Counting-out game

A counting-out game or counting-out rhyme is a simple method of 'randomly' selecting a person from a group, often used by children for the purpose of playing another game. It usually requires no materials, and is achieved with spoken words or hand gestures. The historian Henry Carrington Bolton suggested in his 1888 book Counting Out Rhymes of Children that the custom of counting out originated in the "superstitious practices of divination by lots."^[1]

Many such methods involve one person pointing at each participant in a circle of players while reciting a rhyme. A new person is pointed at as each word is said. The player who is selected at the conclusion of the rhyme is "it" or "out". In an alternate version, the circle of players may each put two feet in and at the conclusion of the rhyme, that player removes one foot and the rhyme starts over with the next person. In this case, the first player that has both feet removed is "it" or "out". In theory the result of a counting rhyme is determined entirely by the starting selection (and would result in a modulo operation), but in practice they are often accepted as random selections because the number of words has not been calculated beforehand, so the result is unknown until someone is selected.^[2]

A variant of counting-out game, known as the Josephus problem, represents a famous theoretical problem in mathematics and computer science.

^ Bolton, Henry Carrington (1888). Counting Out Rhymes of Children. Elliot Stock. p. v. [ISBN unspecified].
^ Opie, I & P (1970). Children's Games in Street and Playground. Oxford at the Clarendon Press. p. 28. ISBN 9781782500322. Fanciful as it would seem to someone who had never been a child, the normal way the young decide who is to have the unpopular part in a game is to form the players up in a line or circle, and count along the line the number of counts prescribed by the accented syllables of some little rhyme.

[1] Bolton, Henry Carrington (1888). Counting Out Rhymes of Children. Elliot Stock. p. v. [ISBN unspecified].

[2] Opie, I & P (1970). Children's Games in Street and Playground. Oxford at the Clarendon Press. p. 28. ISBN 9781782500322. Fanciful as it would seem to someone who had never been a child, the normal way the young decide who is to have the unpopular part in a game is to form the players up in a line or circle, and count along the line the number of counts prescribed by the accented syllables of some little rhyme.

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