Trawling down memory lane, recalling the games that we used to play in childhood can be a bittersweet experience. For some of us memories of careless joy and happy days are blended with episodes of being excluded from play activities, chosen last to a team or leaving a game in a tantrum. Those who share such memories know that sometimes a game is not “just a game.” Events that happen during an instance of play are affected by the shared history of the participants and can potentially shape future relations and identities. At the same time, we can recall how some games seemed to facilitate an exclusionary atmosphere while others did not seem to have this problem. The same child can be brutally excluded from a game of football only to hours later pass smoothly into a session of hide and seek. The nature of a game session is likely to be constituted between the identity of the participants in the broader social context and the identity as a player in a rule governed game system. Who you are outside the game and who you become in the game will shape the social life of the encounter.
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