ABSTRACT
It has sometimes been suggested that the social life of cities should be seen as an ecology of games (Long 1958). From that perspective the structured activities that co-exist in a particular territory are seen as comprising a set of interlocking games which together create the participants' sense of social order. These games provide people with goals, and therefore a sense of purpose, together with criteria for judging success or failure. Within the limits of a game the participants engage in rational decision-making which produces for each game a set of typical strategies. Most games involve the moving of pieces, and that is conspicuously true for a gift game. As in any other game the meanings of the pieces in a gift game are defined by a set of rules (Cheal 1980). One of the important social characteristics of games is that they can often be played according to several alternative sets of rules. The same pieces therefore come to have rather different meanings depending upon which rules are being followed. Those meanings are conveyed through the words that are used in the discourse of gift games.
