Early on when stringing the essays of this book together into a book proposal, I was inspired by a comment that Puerto Rican Dr. Milagros Rivera Sanchez, a former department head where I taught for almost a decade at the National University of Singapore, once made in passing about her research into mobile phone usage among youth in a shanty town in South Africa (‘Making Sense of Life's Trransitions’). She remarked that during her interviews with young people, despite their challenged living conditions, they enjoyed playing games. This comment reinforced my observations from travels made within poorer nations of Southeast Asia, and also my encounter with the work of Latin American public artists like Rene C. Hayashi who design playful experiences for children in poorer neighborhoods and shanty towns in Latin America and Asia. Why should we think that games are only for the most privileged to play? Or that only the games made for and played by white male players in the global North are the most relevant subject of game studies? Who experiences the joys and pleasures of play, and in what circumstances?

Discussions around white privilege at least in the United States in recent years, before the return of the far right, have promoted an awareness of systemic racism, of the fast lanes that white people, especially upper-class white men, ride in their families, schooling, and careers to greater relative success and economic success, despite other shared inter-racial obstacles such as increased precarity in the workplace (Dowsett). Does access to the white privilege lane, or returning to a South/North framework, to being a citizen of a Northern nation, translate to the luxury of free time for fun and games, for play privilege? Much past game scholarship assumed this was the case, opining that only those on the Northern side of a rather rigidly defined digital divide were the proper subject of game studies, whereas those on the other side of the fence had more immediate survival concerns.