Cowboys and Indians

"Are you ready? You're the bad guy. And when you're bad, you just run. That's fine, right? Well... Shall we play?"

—Majora's Mask Moon Child, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

Bang! Bang! You're dead!

Or "Cops and Robbers," "Spacemen and Aliens," "Prosecutor and Defendant" and many other variations: a game where children play out a battle between two opposing forces, generally considered as a struggle between good and evil. It is one of the ancestors of the modern Role-Playing Game (and one of the easiest ways of explaining RPGs to the uninitiated).

This type of game is a trope both in fiction about children, and in fiction about adults who sometimes interact with children.

Generally, there will be more competition for the "good guys" role, while less popular or socially adept children will get stuck with the "black hats." True friends will make sure to switch the roles around fairly, and watch out for that one kid who's always eager to play the villain—he'll probably be trouble later on.

Sometimes the children will learn An Aesop about the dangers of war or prejudice, or how cultural perceptions change over time, causing Values Dissonance.

In stories starring adult characters, the children's pretend battles are generally used as commentary on or echoes of the main plot. For example, if the hero has been doing poorly, he might overhear a child complain about having to take his role in a game. Or hearing his excuses for wrongdoing coming from a child might prick a character's conscience.

Not to be confused with Cowboys and Aliens.

Examples of Cowboys and Indians include:

Anime

Serial Experiments Lain has an online shooter game somehow getting mixed up with a couple of children playing tag. The result? A dude commits suicide after being tagged by a little girl, which looks to those who play the game as the Big Bad. As a result, she ends up getting killed by another player. Pure Nightmare Fuel!
One of Revy's Pet the Dog moments in Black Lagoon involves playing Cowboys and Indians with a few Japanese children.
- She later subverts it by bringing a real gun to a second round. Oh, not in that way, but a few of those kids may get traumas later.
The plan of "Friend" in 20th Century Boys is directly based upon an elaborate game of "Good guys vs. League of Evil" Kenji and Otcho made up.
Rurouni Kenshin - in flashback, Kenshin plays the role of the "Dreaded Manslayer" with a bunch of kids (who of course have no idea that he is said manslayer).

Comic Books

In the early Daredevil issue where he battles the Matador, the Spanish villain has managed to create a public image as a Gentleman Thief and made a fool of Matt. So the local kids play Matador and Daredevil, with the former as the preferred role. When ol' DD manages to turn the tables and not just defeat Matador but show him up for the Jerkass he actually is, the children discard their Matador costumes.
Similarly, at one point in "What's So Funny 'Bout Truth, Justice, and the American Way?" Superman overhears a child saying he no longer wants to play as him because he can't kill while his opponents can.

Film

In The Terminator, Kyle Reese plays with one of the kids in this mode to show what a swell guy he is. Considering the dire straits the humans are in, you might wonder what they're playing - Humans and Terminators?
- The sequel also has a scene of two children playing with what look like real guns.

John Connor: We aren't gonna make it, are we?
T-800: It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.

- - Later played for irony, in that Sarah expresses hope for humanity in the end due to John's actions, and the T-800 performs a heroic sacrifice.
In Wagons East, some of the kids are playing a game involving taking the roles of various adults, and one character is dismayed when a kid complains about playing him.
Spaceballs has a famous Throw It In scene where Dark Helmet plays with action figures of the cast. Of course, he beats the heroes and gets the girl, too.
Reign of Fire has a scene in which Christian Bale and Gerard Butler entertain the children by acting out the Luke, I Am Your Father scene from Star Wars.

"Of course we made it up."

In High Noon, kids imitate the battle to be between the Marshal Will Kane and the bandit Frank Miller, with "Kane" getting shot dead. When the real Will Kane turns up, they quickly disperse.
Sky High. "Heroes" and "Villains" compete to save a mannequin civillain from spinning blades. Big surprise, the guys who consistently play "Villains" are actual villains.
A brief part of the "Once-A-Year Day" dance in The Pajama Game.
In High and Low, Jun and Shinichi play "sheriff and outlaw", then switch roles and outfits, leading to a kidnapper grabbing the wrong child.

