DEFINITION OF GAMES

Games are complementary (reciprocal), ulterior transactions that proceed towards predictable outcomes, often characterized by a switch in roles towards the end.
Games have payoffs for the players. The antithesis of a game, that is, the way to break [free of] it, lies in discovering how to deprive the actors of their payoff.

Analysis of Games
Games may be two handed (played by two players), three handed (three players), or many handed. Three other quantitative variables are often useful to consider for games:
  • Flexibility: The ability of the players to change the currency of the game (that is, the tools they use to play it). In a flexible game, players may shift from words, to money, to parts of the body.
  • Tenacity: The persistence with which people play and stick to their games and their resistance to breaking it.
  • Intensity: Easy games are games played in a relaxed way. Hard games are games played in a tense and aggressive way.

Based on degrees of acceptability and potential harm, games are classified as:
  • First Degree Games are socially acceptable in the agent's circle.
  • Second Degree Games are games that the players would like to conceal though they may not cause irreversible damage.
  • Third Degree Games are games that could lead to drastic harm to one or more of the parties concerned.
Games are also studied based on their:
  • Aims / Roles / Social and Psychological Paradigms /
  • Dynamics / Advantages to players (Payoffs)
Transactional game analysis is fundamentally different from rational or mathematical game analysis in the following senses:
The players do not always behave rationally in transactional analysis, but behave more like real people whose motives are often ulterior.

Some commonly found Games
Here are some of the most commonly found themes of games described in Games People Play by Eric Berne:
  • YDYB: Why Don't You, Yes But. (Historically, the first game discovered.)
  • IFWY: If It Weren't For You
  • WAHM: Why does this Always Happen to Me?
  • SWYMD: See What You Made Me Do
  • UGMIT: You Got Me Into This
  • LHIT: Look How Hard I've Tried
  • ITHY: I'm Only Trying to Help You
  • LYAHF: Let's You and Him Fight
TA identifies twelve key injunctions which people commonly build into their scripts. These are injunctions in the sense of being powerful "I can't/mustn't ..." messages that embed into a child's belief and life-script:

* Don't be (don't exist)
* Don't be who you are
* Don't be a child
* Don't grow up
* Don't make it in your life
* Don't do anything!
* Don't be important
* Don't belong
* Don't be close
* Don't be well (don't be sane!)
* Don't think
* Don't feel.