The Games That People Play
Most men are acting without knowing the script they are following. Here is what that costs, and how to step out of it.
By Dr. Keith M. Waggoner | March 30, 2026 | 15 min read
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” — William Shakespeare
“Let your ‘Yes’ be yes, and your ‘No,’ no.” — Matthew 5:37
People play games. Always. There are games being played in most every conversation you have ever had. But that is not all. There are games being played inside your own head right now as you read this. The voice telling you this does not apply to you, that you already know this stuff, that you are past this kind of thing? That is a game too. And it is one of the sneakiest ones there is, because it keeps you from ever looking close enough to see what is actually running underneath your behavior, your relationships, and the patterns in your life that keep producing outcomes you never actually chose.
What I mean by games here is the hidden, unspoken scripts that shape the way people interact with each other. The invisible set of rules that nobody agreed to out loud but almost everyone is following anyway. Psychiatrist Eric Berne spent his career documenting these patterns, and when his book The Games People Play came out in the 1960s, it became one of the best-selling psychology books ever written. Readers saw themselves on every page, and that recognition was uncomfortable in exactly the right way.
Over decades of coaching men, building organizations, and sitting across from people whose lives were either accelerating or falling apart, I have watched Berne’s framework prove itself again and again in settings that had nothing to do with therapy. Boardrooms. Marriages. Negotiations. The quiet, grinding frustration of a man who keeps putting in maximum effort and keeps arriving at the same dead end. These games run right now in the most ordinary interactions of your life, and the fact that you cannot see them is exactly what gives them their power.
Here is what I want you to walk away with. Every interaction you have is a transaction. You are always trading something, whether you know it or not. Time, energy, attention, trust, words, presence. The question is never whether a trade is happening. The question is whether it is a good one. And once you understand the games well enough to stop playing them, you get to do something far more interesting than surviving your own patterns. You get to trade up.
Before we get into how the games work and what you can do about them, here are three terms Berne built his entire framework around. Understanding them changes how you read every interaction you walk into.
Three Terms Worth Knowing Before You Read On
Psychological Games are recurring patterns of interaction between people that have a hidden motive running underneath the surface conversation, and that always end in a predictable emotional payoff. They are structured, unconscious routines that people run over and over because they produce a familiar feeling. Even when that feeling is frustration, shame, or resentment, the familiar feels safer to the nervous system than the unknown.
Ego States are the three internal modes every person moves between: the Parent, the Adult, and the Child. They are live, shifting states that show up differently depending on the pressure a person is under. Knowing which state you are operating from, and which state the person across from you just moved into, changes everything about how you read what is actually happening in a conversation.
Transactions are the exchanges between people, verbal and nonverbal, that move a conversation forward. Berne observed that most conflict and confusion happens because the transaction being sent and the transaction being received are landing on entirely different levels. One person is speaking to the Adult in the room. The other person’s Child just showed up to answer. This is the mechanics of every bad trade you have ever made in a relationship.
What Eric Berne Actually Discovered
Berne was a psychiatrist who noticed something most of his colleagues were overlooking. His patients were performing their problems in therapy sessions, not just describing them. The same story, the same dynamic, the same emotional conclusion kept showing up week after week, because his patients were running deeply grooved patterns of interaction they had never been shown how to see.
He called these patterns games, and the reason his book landed the way it did is because what he described was instantly recognizable to almost anyone who read it. We all know the person who constantly asks for advice and never takes it. We all know the dynamic where someone plays the victim until you try to help, and then suddenly you become the problem. We all know the conversation that starts about one thing and somehow ends up being about something else entirely, with someone walking away feeling blamed or confused about what just happened.
Berne’s point was that these follow a script. They have a structure. Once you learn to recognize that structure, you stop being surprised by where conversations end up, because you can see where they were always heading from the moment they started. And more importantly, you can start redirecting them. You can start making better trades.
“Most men are not listening to understand. They are listening to protect a position they have not fully examined.”
The Three Ego States Playing Out in Real Time
Berne’s model of the Parent, Adult, and Child sounds almost too simple until you start watching it happen in your actual life. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
The Parent ego state is the part of us that speaks from inherited authority. It carries everything we absorbed from the adults who shaped us growing up, the corrections, the expectations, the judgments, the firm beliefs about how life is supposed to work. When a man is operating from the Parent, he is often correcting, advising, criticizing, or moralizing, sometimes helpfully and sometimes not, but always from a position of assumed authority. The Parent has already decided. It is just waiting for everyone else to catch up.
