Some places take that attitude to the extreme, and for people who just want/need to put in a standard 9-5 and get their work done, feeling forced to participate in extraneous stuff in the name of 'bonding with the team' is awkward.

edit: can't reply to jpwagner again(?): re: "forced" not appearing in the original text. Have you never felt social pressure to do something, even (especially) when someone indicated something was 'totally optional'?

Travis the author of the post here. To clarify there are required hours, and sometimes we get to use some of those hours to "play" rather than work. I can't say that's always going to work but it seems to work pretty awesomely at Mahalo. Maybe it's because we are a really young team.