As long as there have been parents and children, there have been parents trying to get their children to play dull, educational, non-violent games (boys in particular).  This rarely works, though it dates back at least to the year 1600.  How do I know this, you ask?  Allow me to present exhibit A: the Hoop Stick game.  Sound familiar?  Possibly not.  But think back, for a moment, to every single movie about colonial times you've ever seen.  Invariably, there's a least one scene where dapper and wholesome-looking colonial children run through the dapper and colonial streets rolling a wooden hoop with a stick.  In fact, we have a couple of Hoop-Sticks at the Citie of Henricus, where you can carry a cell phone only if it's made out of a hollowed-out racoon.  Never, in all the time I've worked there have I ever seen a kid come up to the Hoop-Sticks and say "Oh look Papa, the Hoop-Stick game, I have so desired to play it!"  Nope, every one of them tries to hula with the hoop for about five futile and awkward seconds, and then starts using the stick as a sword.  Now, kids these days rarely grow up to take part in sword-using professions, and it is altogether probable that theri parents are, in fact, neither knights, pirates, or Jedi Masters, but still, if you give one of them a stick, he starts training for that improbable universe in which he will become a full-time orc slayer.

Now kids haven't really changed all that much in the past gazillion years, so I'll bet that when parents back in the day got their kids the Hoop-Stick game, it was in much the same spirit as parents today who buy their kids video games based on the Book of Psalms (nothing wrong with Biblical games, per se, mind you; "Noah's Xtreme Ninja Power Battle 3D" being a fine one in every particular) and think that playing cowboys and indians will scar them for life with bloodlust and cultural insensitivity.  And, kids back then did the very same thing that they do today, wait until Mom and Dad leave the room and then get back to playing games where you kill eachother.

Now, the reason why parents are so helpless to prevent this phenomenon is because it's based in a very deep-seated and integral survival trait which is probably responsible for the existence of the human race today.  It is, simply put, this: Guys like fire and destroying stuff.  You see, back in prehistoric times, before we got all lazy and our tails evolved away, there were really only two things in a man's world that he needed to worry about (not counting women, but only because this is going to be a long enough blog without getting into that too) fire, and mastadons.  Seriously, fire was important, it gave you light, warmth, was the Neanderthal's television, and it let you cook stuff.  This brings me to point two, mastadons, which taste nasty when they haven't been cooked properly.  Now, mastadons back then weren't like they are now, only living in zoos and the specialty aisle of organic food stores.  No, great herds of them covered the wastelands, scampering hither and thither, straining millions of tiny krill through their baleen, and often blotting out the very sun as the sky turned black as their leathery-winged flocks flew overhead.  Mastadons, you see, are generally disinclined to being killed and eaten, and it was soon discovered that the best way for a caveman (or Cro Magon-American) to bring one down was to hit it repeatedly with pointy of heavy things.  And so it came to pass that the only men who lived to pass on their genes to future generations were the ones who excelled at fire appreciation and mastadon bludgeoning. 

Now, for umpteen squintillion years (not a real number) the human race went on like this, until, sometime while Harry Truman was President, people started being accountants, dental assistants and undead ninja assassins.  It was then that some people got the crazy idea into their heads that fire and mastadon beating weren't things they wanted to teach their children.  Well, lo and behold, but somewhere along the way both these very traits had carved themselves upon the very native heart of man, inextirpatable by even the most bland and uninteresting parents.  And that, gentle reader, is why the Hoop-Stick game is nothing but a legacy of lies.  Also, "President Truman and the Firey Mastadons", would be a great name for a band.