Games People Play (book)

Games People Play is a famous 1964 book by psychologist Eric Berne. Since its publication it has sold more than five million copies. The book describes both functional and dysfunctional social interactions.

In the first half of the book, Dr. Berne introduces transactional analysis as a way of interpreting social interactions. He describes three roles or ego-states, the Child, the Parent, and the Adult, and postulates that many negative behaviors can be traced to switching or confusion of these ego-states. Dr. Berne discusses procedures, rituals, and pastimes in social behavior, in light of this method of analysis. For example, a boss who talks to his staff as a controlling parent will often engender self-abased obedience, tantrums, or other childlike responses from his employees.

The second half of the book catalogues a series of mind games, in which people interact through a patterned and predictable series of "transactions" which are superficially plausible (that is, they may appear normal to bystanders or even to the people involved), but which actually conceal motivations, include private significance to the parties involved, and lead to a well-defined predictable outcome, usually counterproductive. The book uses “Boy, has he got your number” and other casual phrases as a way of briefly describing each game. Often, the "winner" of a mind game is the person that returns to the Adult ego-state first.

It is important to note that not all interactions or transactions are part of a game. Specifically, if both parties in a one-on-one conversation remain in an Adult ego-state, it is unlikely that a game is being played.

Presently, more than 10,000 people around the world define themselves as transactional analysts. Though it is sometimes derided as pop psychology in professional psychoanalytical circles, it is useful to examine certain social situations with the method.

Origin and spinoffs
In the 1950s, to synthesizing his theory of "human gaming", Berne built on Freud's psychodynamic model, particularly that of the "ego states", to develop a psychology of human interactions called transactional analysis. Transactional analysis, according to physician James R. Allen, is a "cognitive behavioral approach to treatment and that it is a very effective way of dealing with internal models of self and others as well as other psychodynamic issues."

From 1980 to 1981, the Games People Play (TV series) was an NBC television show, hosted by Bryant Gumbel and Cyndy Garvey. The format centered on unusual sports competitions, including a belly flop contest and a taxicab demolition derby. Sylvester Stallone discovered Mr. T, whom he subsequently cast as Clubber Lang (the villain in Rocky III), when Mr. T won a "World's Toughest Bouncer" competition on the show. The title of the show is a play on the title of Berne's Games People Play, and the psychology about mind games and interactions within relationships.

In 1993, American psychologist-turned-author James Redfield self-published the The Celestine Prophecy based on the theory of Berne's human gaming, of which the first 100,000 copies were sold out of the trunk of his Honda and as of May 2005 has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and had been translated into 34 languages. Redfield acknowledged that the work of Berne and his book Games People Play, the bestseller from 1964, was a major influence on his work. Specifically, the life games to which Berne refers in his book is a tool used in an individual's quest for energetic independence.