Games People Play

3 THE GENESIS OF GAMES 
From the present point of view, child rearing may be regarded as an educational process in which 
the child is taught what games to play and how to play diem. He is also taught procedures, rituals 
and pastimes appropriate to his position in the local social situation, but these are less significant. 
His knowledge of and skill in procedures, rituals and pastimes determine what opportunities will be 
available to him, other things being equal; but his games determine the use he will make of those 
opportunities, and the outcomes of situations for which he is eligible. As elements of his script, or 
unconscious life-plan, his favored games also determine his ultimate destiny (again with other 
things being equal): the payoffs on his marriage and career, and the circumstances surrounding his 
death. 
While conscientious parents devote a great deal of attention to teaching their children procedures, 
rituals and pastimes appropriate to their stations in life, and with equal care select schools, colleges 
and churches where their teachings will be reinforced, they tend to overlook the question of games, 
which form the basic structure for the emotional dynamics of each family, and which the children 
learn through significant experiences in everyday living from their earliest months. Related 
questions have been discussed for thousands of years in a rather general, unsystematic fashion, and 
there has been some attempt at a more methodical approach in the modern orthopsychiatric 
literature; but without the concept of games there is little possibility of a consistent investigation. 
Theories of internal individual psychodynamics have so far not been able to solve satisfactorily the 
problems of human relationships. These are transactional situations which call for a theory of social 
dynamics that cannot be derived solely from consideration of individual motivations. 
Since there are as yet few well-trained specialists in child psychology and child psychiatry who are 
also trained in game analysis, observations on the genesis of games are sparse. Fortunately, the 
following episode took place in the presence of a well-educated transactional analyst. 
Tanjy, age 7, got a stomach-ache at the dinner table and asked to be excused for that reason. His 
parents suggested that he lie down for a while. His little brother Mike, age 3, then said, "I have a 
stomach-ache too," evidently angling for the same consideration. The father looked at him for a few 
seconds and then replied, "You don't want to play that game, do you?" Whereupon Mike burst out 
laughing and said, "No!" 
If this had been a household of food or bowel faddists, Mike would also have been packed off to 
bed by his alarmed parents. If he and they had repeated this performance several times, it might be 
anticipated that this game would have become part of Mike's character, as it so often does if the 
parents cooperate. Whenever he was jealous of a privilege granted to a competitor, he would plead 
illness in order to get some privileges himself. The ulterior transaction would then consist of: 
(social level) "I don't feel well" + (psychological level) "You must grant me a privilege, too." Mike, 
however, was saver from such a hypochondriacal career. Perhaps he will end up with a worse fate, 
but that is not the issue. The issue is that a game in statu nascendi was broken right there by the 
father's question and by the boy's frank acknowledgment that what he proposed was a game. 
This demonstrates clearly enough that games are quite deliberately initiated by young children. 
After they become fixed patterns of stimulus and response, their origins become lost in the mists of 
time and their ulterior nature becomes obscured by social fogs. Both can be brought into awareness 
only by appropriate procedures: the origin by some form of analytic therapy and the ulterior aspect 
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by antithesis. Repeated clinical experience along these lines makes it clear that games are imitative 
in nature, and that they are initially set up by the Adult (neopsychic) aspect of the child's 
personality. If the Child ego state can be revived in the grown-up player, the psychological aptitude 
of this segment (the Adult aspect of the Child ego state) is so striking, and its skill in manipulating 
people so enviable, that it is colloquially called "The Professor" (of Psychiatry). Hence in 
psychotherapy groups which concentrate on game analysis, one of the more sophisticated 
procedures is the search for the little "Professor" in each patient, whose early adventures in setting 
up games between the ages of two and eight are listened to by everyone present with fascination 
and often, unless the games are tragic, with enjoyment and even hilarity, in which the patient 
himself may join with justifiable self-appreciation and smugness. Once he is able to do that, he is 
well on his way to relinquishing what may be an unfortunate behavior pattern which he is much 
better off without. 
Those are the reasons why in the formal description of a game an attempt is always made to 
describe the infantile or childhood prototype.