House (game)

House, also called playing house, is a traditional children's game of imaginative role play in which participants take on family roles such as parent, child, infant or household pet inside a simulated home. Play typically uses props including toy food, mock kitchen appliances, dolls and miniature furniture, and can take place in a domestic setting or in an institutional one such as a kindergarten or daycare room fitted with a play kitchen or model house. The game appears across many cultures under localized names, among them guo jia jia in Chinese, Mutter Vater Kind in German, mamagoto in Japanese and rumah-rumahan in Indonesian, reflecting how widespread the format is among young children's imaginative play traditions. An 1883 German illustration shows children already engaged in the activity, though no single point of origin is established.