Third places, also known as environments separate from one's home (the first place) and the workplace (the second place), encourage informal social interaction and community. Over the last few decades, they've been disappearing, signaling a broader cultural shift. Researchers, brands, and urban planners are increasingly focused on the erosion of everyday spaces where people once gathered regularly and built social bonds.
PAPAYA, a mobile game developer best known for adding competitive structure to classic single-player games like solitaire, is using adult play as a catalyst to create new modern third places that foster community beyond home and work. As traditional community spaces shrink, structured digital competition is emerging as a new pathway to belonging.
The decline of third places
Third places are any environment that encourages social interaction and community. As seen on popular sitcoms, coffee shops are a quintessential third place, as are gyms, bars, dog parks, and hair salons.
Recently, the decline of third places has come into sharp focus as more attention is paid to the erosion of everyday gathering spaces. Some major coffee retailers have even made incubating these spaces a core component of their business.
The loss of third places is not a new phenomenon, howeverThirty years ago, in his essay "Bowling Alone," social scientist Robert Putnam lamented that people had become disconnected from their family, friends, and neighbors. He cited the decline of places like bowling leagues and bingo halls as a cause for this disconnect.
Play as a social connector
For PAPAYA, play is both a critical social connector and a foundational element of many traditional third places. Crucially, the company believes that play must be meaningful and competitive to foster sustained engagement.
In 2019, PAPAYA, then known as Papaya Gaming, entered the mobile gaming market, which was already home to billions of global players. Most mobile games at the time were designed primarily as passive, solitary distractions rather than pathways to skill development or social interaction.
PAPAYA identified a structural gap: people were playing daily, but those experiences rarely led anywhere. There were limited opportunities to improve, compare performance, or move from solo play into a shared context. For a company viewing gaming as a social behavior and not just entertainment, that gap represented an opportunity.
Over time, PAPAYA noticed a pattern. Many adult players were not truly "casual," despite how the industry labeled them. They practiced deliberately, repeated specific strategies, tracked their results, and cared about improvement. While these behaviors occurred in isolation, they could be organized into something collective.
From solitary practice to structured competition
The progression from private practice to public competition has become a defining feature of PAPAYA's ecosystem. Games like solitaire, traditionally played alone, serve as entry points. Players begin independently, build skills at their own pace, and then enter tournaments where they can measure their progress. What starts as a personal routine evolves into participation in a broader, shared competitive environment.
This trajectory reached a milestone earlier this year in Miami, where PAPAYA hosted the first-ever World Solitaire Championship. More than 400 players traveled from around the world, many meeting in person for the first time after months of competing against one another digitally.
The event demonstrated something quantitative metrics alone can't capture: people will show up in person for experiences that feel earned, structured, and tied to a community they value.
Digital play as a social anchor
At the core of PAPAYA's model is a competition engine designed to sit beneath familiar single-player games. Its innovative technology standardizes how games are generated, scored, and matched, transforming classic formats into scalable competitive experiences.
The focus is not on reinventing solitaire or other legacy titles, but on providing the structure that enables progression, performance comparison, and ultimately community.
As traditional third places continue to vanish and digital life becomes increasingly fragmented, PAPAYA's approach positions digital play as a social anchor rather than an escape from interaction. By creating clear pathways from solo engagement and shared competition to in-person events, the company is building a new category of gathering.
What began as a mobile activity is evolving into a community where skill development and social connection coexist. For a growing number of adults, experiences like these are helping to fill the void left by the decline of traditional third places.
Learn how PAPAYA is transforming familiar games into shared experiences.
This post was created by Papaya with Insider Studios.
The post Third places are disappearing. How PAPAYA is using digital games to fill the gap with in-person social connections appeared first on Business Insider
