PDF Summary:Games People Play, by Eric Berne

You probably know someone who regularly blows things out of proportion, or who insists on having the same argument over and over, or constantly tries to one-up other people. According to Dr. Eric Berne, a pioneering psychiatrist who broke away from the Freudian tradition, those are just two of the games that people play in work, love, sex, and friendship.

Games People Play is Berne’s 1964 classic about the many ways that we habitually relate to one another through “games.” These aren’t fun, harmless social games, though—they’re subtle, largely unconscious patterns that harm us and our relationships. Berne explains how most of us don’t even notice our games, and how we’re missing out on the fulfillment of game-free living.

In our guide, we’ll explore the foundations of Berne’s theory and build up to an extensive discussion of games, before finishing with his strategies for growing into a fuller way of living. We’ve also added psychological perspectives from Freud to modern-day and updated Berne’s ideas.

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The key is that the game is mostly unconscious. Player A doesn’t realize she’s just defending a belief, and she didn’t intentionally provoke her partner. But it happened nonetheless and, according to Berne, she unconsciously desires the fight because of the reward: It reinforces her belief and allows her to feel “right” about her world.

(Shortform note: Berne describes here a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: Insofar as you believe X to be true, you’ll create situations that prove it true. The placebo effect is the classic example: Believing that inactive, fake medications will work can actually cause them to have some effect. When it comes to mental health, this can cause downward spirals: Negative self-talk compounds on itself and makes things even worse.)

The Basic Pattern of a Game

Though Berne doesn’t explicitly lay it out, we can infer that the basic pattern of a game goes as follows:

• Player A holds some unconscious belief, and it gives them a hidden motive. Neither they nor the other players are aware of this motive, which is generally to create a situation that reinforces their belief.
• Working from that belief, Player A indirectly causes Player B to behave as they want them to.
• Player B typically plays into the game, and there’s some back-and-forth until B ends up proving A’s belief to them.
• Player A now feels validated: They got the outcome they wanted and reinforced their belief.

On the other side, Player B plays their own game—people play games that complement one another. A’s game works to prove B’s, too, so both players enable each other to keep playing.

• Say Player A is complaining about an annoying coworker, and Player B flares up—“God, can’t you stop being so negative?” Here, Player A’s game of “I Can’t Believe That…” complements Player B’s game of “Toxic Positivity,” allowing them both to keep playing.

Gather Details to Understand a Game

To truly understand a game, Berne states, you need to know the individual’s specific life history. The general pattern alone is not enough. Let’s go through a detailed example to illustrate a potential case. This game is called “Mr. Vesuvius,” and it goes like this:

• Mr. Vesuvius is a regular working man in regular suburban America. He provides for his family, but struggles with emotionality. He believes that “Anger is a justified way to punish rule-breakers.”
• Mr. Vesuvius never learned to manage his stress and is prone to anger; his father was the same way. When his kid or wife steps awry, Mr. Vesuvius often erupts. A door accidentally slammed too hard becomes his excuse to berate the offending family member.
• Eventually his anger wanes, and he walks off. Soon he returns with a back-handed apology, saying “sorry, but” and defending his outburst.
• With the offender cowed, Mr. Vesuvius has won his game: He got the reward of dumping all his frustration on an easy victim, and he reinforced his belief in justified anger.

Knowing more about a specific Mr. Vesuvius, in particular, enables you to better understand that instance of the game. Plenty of others play it, but background differences mean that each player has slightly different underlying motivations.

A Catalog of Games by Life Areas

Berne gives multiple ways to classify games; the clearest delineates them by areas of life:

Couples Games are the unhealthy habits that often develop between two people in a close, committed relationship. They can go on for years, and they may have a seriously negative effect on the players’ lives. (Shortform note: Some are what today we’d call abuse, like “love bombing.”)

Sex Games approach sexual interaction, but then instead derive satisfaction from the game’s reward, according to Berne. People who play these receive gratification from noncommittal flirting, making people fight over them, and so on.

(Shortform note: Here Berne’s sexism has influenced his interpretations. “Frigid Woman,” features a sex-refusing wife who “provokes” her husband into repeated advances, just so she can say, “Aha! All men are pigs!” There’s no real reason to go with Berne’s interpretation of her motives here: Any psychologist’s interpretations are subjective. They’re working to understand the subjective experience of another individual, and are thus subject to biases: We all tend to interpret things through our favored beliefs and mental frameworks.)

Career Games are long-term games that can consume the player’s life. Their lifestyle, health, and financial situation can all fall apart around the game. “Addict,” for example, can last for years, and often derails the player’s life.

