From the course: Persecutors, Victims, and Rescuers: How to Deal with Psychological Games Players

What's a game?

From the course: Persecutors, Victims, and Rescuers: How to Deal with Psychological Games Players

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What's a game?

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- So what is a game? And by that, I mean a psychological game that people play with other people. Well, a game is a series of interactions between two people. It's a regular pattern that's repeated by the games player. It becomes a habit in how they interact with other people. And it starts with an opening gambit and it ends with some sort of twist or payoff. For example, it might start with, "Oh, you're not doing that right." And it might end with, "Oh, I was only trying to help." The payoff being that the games player gets to feel both superior to the other person and helpful, as well as underappreciated. Games were invented, or should I say discovered, by Eric Berne, who wrote the original classic book, "Games People Play." By the way, the book "Games People Play" is not an easy read. It was originally called "Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy" and he retitled it. He pretty much put out the same book under the title "Games People Play," and it sold millions. But it is really quite an academic book and I don't find it a particularly easy read, personally. If you are looking for a book on games playing, there's a book I would really recommend by Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward, and it's called "Born to Win." There are quite a few books called "Born to Win," but James and Jongeward's book, I think, is a classic. Anyway, Eric Berne wrote "Games People Play," and later Stephen Karpman came up with the drama triangle of persecutor, victim, and rescuer, which is such a brilliant theory. If ever there was a theory that I wish I'd invented. I mean, Maslow's fantastic and there lots of other great theories, but I just think the drama triangle is so amazing. That's what the rest of this course is going to be about. And it's such a clever theory. So the drama triangle of persecutor, victim, and rescuer. Now games are not usually played consciously, so the player just slips into the habit of interacting in this way without realizing that they're doing it, which means that you might play some games, of course, and without realizing the effect they're having on the people around them. And the games might be just occasional in certain situations, or they might become the main interaction that they have with most people they encounter, by which time the games player has become a toxic person. We all play games a little bit. So as you go through this course, it's worth having half a mind on, "Do I do this one?" Although my main focus is to help you to deal with people who are doing these things to you.

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