We must use the three games (call them 1, 2, 3) as the domain and the 5 friends (a,b,c,d,e) as the codomain (otherwise the function would not be defined for the whole domain when a friend didn't get any game). So how many functions are there with domain \(\{1,2,3\}\) and codomain \(\{a,b,c,d,e\}\text{?}\) The answer to this is \(5^3=125\text{,}\) since we can assign any of 5 elements to be the image of 1, any of 5 elements to be the image of 2 and any of 5 elements to be the image of 3.
in-context