According to Mead, personalities develop through the communicative and social activities he terms "play" and "game." Play occurs early in a child's development, in which they try to assume different adult roles that they observe in society. When playing "cops and robbers," for example, a child begins to understand how these roles are integrated into the large socioeconomic structure that they inhabit simply through exploring and toying with these roles. The idea of "game" is slightly different. Game is when a child is able to assume the roles of everyone that they know. They are able to imagine the consciousness of the other people in their lives, and that helps them determine their otherness and ultimately their unique qualities that make up their personality. Mead uses an example of the baseball game to illustrate this point. In a baseball game, each player must be able to imagine themselves in the roles of the other players on the field (even on the other team). Through this extension of consciousness that includes all of the players, the original player can understand how their role interacts with the team, and so they know firstly how their role is specialized and secondly how they need to act to make the team function correctly (throwing the ball to first quickly after a hit, or stealing a base when the batter bunts).
