Games People Play
“Dr. Eric Berne (1910-1970) was the author of “Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships” the ground breaking book in which he introduced Games and Transactional Analysis to the world.
According to Berne, games are ritualistic transactions or behavior patterns between individuals that can indicate hidden feelings or emotions.” The book was a great success and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list in the mid 1960s, longer than any non-fiction book over the preceding decade.
‘Games People Play’ and Transactional Analysis went on to influence and inspire millions of people, including Thomas A. Harris, author of the book I’m Ok–You’re Ok, and Muriel James, author of Born to Win: Transactional Analysis with Gestalt Experiments. Forty years ago, Games People Play revolutionised our understanding of what really goes on during our most basic of social interactions.”
Playing Games
So, where have I been these past few months? Playing games of course! Well, for some of the time. Where? In Facebook of course. Facebook, the social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.
Additionally, they can join networks organised by city, workplace, school and region. The website’s name was derived from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students get to know each other better.
It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. As at January this year a study by website traffic analysis service Compete.com has ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users”
Baby-Gamer
I became a ‘baby-gamer’ cutting my teeth in Zynga’s Mafia Wars. I took my professionally administered Briggs-Meyer tested credentials as an INFJ (Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging) type and set them among the war mongering Zynga-developed Mafia War crime lords starting out as a Street Thug and graduating to an Associate, Soldier, Enforcer, Hitman, Capo, Consigliere, Underboss and finally to a Boss.
Along the way I mastered jobs as varied as dodging an FBI tail to making arrangements for a visiting Don. SO, am I a certifiable whack job now? No. Though my ‘death’ rate is a respectable 41 times at the hands of more proficient and higher-level gamers! Do I think about going out and committing real-time atrocities against another human being based on my experiences in Mafia Wars? Not at all.
Perhaps Berne might have chuckled inwardly, as I did about my ritualisticly competitive emotions that keep me in the game. I resort to type and did what any self-respecting biz creative would do. I developed a strategy to increase my cash flow by buying and maintaining property purchases which currently stand at $58,062,250 every 60 minutes. Me, I wear my emotions on my sleeve. You can fleece me (as many higher level gamers are want to do) with their five hundred and one Mafia Family members as compared with my 118 but it’s ALL about staying in the game. Playing the game is one thing, staying in it is quite another.