The Child ego state is where our raw, early emotional experience lives. The need for approval, the fear of rejection, the impulse to rebel, the desire to be seen and valued. A man operating from the Child is feeling his way through a situation rather than thinking his way through it, and often the feelings are older than the situation that triggered them. The argument with his boss lands somewhere in the same place as every time he felt dismissed by his father. The Child responds to that memory rather than to what is actually in front of him.
The Adult ego state is where clear, grounded thinking happens. The Adult processes what is actually present, gathers real information, and responds proportionally to the situation at hand. It is engaged with reality as it is rather than as we fear it to be or wish it were. And here is what matters practically: the Adult is the only ego state capable of making a genuinely good trade. The Parent trades from pride. The Child trades from fear. The Adult trades from clarity.
The challenge is what happens to most men when real pressure arrives. A man who feels challenged will often shift into Parent, becoming corrective and authoritative when curiosity is what the moment calls for. Another man who feels exposed will shift into Child, becoming defensive or withdrawn when directness is what the situation needs. The conversation still looks like two adults talking, but underneath neither person is addressing what is actually right in front of them. And both are walking away from a trade they did not have to lose.
“Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.” — James 1:19
James 1:19 is a precise description of what staying in the Adult requires. Slow the reaction down. Create a gap between what happens and what you do next. That gap is where real leadership lives, and it is where good trades get made.
Why Men Keep Playing Games They Do Not Enjoy
If these patterns are so circular, so costly over time, and so exhausting to live inside of, why do smart and capable men keep running them? The honest answer is that the games work, at least in the short term, and short-term relief is a powerful thing.
When a man deflects responsibility by shifting into blame, he gets immediate relief from the weight of accountability. When he withdraws into silence, he feels temporarily protected. When he over-explains or lectures, he feels intelligent and in control. When he erupts in anger, there is one brief moment where the pressure feels like it has somewhere to go. None of these produce lasting results, but they are fast, and as Daniel Kahneman spent a career showing us, the human brain does not primarily optimize for quality. It optimizes for speed. Familiar discomfort beats unfamiliar uncertainty every single time.
What is really happening in each of those moments is a bad trade. The man trading blame for accountability is spending his credibility to buy a moment of relief. The man trading silence for honesty is spending the trust in a relationship to avoid one uncomfortable conversation. Every game is a transaction, and every game is a losing one when you look at the full ledger. You might feel better for an hour. You pay for it for a month.
Viktor Frankl wrote about this from inside a Nazi concentration camp in Man’s Search for Meaning. When a person surrenders responsibility for their inner life, he observed, they do not reduce their suffering. They ensure it. The game feels like an exit. It is actually a loop. You sidestep what is in front of you and re-enter it later, at a higher cost and in a bigger form.
“Every game a man refuses to examine becomes a pattern he is condemned to repeat.”
What Negotiators and Behavioral Analysts Already Know
Berne’s core insight, that behavior has a structure underneath its surface and that reading that structure matters more than reacting to the words on top of it, has been refined and applied in environments where misreading a human dynamic carries serious consequences.
Chris Voss spent years as the FBI’s lead hostage negotiator and later wrote Never Split the Difference. His entire approach is built around one discipline: stop engaging with what people say they want and start reading the emotional pattern driving the behavior underneath. He calls it tactical empathy, and what he is describing is the ability to recognize which ego state someone is operating from in real time and respond to that rather than to the surface content of what they are saying. In every negotiation, Voss is asking the same fundamental question a man should be asking in every significant conversation: how do I leave both parties better off than when we started?
That question is exactly where Berne’s framework and my own coaching work converge. The games Berne mapped are the enemy of that outcome. They are what happens when two people stop trying to leave each other better off and start trying to leave each other with the bill. Behavioral analysts in intelligence work have understood this for decades. A skilled interviewer watches where the narrative shifts unexpectedly, where the emotional register does not match the words being used, where behavior reveals something the words are working to conceal. He is reading the structure of the interaction because that is where the real transaction is happening.
The same patterns that show up in a crisis negotiation show up in a performance review, a difficult conversation with your spouse, and the exchange with your teenage son that keeps ending in the same wall of silence. The patterns are identical. The only variable is whether you have learned to see them, and whether you have decided to trade up.
Always Trade Up: The Most Important Filter I Teach
Here is the idea I come back to more than almost anything else in my coaching work, in my events, and honestly, in my own life. Once you understand that every interaction is a transaction, something shifts. You stop being a passive participant in your own exchanges and start becoming an active one. You realize you have more agency than you thought, and with that agency comes a simple but powerful question you can begin asking about almost every decision in front of you.
Is this trading up or trading down?
