THE SIGNIFICANCE OF GAMES - from "Games People Play" by Eric Berne 1964

 PART III Beyond Games

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Significance of Games

1.   GAMES are passed on from generation to generation. 

The favored game of any individual can be traced back to his parents and grandparents, and forward to his children; they in turn, unless there is a successful intervention, will teach them to his grandchildren. 

Thus game analysis takes place in a grand historical matrix, demonstrably extending back as far as one hundred years and reliably projected into the future for at least fifty years. 

Breaking this chain which involves five or more generations may have geometrically progressive effects. 

There are many living individuals who have more than 200 descendants. Games may be diluted or altered from one generation to another, hut there seems to be a strong tendency to inbreed with people who play a game of the same family, if not of the same genus. 

That is the historical significance of games.

2.   "Raising" children is primarily a matter of teaching them what games to play. 

Different cultures and different social classes favor different types of games, and various tribes and families favor different variations of these. That is the cultural significance of games.

3.   Games are sandwiched, as it were, between pastimes and intimacy. 

Pastimes grow boring with repetition, as do promotional cocktail parties. Intimacy requires stringent circumspection, and is discriminated against by Parent, Adult and Child. 

Society frowns upon candidness, except in privacy; good sense knows that it can always be abused; and the Child fears it because of the unmasking which it involves. 

Hence in order to get away from the ennui of pastimes without exposing themselves to the dangers of intimacy, most people compromise for games when they are available, and these fill the major part of the more interesting hours of social intercourse. 

That is the social significance of games.

4.  People pick as friends, associates and intimates other people who play the same games. 

Hence "everybody who is anybody" in a given social circle (aristocracy, juvenile gang, social club, college campus, etc.) behaves in a way which n:ay seem quite foreign to members of a different social circle. 

Conversely, any member of a social circle who changes his games will tend to be extruded, but he will find himself welcome at some other social circle. 

That is the personal significance of games.

 

NOTE

The reader should now be in a position to appreciate the basic difference between mathematical and transactional game analysis. Mathematical game analysis postulates players who are completely rational. Transactional game analysis deals with games which are un-rational, or even irrational, and hence more real.