Recreational games — card nights, bingo evenings, board games around a table — have served as quiet social anchors for people living in group homes and care settings for decades. These gatherings have never been simply about the games themselves; they have always been about the gathering, the rhythm of shared attention, and the small pleasures of sitting together with something in common to do.
For many survivors of residential institutions, game nights were among the few structured activities that offered genuine social latitude. Unlike therapeutic sessions or supervised daily routines, a game of cards or an evening of bingo carried no formal agenda. The outcome did not matter to anyone's care plan. What mattered was the table, the other players, and whatever conversation grew up naturally around the game.
Bingo has a particular place in this history. Its combination of accessibility, low barrier to entry, and collective rhythm — everyone playing together, listening for the same numbers — made it a staple of recreational programming in group homes and care facilities across Canada. For many people who grew up in institutional settings, bingo nights are embedded in some of their most social memories. The caller's voice, the satisfying thump of a dauber, the small triumph of a completed row: these sensory details stay with people for years.
Card games offered something slightly different: a space for strategy, friendly competition, and the particular pleasure of learning a game well enough to play it confidently. Simple games like Crazy Eights or Go Fish could be picked up quickly; games like Cribbage rewarded sustained practice and created a basis for ongoing partnership between players. In a care setting where many social arrangements were managed by staff schedules rather than personal preference, finding a regular card partner was a meaningful social achievement.
The social function of recreational gaming did not disappear when institutions closed. Community living brought new contexts for gathering around games — community centres, day programmes, drop-in settings — and the appetite for that kind of easy, low-stakes social contact remained strong. Survivors who had played cards or bingo in institutional settings often continued to seek out those activities in their new environments, carrying the social habit with them.
In more recent years, the tradition of accessible recreational gaming has extended into digital formats. Online card games and video call platforms have made it possible for people who cannot easily travel to participate in game nights from home — something that matters particularly for people whose mobility or geographic circumstances limit access to in-person venues. The social dimension is different — a screen is not a table, and a chat window is not the same as an overheard joke across the room — but the underlying appeal is recognisable: a shared structure, a defined activity, and the low-stakes pleasure of participating alongside other people.
For people who have experienced the isolation that often follows institutional life, any format that supports regular social contact and provides a reliable activity around which connection can form is worth taking seriously. Recreational gaming, in its various forms, has been one of the more durable and accessible vehicles for that kind of connection. Its persistence across generations and across changes in technology suggests that the appeal is genuine — that people who have been separated from ordinary social life reach for game-based activities not as a last resort but as a first instinct, because games are among the most natural ways human beings have found to be in a room together.
MWH project gatherings have included their own informal game moments — the puzzle on the table before a session starts, the friendly card game during a break. These moments are not incidental. They are part of how the project creates the conditions for the more serious work of memory and testimony: by first establishing that this is a place where ordinary social pleasures are welcome, and where no one needs to be performing something important to belong.