I wish I had the wherewithal to ask that question twenty years earlier than I did. I look back at seasons of my life where I was giving my best hours to the wrong rooms and my leftover hours to the people who deserved my best. I was spending my health on stress I had chosen and my passion on ambitions that were not even mine, borrowed from other people’s definitions of success. I was in relationships where I kept making the same losing trade, offering more of myself in exchange for less and less, and calling it commitment when it was actually avoidance. I was not a bad man. I was an unexamined one. And unexamined men do not make good trades. They just make fast ones.
Here is what I know now. A man carries multiple currencies at any given moment in his life. Each one has real value. Each one can be spent wisely or wasted. And most men are spending them without ever stopping to ask whether the exchange is worth it.
The Eight Currencies Every Man Carries
Money — The most visible currency. Easiest to track, easiest to waste on things that trade down.
Time — The only currency that cannot be earned back. Every hour is a trade, whether you choose it or not.
Passion — The fuel that multiplies everything else. Spend it on the wrong things long enough and it runs dry.
Health — The platform everything else is built on. Most men trade it away slowly, in small daily decisions they barely notice.
Competency — The value you bring to the room. It grows when invested and atrophies when avoided.
Relationships — The deepest store of long-term value most men possess, and the one most often taken for granted.
Service — One of the few currencies that multiplies when given away. Most men underinvest here their entire lives.
Worship — The anchor that reorients all the others. When this currency is depleted, everything else drifts.
Trading up does not always mean getting more. Sometimes it means giving more, investing more, serving more. A man who spends three hours with his son instead of watching television is making a trade where the return is not immediate but it is compounding. A man who tells the truth in a hard conversation is spending some short-term comfort to buy long-term trust. A man who chooses his health over convenience is trading a small pleasure now for a larger capacity later. These are good trades. They leave you better off. They often leave the people around you better off too.
Trading down is what happens when the games are running. You spend your integrity for a moment of feeling right. You spend your credibility for a moment of feeling powerful. You spend your relational trust to avoid one honest conversation. The games are always a series of bad trades made quickly, with the bill deferred until later.
“The goal of every interaction is to leave yourself and the people around you better off than you found them. That is what trading up actually means.”
The Trade-Up Filter: Questions Worth Asking in Real Time
So how do you build this filter? It starts with slowing down enough to ask the question before you act rather than after. Most men review their trades in hindsight, which is useful but expensive. The men I have watched build this into their lives do something different. They have trained themselves to pause at decision points, even small ones, and run a quick assessment before they move.
- Is what I am about to do, say, or agree to leaving me better or worse off than I am right now?
- Is the person I am talking to going to walk away from this interaction better off because of how I showed up?
- Which of my currencies am I spending right now, and is what I am getting in return worth the cost?
- Am I making this decision from the Adult, with clear eyes, or from the Parent or Child, with an agenda I have not fully examined?
- Ten years from now, will I look back on this trade as one of the good ones?
These questions do not have to take long. With practice, the most important one, is this trading up or down, becomes close to automatic. It becomes a value rather than a technique. But getting there requires repetition. It requires a man to catch himself mid-game, name what is happening, and choose differently often enough that the new response starts to replace the old one.
The men I have seen make the most progress with this are not the ones who never make bad trades. They are the ones who recover fastest. They notice the bad trade quickly, own it without theater, course correct, and move on. The game ends not because they became perfect, but because they stopped letting the games run unexamined.
Three Roles That Develop as a Man Grows in This
Over many years of working with men, I have watched a consistent progression emerge in those who let this material actually change them. It does not happen all at once and it rarely moves in a straight line, but it is consistent enough to describe.
The Student
The Student becomes willing to look at his own patterns honestly, without immediately building a defense around what he sees. He starts noticing where he deflects, where his emotional reaction arrives before his awareness does, where he has been making bad trades and calling them something else. This stage requires more humility than most men expect, because real self-examination means sitting with things you would prefer not to see. Most men stop here, not because they lack capability, but because clarity about yourself is uncomfortable before it becomes useful, and the discomfort feels optional right up until it does not.
The Observer
The Observer has developed real distance from his own reactions without losing his engagement with the people around him. He can watch a conversation while he is inside it. He notices when someone shifts from clarity into reactivity and has learned not to automatically follow them there. He is beginning to read the trades in real time, to see which currencies are on the table and whether the exchange being offered is one worth making. He has built enough of a gap between stimulus and response that he can choose his next move rather than simply find himself somewhere he did not intend to go.
The Teacher
The Teacher leads through presence rather than position. He does not need to control a room because he is not frightened of it. When a conversation drifts into ego or escalation, he can name what is happening calmly and bring it back to what actually matters. He has internalized the trade-up filter deeply enough that it operates as a value rather than a technique he remembers to apply. The people around him sense this. They know that walking away from a conversation with him, they will be better off than when they walked in. That is his reputation, and it is one of the most valuable things a man can build.
