Prisoner's Base

is a game that children are supposed to know how to play, that I have only recently heard of, and all the descriptions of which, that I have found on Google and Wikipedia, are as opaque and meaningless to me as the Hegelian Dialectic. You take Hostages? How is this a game? Why is it fun?

A modicum of research reveals: as I suspected, Medieval Peasant Aggression (Border Conflicts) as the origin of tag games--pretty much, from the same feudal period, the same sort of barely suppressed mutual carnage that was wrought on one another  by English villages who were inventing what we now call Australian Rules Football or Rugby.

The reason I've never played them, and that I had to look them up in the encyclopedia to find out what they were, is that these tag-games--children's games--with their heavy implicit burthen of calamitous 14th century European history, are generally felt/perceived by Americans, and by American Educators, to be too much like exercises in bullying and elitism, for American kids to enjoy them or to want to play them. So they don't--and I, being an American kid, never did.