Using Fun to Repair the American Family

Michael Morrison — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Mama used to roll her hair, back before the central air. We’d sit outside and watch the stars at night. She’d tell me to make a wish, and I’d wish we both could fly. Don’t think she’s seen the sky, since we got the satellite dish. — James McMurtry, “Levelland”

The Decline of the American Front Porch

Prior to World War II, the front porch represented the American ideal of family. The porch, in essence, was an outdoor living room, where the family could retire after the activities of a long day. In the evenings, as the outdoor air provided a cool alternative to the stuffy indoor temperatures, the entire family would move to the front porch. The children might play in the front yard or the friendly confines of the neighborhood, while the parents rocked in their chairs, dismissing the arduous labors and tasks of the day into relaxation and comfort. Stories might be told, advice garnered, or songs sung. What the family room of post World War II America would become, existed first as the front porch.

The porch did something else as well, something easy to overlook now that the porches are mostly gone. It faced the street. A porch was a room with one wall left open, and a whole block of them turned an ordinary street into something larger than a row of houses. Neighbors passing on the sidewalk were in plain view and near enough to greet; a wave could slow into a conversation, and a conversation could end with someone climbing the steps to sit a while. News and gossip and small kindnesses moved house to house in the evening air. Children roamed the block under the loose, shared attention of every adult sitting out, all of whom knew whose child was whose. So the front porch did more than move a family outdoors for the evening. Every household sat in view of every other, night after night, and out of that ordinary visibility a neighborhood held itself together.

In the period immediately after World War II, the American front porch became a relic of the past, an architectural feature and cultural symbol no longer important to Americans. The primary technological change that spurred this abandonment of the front porch was the proliferation of the American automobile. The new technological development of air conditioning further aided in the decline of the front porch. Providing a cool(er) environment indoors, the front porch was no longer needed as a cool shaded area during the day or as a place to enjoy the cool night air. Families remained indoors comfortably, and a primary use of the front porch was no longer needed. Air conditioning, in a sense, also contributed to another technological development which would affect the front porch: the television. The television, which could exist only inside, provided endless hours of entertainment indoors. As a result, family life shifted from the porch to a family room or television room, where families could watch the evening news, sporting events, or the early sitcoms, all while enjoying the newly invented “television dinner.” No longer would families relax outside on the front porch.

America had become overtly more individualistic and less community oriented during this period. At the same time, the traditional American importance given to the family had declined. Familial structure and relations had changed, lending to less family interaction and family time. While this connection to the decline of the front porch is a stretch, it certainly may have played a role.

By the 1960’s, the front porch had disappeared in the new architectural forms and houses sweeping the country. Technological and cultural forces had pushed porches to the back or side yard, or had eliminated them altogether. American society had changed, and with this change the front porch no longer stood as an American cultural symbol. Few Americans noticed this change, and the front porch disappeared into the realm of American memory. In many ways, family interaction disappeared along with front porches.

We don’t say any of this to wish the era back. That world was, for a great many people, a worse one to live in, and its neighborly streets were never equally open to everyone who might have walked down them. What disappeared that we’d actually want returned is narrow: the plain habit of being in easy view of other people, evening after evening. That habit belongs to no particular decade, which is the only reason we think it can be had again.

Bringing Families Back Together

So, is the solution to the problem of lost family interaction to lead a porch building campaign across the country? Probably not. America has permanently changed since the days when the front porch served as the glue holding our communities together. However, this doesn’t mean that the fight to restore interaction to families has been lost. The challenge is to figure out ways to work with and around technology to bring people together in different ways.

Technology really isn’t a bad thing, we just need to figure out when and where it is the most beneficial in our lives. It isn’t too hard to see that a family that sits in front of the television every night will be less connected than a family that communicates around a dinner table. Or more to the point, a family that plays a social game together will have shared more and grown closer than a family that goes to watch a movie.