Literature

in the Bill Bergson books the kids play a game they call "War of the Roses".
An early chapter of Ender's Game features one of these, in which Ender's older brother demonstrates his sadism.
There's a story in the Thousand and One Nights wherein a sultan is having trouble deciding how to judge a (well publicized) case, and ends up wandering around town for a bit to clear his head. He happens across a group of children who are playing judge and defendant and the like, mimicking the case at hand. They actually have a smart way to solve the case (showing that one of the participants was lying), and the sultan takes the kid who was playing judge back to the palace to do the same thing in real court - although the kid was too smart to pronounce sentence, instead deferring back to the sultan at the end of the case.
The title character of O. Henry's The Ransom of Red Chief is a boy who is all too enthusiastic about playing the Indian part.
In The Return of the Great Brain, the boys play a more formal game called Outlaw and Posse, in which the outlaw is given a head start and the posse has two hours to track him down. In this particular game, the posse ends up rescuing the outlaw from a ledge. The boys promise never to tell their parents, who would never let them play the game again.
In the Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel King's Ransom, a rich man's son and his chauffeur's son play "sheriff and outlaw", then switch roles and outfits, resulting in a kidnapper grabbing the wrong child.

Live Action TV

An incident on the third season of The Wire, where detective Bunk Moreland sees children dressing up as stick-up artist Omar Little and pretending to rob the Barksdale crew.
- Ironically, the kid pretending to be Omar goes on to kill Omar in the fifth season.
In early episodes of Stargate Atlantis, some of the Athosian children are shown playing, with one wearing a wraith mask, and the other saying he's playing as then-Major Shepherd.
One Alfred Hitchcock Presents story follows a boy playing Cowboys and Indians and what happens when he borrows his father's gun for playing.

Newspaper Comics

In an early Peanuts strip, Linus and Charlie Brown play "Liberals and Conservatives".
- Also straighter examples in the 50s strips, with jokes about Infinite Ammo, the science fiction fad replacing cowboys and Indians with spacemen and monsters overnight, and so on.
- Subverted in this really early strip.
In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin and Hobbes play "Americans and Soviets" with dart guns and both get shot, subsequently deciding "War's a stupid game, anyway."
- They also play more traditional Cowboys and Indians in the house, much to Calvin's mother's chagrin. A recurring trope is Calvin's attempts to cheat, such as insisting that Hobbes missed when he's shot and zapping Hobbes with his cattle prod when Hobbes declares his gun's out of bullets.
There's a Mafalda strip where all the kids are much too busy to play their usual game of Cowboys and Indians at the park, so they play Global Thermonuclear War instead—a much shorter game which consists of saying "boom" and dropping dead in unison. Punchline: "This modern life demands ever briefer forms of entertainment."
In one Bloom County strip, Olivia and Opus are playing Cowboys and Indians until told by the cockroach that it's politically incorrect. They go through a series of other villains ranging from Klingons to communists, each time being told that group is not a suitable villain. They ask the cockroach what he does for a living and he says he's with the media. Cue much cocking of dart guns and evil grins.
In FoxTrot, Jason and Marcus frequently cast Paige as the villain of their games. She never wants to play, but they don't take no for an answer. Hilarity Ensues.

Video Games

Super Mario Bros.:
- When Mario first meets Gaz in Super Mario RPG, he is pitting his Mario and Bowser toys against each other. Bowser wins. (Between this and a few later comments, one gets the impression that he doesn't think much of Mario as a hero.)
  - ...then again, Gaz may have just been getting Mario out of the way so he could introduce Geno to the plot.
- Part of Wario's Backstory, according to old Nintendo Power comics, was that he played Cops and Robbers (Western variant) with Mario as a kid, but never got to play the Sheriff role.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: Psychopathic Manchild that he is, Majora considers the final boss battle a variant of this. He plays the "good guy" and Link plays the "bad guy." Since both he and Link are throwing around deadly weapons and magic with the fate of the world at stake, this fits the trope only in Majora's mind.
- And as the page quote indicates, Majora expects Link to just run around and let Majora attack him. Instead, the Fierce Deity's Mask gives Link the power to defeat the demon in a few hits. Link is not playing along.
An unusual variant occurs in Final Fantasy IX when Vivi watches a couple of Lindblum kids playing a war between Lindblum and Alexandria. Rather than see one side as good and the other as evil, Vivi finds himself comparing his fellow black mages to the toys the kids are playing with, thinking that they're Not So Different.
In The Sims 2, sim children can plays "cops and robbers".

