Do you ever play games that you don’t know you’re playing?
Demanding children at the checkout? Checkout this:
I think he deals with it pretty well. I also think that the timing is pretty bad, what with the TV cameras being there. The temptation in this sort of situation is to meet this craziness with craziness of our own. We start, even though we didn’t know we had been invited to, to play a “game.” Eric Berne in his classic 1964 book The Games People Play , defines a game like this:
“A game is an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome. Descriptively, it is a recurring set of transactions… with a concealed motivation… or gimmick.”
What was interesting, was that our Scandinavian friend refused to play. He watched the game play out, admittedly with some outward signs of internal resignation, but he watched all the same. So next time you start playing, make sure you know the rules and that it’s really a game you want to play.