America is a highly entertainment driven culture, and we don’t aim to change that. In fact, we’re all for entertainment. What we’re suggesting is that people entertain themselves in ways that help enrich the relationships they have with other people. We’ve found that one of the best forms of entertainment for fostering relationships is traditional games such as board games, trivia games, scavenger hunts, and the like. We regularly play such games at gatherings with friends and family. We’ve found that people are pleasantly surprised at how much fun it can be to connect with other people socially in the context of a game.

The fact of the matter is that you really don’t need a front porch to become a part of your community or get closer to your family and friends. You just need to make an effort to interact with them, preferably in a fun setting.

It’s a Vital Part of Growing Up

Watch a child play a game. It looks like nothing — like time being pleasantly killed. It isn’t. The six-year-old losing at Candy Land is learning that the world doesn’t always break her way, and that you stay at the table anyway. The boy fidgeting through someone else’s turn is practicing the single hardest thing a small person ever has to do, which is wait. Kids at a game are settling rules, catching each other cheating, arguing out what counts as fair, and reading the face across the board to decide whether a bluff is real. None of that is printed on the box. All of it is the point.

Play is how people learn to be people. It is the first safe place a child gets to try on cooperation and competition and get them wrong without anything real breaking. You can lose at checkers and the sun still comes up the next morning. You can win and discover, fast, that gloating costs you the next invitation. The stakes are small enough to risk and big enough to teach — which happens to be exactly the size of stakes a person grows on.

We never stop needing that. A family around a card table is doing the same work the children are: a teenager and a grandfather made briefly equal, both at the mercy of the same rules and the same rotten luck of the draw. A couple can learn more about each other over a board on a quiet Tuesday than over a month of sitting side by side facing the same screen. The reunion that might have been an afternoon of careful small talk turns instead into a tournament nobody shuts up about for the next ten years. A good game hands people a reason to stay in the same room and something to do once they’re in it. For anyone who has ever run dry of things to say to someone they love, that is no small gift.

This is the part the front porch used to handle without anyone naming it. The porch wasn’t magic. It was a place that made staying together easy and gave people something to do while they did it. Take away the porch and the need stays right where it was. What’s gone is the easy way of meeting it, so the need goes looking for somewhere else to land.

Why We Build Games

Here is what we are for. We make games because a good one does something almost nothing else does this cheaply or this well: it gets people to look at each other. Set a deck of cards down between two people who have run out of things to say, and watch them find something. That is the entire business we are in. It is also, as it happens, why a company that wants to repair the American family would start by making a game rather than building a porch.

We have nothing against the television, or the automobile, or the cool dry air pouring out of the vents. They won. They were never really the enemy, and we have no interest in fighting a war we’d lose and shouldn’t win. What we’d like to fix is smaller and a lot closer to home: the ordinary evening that quietly dissolves into everyone alone in the same house. There’s a cure for that, and you can hold it in two hands and set it on a table.

You don’t need a porch. You need a table, a few people you’d like to know a little better, and a reason to stay a while longer. We intend to spend our years making the reason. Pull up a chair.

A note, added much later. We drafted this in our founding year, when the screen we worried about was the one in the living room. There are more screens now, and they are far better company than any television ever managed to be — in your pocket, tuned to you, refreshed without end, and lately able to answer back when you talk to it. The first social network in this country ran on front porches, open to the street and refreshed each evening by whoever happened to walk past. We have spent the decades since rebuilding it indoors, behind glass. None of that softens the argument. It sharpens it. The question we started with is the one still on the table: when, and where, does the technology actually carry you toward the people in the room instead of away from them? We began as a game company and grew into something wider, a studio for whatever seems worth making — from that first printed deck to a skate ramp you design on a screen and then go build, to a jump simulator, to apps and odd little web experiments that have nothing to do with cards. The form keeps changing; the job underneath it hasn’t. Get people into the same room, the same yard, the same patch of real ground. That is still the porch’s old work, and still the wager behind everything we make.

Stalefish Labs

Using Fun to Repair the American Family

The Decline of the American Front Porch

Bringing Families Back Together

It’s a Vital Part of Growing Up

Why We Build Games