(Shortform note: Extending Berne's notion of lifelong games, we might say that some have generation-spanning careers. Alcoholism, for example, can pass from parents to children. There's a physiological aspect—which Berne doesn't mention—to such inheritance, too: Traumatic childhood experiences can lead to chronic health problems. In this view, you don't control what games you inherit—but we each have the opportunity to combat any "generational curses" we receive, and thereby prevent our descendants from inheriting the destructive patterns.)

Criminal Games are illegal activities, occurring in the criminal underground and in prisons. For example, inmates who appear to want reduced sentences play “Want Out.” But really, they believe, “The world is uncertain, and uncertainty is frightening,” and so they’ll ultimately sabotage their own chances because prison is certain, thus safe.

(Shortform note: Transactional Analysis was one of the earlier treatments attempted in prisons: The psychiatrist Martin Groder drew on Berne’s game analysis, blending it with shock-and-awe style group therapy. This was Asklepieion, a rehabilitation program that ran at a federal maximum security prison for a full decade. Trained group members would shout, shame, and antagonize the “patients,” trying to force them to change their views and behaviors. The program succeeded in some ways, including by readjusting political dissidents to accept mainstream society. It was duplicated in 10 other prisons before being shut down due to multiple violent incidents within the therapy groups.)

Therapy Games are played by mental health professionals and their patients. Berne says that these can prevent real therapy from taking place, because they give the illusion of progress. “Psychiatry,” for example, features patients and therapists who get wrapped up in the experience of therapy. They believe that they’re making progress, but they really just enjoy being wrapped up in the illusion of progress.

(Shortform note: Ineffective therapy is a real issue, and can even leave patients worse off than when they started. Part of the issue is similar to what Berne describes: Well-educated, trained clinicians overestimate their own effectiveness, and they tend to resist changes that could improve patient outcomes. This is a case of ego getting in the way of effective therapy, and highlights the fact that holding a therapy license doesn’t mean you’ve resolved your own psychological dissonance—one study, for example, found that around two-thirds of clinicians experienced mental health issues.)

Positive Games have a net positive that offsets their deceptive qualities. For example, many privileged Westerners enjoy “Mission Trip” or “Peace Corps,” where they build schools, take pictures with the locals, and get to feel like good people.

We’ve based these tongue-in-cheek game names on Berne’s style. Colloquial names, he says, capture the feel of a game more effectively than psychoanalytic jargon like “verbalizing projected oral sadism.”

(Shortform note: Berne is right, insofar as jargon can often obscure the real message, make things sound more important than they actually are, and cause people to disconnect from what’s being said. Plain language has many advantages over jargon-heavy writing. However, Berne doesn’t consistently apply his own advice, often using Freudian psychoanalytic jargon like “oral frustration” and “transference reaction” that obscures his meaning.)

Identify and Overcome Your Games

Berne saw mostly destructive games because, he says, people with constructive games don’t go to therapy. Below, we’ve condensed and clarified his steps to identify games:

Step #1: Identify whether some social habit of yours seems to fit the pattern of a game. Is there a concealed motive in play? Are the exchanges deceptive? Is there some dramatic ending, or a self-validating outcome?

Step #2: When you think you’ve found a game, test it by trying to break it. According to Berne, attempting to break a game pattern results in significant resistance from the player. So if you notice substantial emotional resistance in you or the other person, you’ve likely found a game.

Step #3: If you want to better establish the pattern, look for more instances of it in the world. The more examples you find, the more you confirm that the game really exists. Then, describe the game’s characteristics, and learn to recognize it anywhere.

Once you’ve identified a game, there’s one key to overcoming it: You need an effective pattern-breaking solution. Berne explains that a good solution has a few characteristics:

• It’s tailored to the specific situation. Games are general patterns, but every specific situation is distinct. You need to create a disruption that fits the game and the person playing it. A direct call-out might work for someone less invested in their game, while Mr. Vesuvius might need a calm, patient pointing-out of his pattern.
• You use your adult state to intentionally disrupt the game. You refuse to communicate from the ego state the player talks to, and players are often taken off-guard by this rational treatment—at best, you snap them back into their adult state, too.
• It’s precise and considerate. Bluntly confronting people’s games is often less effective than threading the needle. Emotions can be volatile in game playing, so you need to be precise and mindful of triggers—your own and others’.

(Shortform note: Tony Robbins discusses his “pattern interrupt” technique in Awaken the Giant Within, arguing that you need to cut through the old habit with an unexpected interruption. His technique is somewhat blunt, though—like screaming and plunging your head into ice water to snap out of negative self-talk. It’s possible that sometimes you need a hammer (Robbins), and sometimes you need a needle (Berne). Alternatively, you can employ mindfulness to dampen your reactivity, making it easier to make new choices and form new habits.)

For example, you might disrupt someone’s game of “No I’m Less Wrong” by cheerfully acknowledging their superior reasoning abilities. No longer able to feed off a feeling of intellectual superiority, their game may just deflate.