Web Comics

In Wapsi Square, Shelly mentioned that she often found herself playing this as a kid. She took the suction cups off of her toy arrows.

Western Animation

Samurai Jack: After establishing himself as potent threat to their once all-powerful overlord, kids started to pick up a game where they dressed in robes and beat an unlucky kid with a Aku-ish haircut over the head with sticks.
Justice League Unlimited, "Patriot Act": After the second-stringers such as Vigilante, Shining Knight and Green Arrow manage to fend off the Shaggy Man, the kids of Metropolis want to play as them, the Seven Soldiers of Victory.
The South Park kids, in one of their moments of actually acting like kids, played "Americans and Bosnians" in an episode made during the Kosovo conflict. On another occasion, they play as stereotypical police action-movie protagonists, and get their investigation taken over by kids playing FBI. Then they get involved in a real drug investigation. Then they go play laundromat, instead.
- There's also "Fun Times With Weapons", where they play ninjas vs Super Villain, then ninjas vs other ninjas.
In the Merrie Melodies cartoon Robin Hood Makes Good (1939), three... um... well, let's just call them sciuridae for now, are preparing to play Robin Hood. One gets the impression that the largest always gets to be Robin Hood, while the smallest is stuck as the Sheriff. Not much roleplay is involved; the "sheriff" doesn't even do anything before the two others mount their attack. The two "heroes" are caught by a predator, but the little one manages to rescue them. They start a new game, the bigger one beginning to assume the role of Robin again, when the small one says: "Whooooo's gonna be Robin Hoooood?" (The cartoon is by Chuck Jones, who in later years might've considered it an Old Shame along with the Sniffles the Mouse character.)
In The Simpsons episode "Springfield Up", young Clancy Wiggum plays cops and robbers with Homer, before getting disturbed by Homer's reaction to being "shot" ("Oh, I can't take the pain! Please put one in my brain!")
- Another episode had the kids playing Cowboys and Indians. Bart gives Lisa the "Indian" name of "Thinks-Too-Much".

Other

Evoked in a cartoon of H. T. Webster's entitled "The Passing of a Idol", where the children all want to play gangsters instead of cops and are overheard by a passing policeman.
Legend has it this trope was once ingeniously invoked to discredit the Ku Klux Klan; a journalist who'd infiltrated them gave details of secret meetings, passwords, titles etc to the writers of the Superman radio show to use in a Supes vs. the KKK storyline. Soon enough, there were kids running around neighbourhoods all over America dressed in pillowcases, being beaten up by their friend with the Superman pyjamas.
Zig-zagged in real life naturally. While sometimes they competed for pasturage (because after all buffalo are a little like cattle). And in fact one of the reasons for the depredatations on buffalo was to make room for cattle. But sometimes cowboys just wanted transit privileges for their drive and were willing to pay tolls. The most famous cowboys (Texans) sort of collided with the Commanche when the Mexican government invited them in to replace lands depopulated by Commanche raids on both local Indians and Mexicans (Commanche were one of the most warlike of all the tribes). Sometimes too, a cowboy would be an Indian; it was after all not an uninviting job and required some of the same skills as those of the old-school horseback prairie-wolves of the buffalo hunting days.
- In point of fact cowboy is often a deceptive shorthand for,"Western settler". Much as "Viking" was often a shorthand for Early Medieval Scandinavian even though, not all Early Medieval Scandinavians were vikings. Cowboys proper, that is ranch hands in a way had a lifestyle that was Not So Different from Indians and the type of settlers that were most likely to come into conflict with Indians were those such as railroaders and farmers. The ones that had economic ambitions that required absolute control of the land. Cowboys certainly did fight Indians just like fur men fought Indians(that is not needing to be an urgent threat to each others actual existence when they fought). And for that matter Indians fought Indians and for that matter White men fought White men of course. There just was not such a zero-sum nature to it as with railroaders and farmers.