Transitions in and out of Games: How Parents and Children Bracket Game Episodes at Home

Drawing on a corpus of ethnographic data collected among 8 Italian middle-class families, this article analyzes transitions in and out of episodes of games played by parents and children at home. The analyses focus on game prefaces in which participants display their mutual availability to engage in the game, and game codas in which participants signal their disengagement. The article shows how game prefaces and game codas allow parents, in particular, to accomplish concurrent operations (such as, attending to housekeeping activities) while orienting to the game. Transitional sequences, then, help sustain the management of the parallel temporalities ordinarily running across family life.