After Games Comes Self-Sovereignty

Ultimately, games are a shallow, often unhealthy form of interaction. We default to them, Berne says, because the more fulfilling social form—intimacy—is either unavailable or too terrifying for most people.

But it’s possible to grow past your games, into a fuller life that involves intimacy. Berne calls this advanced stage of personal development “autonomy,” and we’ll refer to it as self-sovereignty. To transcend games and reach self-sovereignty, we need to develop three capacities:

#1: Present Awareness: This is the capacity to live in the here and now, to engage with raw reality. Presence affords you a deeper relationship with direct experience and enables you to show up more fully in life.

#2: Freedom of Choice: This means expressing your genuine emotions, uninhibited by parental and cultural conditioning. When you make choices that are true to you, unafraid of others’ expectations, you more fully become yourself.

#3: Sincere Connection: Present awareness and uninhibited choice enable you to show up, sincerely and vulnerably, in your relationships. From here intimacy can arise, which Berne believes is the most rewarding form of social living.

Berne's "Autonomy" and Maslow's "Self-Actualization"

When Games People Play was released in 1964, the humanistic psychology movement was just picking up steam. Humanistic psychology shifted away from the traditional focus on psychological problems and asked instead, “What about the human potential for living full, meaningful lives?” Berne’s work exemplifies this transition—he was concerned with pathologies, and he also focused on the potential to grow beyond them.

Another more widely known psychologist was directly involved—Abraham Maslow, famous for his hierarchy of needs, is considered a founder of the humanistic movement. At the top of his pyramid sits self-actualization, the need to grow into the best version of yourself. And there’s some interesting overlap between his ideas and Berne’s. For example, they both hold that spontaneity or uninhibited self-expression is crucial to peak development.

Elsewhere, they differ: Berne describes a type of automobile driver who is “at one” with the car, skillfully and fluidly navigating, and with great enjoyment. This sounds much like Maslow’s conception of peak experiences, a core indicator of self-actualization that involves feeling deeply immersed in the immediate experience. Yet for Berne, this is one step beneath true presence, which is closer to deep appreciation of the immediate experience à la mindfulness.

He also holds that “the most perfect form of living” is intimacy, which is fundamentally relational—not something you can achieve by yourself, like some peak experiences (being “in the zone” as an athlete, reaching big personal goals, and so on). In this way, Berne’s conception of fulfillment pivots away from our culture’s usual emphasis on the individual. We often frame a fulfilling relationship as subordinate to a satisfying individual life, but what if it were the other way around?

Achieving Personal Sovereignty

Despite our parental and cultural conditioning, we can recover the capacities of self-sovereignty. Berne argues that we had them as children, then lost them as we were molded by societal pressures. But we chose how to adapt—which of our parent’s traits to toss out, for example—and therefore we can reverse those decisions.

For example, maybe a parent insisted you follow a strict path through school to become a doctor. That pressure inhibited your ability to choose for yourself, but you can return and undo the negative effects it had.

Berne doesn’t say specifically how to do this, but he does sketch out the broad steps. Below, we’ve distilled his recommendations into four steps.

• First, overcome the influence of inherited conditioning. The expectations of parents and society often inhibit us from expressing who we really are. So to truly reach self-sovereignty or autonomy (which literally means “self-governing”), you have to throw off the influence of culture and tradition.
• Second, shake off the expectations of others. After addressing your cultural conditioning, shed the expectations of your immediate friends and acquaintances. Often, friends who don’t grow with you start to hinder your development.
• Third, stop indulging in your games. Games provide us easy, but ultimately unfulfilling, rewards. They’re more analogous to a chocolate bar than a soul-warming bowl of soup; you won’t grow healthy on games alone. Once you notice that you’re indulging in some self-validating behavior, it’s time to let go of that shallow gratification.
• Fourth, take the helm of your life’s ship. Focus on developing habits that reflect who you really are, and practice making only the choices that align with that. When you think, feel, and act as you genuinely want to, Berne argues, you can develop authentic relationships that transcend the influence of games and yield a fuller experience of life.

(Shortform note: Here, it’s clear why Games People Play has been labeled as an early self-help book. Despite the clinical content, Berne’s prescription for personal growth is familiar. His first two suggestions map well to individuation, which has been an important topic in psychology since Carl Jung first discussed the human need to realize your unique selfhood. And he wasn’t the first to suggest we should overcome unhealthy habits: Dale Carnegie, who died before Berne wrote Games People Play, encouraged people to be present and break bad habits. And his fourth suggestion, while a good reminder, is also nothing new—thinkers as far back as Aristotle have emphasized the importance of self-actualization in achieving a fulfilling life.)