Eric Berne wrote his famous book in 1964. He called the hidden patterns of human interaction “games.” More than sixty years later, almost nothing has changed. We are still running the same scripts. Many of us just call it culture.
Jung had a line that cuts to the heart of it: until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Berne took that insight and made it practical. He showed what the unconscious actually looks like when it runs through everyday human interaction. Not in therapy sessions. Not in extraordinary moments. In ordinary conversations, at the dinner table, in the office, on the phone with your mother.
A game, in Berne’s terms, is not a sport. It is not entertainment. It is a predictable sequence of transactions with a hidden motive and a familiar emotional payoff. You say one thing. You mean another. The other person plays their role. Everyone ends up where they always end up. And nobody quite names what just happened.
This is the human default. The uncomfortable thing is that it is not a flaw in character. It is the architecture of how most people have learned to communicate. And in our part of the world, it runs especially deep.
Three scenes you will recognise immediately
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Surface message
An invitation to share a meal
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Real message
I see you. You are welcome here. Accept this gesture.
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The script has three acts: offer, polite refusal, insistence, acceptance. If you exit after act one, you have not saved anyone any food. You have rejected a relationship signal. The offer was never really about the food.
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Surface message
A check for comprehension
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Real message
Do not embarrass me or yourself by admitting confusion
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In many Nigerian and Ghanaian professional environments, admitting you do not understand is coded as incompetence. So the entire room trades truth for social safety. And the confusion persists quietly, sometimes at great cost to the organisation.
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Surface message
I am being considerate of your time
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Real message
I want to leave but I will not take responsibility for that
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This is one of the most elegant games in African social life. You avoid the discomfort of declaring your own desire by framing your exit as a service to the other person. No one is at fault. Everyone performs consideration. Nothing is said directly.
The deeper pattern
What ties these three scenarios together is not manipulation in the malicious sense. The people running these scripts are not villains. They are doing what social conditioning has trained them to do: protect harmony, avoid rejection, preserve face, and navigate hierarchy without friction.
Games are not bad habits. They are default scripts. The problem is not that they exist. The problem is when you do not realise you are running them.
In African settings, the scripts are unusually elaborate because the social costs of getting them wrong are genuinely high. If you are too blunt with an elder, you are disrespectful. If you ask too many questions in front of management, you are troublesome. If you say you want to leave, you are ungrateful. So you learn the indirect route. You learn the script. And then you forget you ever learned it. It becomes instinct. It becomes culture. It becomes, as Jung would say, fate.
It gets more serious than food and visits
The same pattern runs through the parts of life where the stakes are much higher.
Consider the junior employee who says “I will try my best” when what he means is “I do not understand what you are asking for.” His manager hears agreement. The deadline passes. The manager is angry. The employee is confused. Both played their roles. Neither spoke plainly.
Consider the contractor who says “we will sort it out” instead of “I cannot complete this for the price we agreed.” Both parties leave the meeting feeling understood. Three weeks later, the project stalls. Everyone is surprised. The conversation they needed to have in week one now has to happen in crisis mode.
Consider the business partner who raises concerns about a decision by saying “I am just wondering, but are we sure about this?” rather than “I disagree and here is why.” His concern is noted as a small worry. The decision proceeds. The concern was valid. Now it is a problem.
In each of these, the game felt safer than clarity in the moment. And it cost more in the end than clarity ever would have.
What to actually do about it
The answer is not to become blunt in a way that treats directness as virtue and relationships as inefficiency. That misses the point. African social environments are relational for good reasons. The communal fabric matters. Warmth is not theatre.
The answer is to become script-aware rather than script-free. There is a difference between choosing indirectness because you have read the situation and it is the right move, and defaulting to indirectness because you never stopped to question it.
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Step 1
Spot the repetition
Same conflict, different people. Same emotional ending. Same role you end up playing. That pattern is the script. |
Step 2
Name the hidden payoff
Every game has one. Feeling justified. Avoiding vulnerability. Maintaining control. Ask: what do I get from this pattern? |
Step 3
Replace one move
Say the thing you usually imply. Ask instead of test. Stay instead of withdraw. It will feel strange. That means it is working. |
You do not need to rebuild your personality. You need to build the habit of watching yourself in real time. When you feel the emotional hook, the mild guilt, the defensive spike, the urge to smooth things over before they get uncomfortable, pause. That spike is the entry point into the game. What you do next is a choice. It may not always feel like one. But it is.
The final point
Berne’s work matters not because it gives you a set of techniques for catching other people in their games. That is the wrong use of it entirely. It matters because it shows you your own machinery. The games you run. The scripts you follow. The outcomes you keep producing and calling coincidence.
Jung’s line returns here. The life you experience as happening to you is often, in significant measure, a life you are co-creating through patterns you have not yet examined. That is not blame. It is leverage. Because what you can see, you can change.
You will not become game-free. No one does. But you can become the person who sees the script while it is running. That gap, between the impulse and the response, is where agency lives.
In our environment especially, that is a rare and valuable thing to have.
Eric Berne, Games People Play, was published in 1964 and has sold over five million copies. Transactional Analysis, the framework it introduced, remains one of the more practically useful bodies of thought in psychology. If you have not read it, it is worth your time.