Eric Berne, the originator of Transactional Analysis and social game theory, defines a game as "sets of ulterior transactions, repetitive in nature, with a well-defined pay off" [Berne, Eric, MD. - What Do You Say after You Say Hello? (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1972)].  Satisfaction of position hunger is the existential advantage of the game.  This, as we said, is the need to feel "one-up" or "one-down" in relationship to another person in order to vindicate a not-OK existential position.  The arrogant position, I'm OK - you're not OK, is the basis of the common domestic squabble game called Uproar where insinuations of worthlessness are tossed back and forth like a hot potato with escalating vehemence in order to avoid intimacy.

     Games vary in intensity or degree from the relatively harmless first degree to the hard third degree game which leads to personal injury and involves tissue destruction.  In any given episode of a game, the players must initially adopt one of the three complimentary attitudinal stances referred to as: Victim, Rescuer, or Persecutor.  The participants then engage in ulterior transactions leading to a switch in stances for each player.  This usually comes as somewhat of a surprise, at least for one of them, after which comes a moment of confusion called the crossup.  The cardinal symptom by which a person can recognize that a social game is in progress is that momentary feeling of being off balance, at odds with what she thought was happening, of elation over a sudden sly victory, or frustration of having been conned.  With the switch and cross-up comes the psychological payoff in which each player collects positive or negative strokes.  Since a negative stroke is regarded as better than no stroke, the game may then proceed to the next round with the players each in a new victim/rescuer/persecutor role.  Dr. Stephen Karpman developed the diagram below, called the Drama Triangle, to illustrate the three game role positions and their interchangebility [Karpman, S. - TA Bulletin, 7, (April 1968) P. 39-43.].

     Wollams and Brown, in their Textbook Transactional Analysis [Wollams, Stan / Brown, Michael - Transactional Analysis (Dexter Mi: Huron Valley Institute, 1978).] give the following table of common games broken down by the role of the player that usually initiates each one.  The first listing in each column is the most common for that role:

     People seem to advertise for willing players in their games almost as if the invitation were a logo printed upon their shirts and collect their payoff feelings in small parcels which are saved much like a stamp collection.  Grocers used to give trading stamps with purchases which could be saved and traded for prizes at special stores.  Though the grocer usually added the price of the stamps to his groceries, people who didn't think too hard about it could maintain an illusion of getting something for nothing, which resulted in a great many avid collectors.

     Many persons exist in a state of emotional confusion because their parents discouraged certain types of feelings while encouraging others instead of helping the children to understand and accept all of their feelings.  The result is that people tend to have one or two favorite feelings which they view as OK and which they use to forward their scripts, justify their illusions, and provide payoffs for their games.  In TA, these feelings are referred to as the person's racket.  People tend to save up their racket feelings in small parcels, stamps, and, when they have enough, trade them in for a dysfunctional episode, prize, such as a divorce, a runaway, a drunk, a hostile outburst, suicide, or homicide, etc.  Racket feelings are phoney, scripted feelings collected as brown stamps.  Genuine autonomous emotion such as joy, love, fear, and despair would be gold stamps, but are not usually found as the payoffs to social games.  In the game of "now I've got you - you sob" (NIGYSOB), suppressed anger in the Child ego state is held until someone does something to "justify" its explosive release.  Justification here, Berne points out, means the "Adult puts in with the Child in saying to the Parent 'why, no one could reasonably blame me for getting angry when he does something like that!'" [Berne, Eric, MD. - What Do You Say after You Say Hello? (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1972)]  We tend to surround ourselves, to a greater or lesser degree, with persons who have similar scripts and to whose advantage it is to support us in our games which helps us to maintain the illusion that this is a sane and reasonable way to behave.

     Some people review their stamp collections nightly, before sleep, while, with others, it is less frequent, only when bored, or when they need a big justification to crap out on themselves or on others.  Berne notes that "the feeling of righteousness provides a fool's gold stamp, redeemable only in fool's paradise" [Berne, Eric, MD. - What Do You Say after You Say Hello? (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1972)], and that "triumph stamps glitter but are not collected by persons of good taste because they are only gold-plated" [Berne, Eric, MD. - What Do You Say after You Say Hello? (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1972)].  Some people are so accustomed to the bad old feelings (brown stamps), that they will not accept genuine gold stamps since they cannot figure quite where to put them.  Truly zealous collectors of brown stamps can turn even sincere offers of love and friendship into veiled insults in their minds.  Since they are somewhat loathe to discard a stamp altogether, Berne says that they solve the problem resourcefully by "spewing some feces" over the uncomfortable gold stamp and thereby create a passable imitation of an unpleasant brown one which they can now properly admire and add to their collection [Berne, Eric, MD. - What Do You Say after You Say Hello? (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1972)].

     It is just as difficult for script-bound persons to give up a lifelong habit of collecting hard-earned psychological stamps as for a proud homemaker to give up a box full of the commercial kind.  This is a prime factor hindering the cure since the cure "requires total resignation from all compulsive game playing" [Berne, Eric, MD. - What Do You Say after You Say Hello? (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1972)] first there is usually a dishonest "smoke screen" attempt in which the person tries to begin letting others off of their game hook.  Closer scrutiny may reveal, however, that "forgiveness" now means simply putting the stamps away rather than permanent disposal.  There they will remain until a new offense occurs when she will quickly pull them out and add their value to the new pay off for calculating a prize.

     Stamps, once used, are canceled but crooked spouses often con each other, according to Berne, by pulling out used or counterfeit stamps to wave reproachfully in the other's face.  Since the justification for this rerun blackmail lacks substance, the pay off is also likely a chimera.  This, however, may continue, ad nauseam, until all of the stored up toxic energy has been released, often with great damage to all parties.  Fortunately, the same old stamps trotted out over and over begin to look a little faded to the clever observer.

     An extraordinary amount of time is spent in this dishonest form of communication which Berne describes in great detail [Berne, Eric, MD. - Games People Play (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1964)].  He has also noted early on that "games appear to be segments of larger, more complex sets of transactions called scripts.[Berne, Eric, MD. - Sex in Human Loving (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970)]"  The script is the subject of the next section.

     

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