Jesus modeled all three of these in ways worth paying close attention to. When the religious leaders came at Him with trick questions designed to trap or destabilize Him publicly, He stayed grounded, read what was actually driving the question underneath its surface, and responded with a precision that consistently exposed the real motive without escalating the tension. Every exchange He had was a trade-up. He left people with more clarity, more dignity, or more honest confrontation with themselves than they arrived with. That kind of response comes from an integrated inner life with nothing to hide and nothing to prove.
“Search me, O God, and know my heart.” — Psalm 139:23
The Internal Work That Makes All of This Possible
Everything described in this article starts with a man looking honestly at himself. Where is he reaching for blame when ownership is what the situation calls for? Where is he using tone, silence, or intensity to steer a conversation rather than communicate through it? Where is he avoiding a direct statement because he already knows it will create tension, and tension has always been something he would rather manage around than walk straight through? In the language of the trade-up filter, where is he spending his relational currency on avoidance rather than on the harder and more valuable exchange?
Carl Jung put the cost of skipping this work plainly: until a man makes the unconscious conscious, it will direct his life and he will call it fate. The accumulated weight of patterns never examined, running on autopilot across years, quietly shaping decisions and outcomes the man believes he is making freely. That is the most expensive trade of all, and most men never see it on the ledger until the balance is already gone.
“Clarity is power. Not the power to control others, but the power to remain unmoved by what once controlled you.”
Psalm 139:23 is an active request rather than a passive spiritual posture. Asking to be seen clearly, and actually meaning it, requires a settled sense of identity that does not depend on being right or being perceived well. Most men skip this because it costs the most to face. It is also where everything else begins.
Seeing It in Others Without Becoming Cynical About People
As this awareness develops, the patterns in the people around you start to become readable. You can see when someone is structuring a conversation to avoid accountability. You recognize when generosity is being used as a vehicle for control. You notice when emotion is being deployed to redirect a discussion rather than resolve it.
The risk is that clarity curdles into judgment. That you start using pattern recognition as a reason to pull back from people rather than as a better tool for engaging with them. The man who sees clearly and leads well does not announce the game publicly or use what he sees as leverage. He simply refuses to play. He responds to the substance underneath the maneuvering, stays grounded in the Adult, and creates through his own steadiness a space where the people around him gradually have less reason to defend and more room to be honest. Every time he does this, he is making a trade-up, not just for himself, but for the person across from him who needed someone to hold the line.
The Man Who Lives Without the Script
The goal of all this work is a man who has left the games behind. He answers directly because he is not managing an impression. He takes ownership quickly because accountability is information he can use rather than a threat to his identity. He stays steady when the people around him escalate because he has learned that their anxiety does not have to become his own. He says what is true even when it is inconvenient, because years of working through this have taught him that the relief of avoidance is always shorter than the cost of it.
He has also learned to trade well. He has built a filter that he runs without thinking now, asking in real time whether what he is about to do leaves things better or worse, whether the exchange in front of him is worth the currencies it will cost. He is not perfect at it. No man is. But he is awake to it in a way that changes the trajectory of his days, his relationships, and over time, his life.
Jordan Peterson describes this as choosing to carry the full weight of your own being with clear eyes about what that costs, and doing it anyway. The man who never examines himself does not stay neutral. He drifts. He looks up one day and finds himself living a life assembled by default, shaped more by patterns he was never willing to confront than by anything he consciously chose.
Timothy Keller described the freedom that becomes available to a man whose identity is grounded in something beyond performance, beyond being right, beyond being perceived as strong or winning the interaction. That groundedness is what makes the Adult state sustainable when real pressure arrives. It is also what makes the trade-up filter sustainable, because a man whose identity is not on the line in every interaction can afford to make the generous trade, the honest trade, the trade that costs him something now and builds something real later.
And it will cost something. The question is whether you are paying for something worth having.
Go Deeper
- The Games People Play by Eric Berne
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
- Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
- Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- Selected lectures by Andrew Huberman on emotional regulation and neural patterning
Ask Yourself This
- Where did I follow a pattern today instead of actually choosing a direction?
- Where did I react to something when I had the capacity to stay grounded?
- Where did I avoid saying what was true because I did not want to deal with what came next?
- Which of my currencies did I spend today, and were those good trades?
- Did the people I interacted with today walk away better off because I was there?
The goal is not to become better at the game. The goal is to step out of it entirely, and live as a man who trades well, leads clearly, and leaves every person he encounters better off than he found them. That is where real influence begins.