次亲密接触 Yuan Yue: The Three Intimate Encounters Between Modern Humans and Neanderthals
- 张斌:宝库 :奥林匹克的财富 Zhang Bin: Treasure House: The Wealth of the Olympics
- 朱德庸:大家都有病 Zhu Deyong: Everyone is Sick
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「小学生如何社交?」点击图片,一键下单纸刊!
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howie.serious
从自由玩耍,到教育内卷下的制度化玩耍 From free play to institutionalized play under educational involution
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优绩主义,三六九等,渗透到儿童的游戏中 Meritocracy, hierarchy, permeates into children's games
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本质上是大脑被劫持,是一种慢性疾病,是无良资本对儿童大脑在生物层面的 hack
Essentially, it is the brain being hijacked, a chronic disease, an unethical capital hack on children's brains at the biological level