I have never heard of anyone, anywhere, banning "Simon Says" for any reason.
When I was in Elementary School, we played Red Rover and Steal the Bacon and had a wonderful time at two recesses and after lunch. In October, the local college sent down several PE Majors and we all were forced to play THEIR games, which were baseball until it got too cold, then basketball. It was always the same crap. Some jock would pick the two tallest kids and make them captains and let them choose the team, one by one.
Baseball is an intensely b o r i n g game most of the time. The team that is up to bat waits to be able to hit the ball. The other team waits for them to hit it. We got LOTS of exercise playing our coed kiddy games. Everyone was always running around. We mostly sat around waiting for something to happen playing baseball. Of course, no one can play nine innings in a 20 minute recess period.Sometimes we continued the morning game throughout the day, other times we started again, depending on what the jocks told us.
Basketball was a pain because half the kids had to take their shirts off and be "skins". The thought of asking kids to simply bring shirts of specific colors was apparently too difficult for the jocks to figure out. The gym was really cold in the winter, and the shirts usually won because the skins were shivering too much. There were two classes of grades 3 through 6, and when we played basketball, only ten of maybe twenty boys got a chance to play. Everyone else got to sit on the floor and shiver.You could see your breath in that gym. If anyone complained, they got to do laps around the gym, which often interfered with the play, since we only got to use half the gym.The girls got the other half.
In April, the jocks left and we got to play kiddie games again.
We played Simon Says at some Church programs and camps. Of course, the goal was to try to make others look foolish when they did something that was not preceded by "Simon says". It was not humiliating to me, I always thought it was good fun. I don't recall ever playing "Simon says" without being led by an adult. Kids in my classes and groups preferred steal the Bacon and Red Rover.
