What Games Tell Us About Who We Are

In many ways we’ve come to understand our humanity through the contests we create. The Olympics, for example, frames its mission as a “philosophy of life, which places sport at the service of humankind.” Sport means more to us than we realize because conflict is easier to process as a metaphor. It’s a fitting way to emblematize something we aren’t comfortable talking about. In the game of life who we are and who we want to be is told through winning, while the story of who we are not, is told through losing. We all are players in the game of life whose legacies will ultimately boil down to whether or not we won or lost.

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“In the game of life who we are and who we want to be is is told through winning, while the story of who we are not, is told through losing.”

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One doesn’t have to look far to see how games have come to define us. There have been moments in history where players have transcended the game itself, becoming symbols of a movement. Jackie Robinson was the first black man to play Major League Baseball, and his entry to the game heralded the end of racial segregation. The 1936 Olympic games was a stand-in for the geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and the rise of Hitler through Nazi-occupied Germany. And more recently, soccer superstar Megan Rapinoe has trained our attention on the playing field where the imbalance of gender and pay equity is unraveling. Though they were playing the same game, Jackie Robinson had to play by a different set of rules than his teammates. Despite winning four gold medals, Jesse Owens wasn’t personally honored by President Roosevelt, as were other Olympians. Megan Rapinoe led her team to a FIFA World Cup Championship and was crowned player of the year, but still hasn’t received a fair share of the spoils.