Definition - What is a Game?

Games are ways of structuralizing time - establishing forms which will fulfill interpersonal contacts. Eric Bernie put games in a sequence of behaviors that structuralize time as following: rituals, amusement, games, intimacy, activity.

A unit of social relation is called transaction. When two or more people meet in a group, one of them shows that he noticed other people for example saying something, or in different manner. We call this transactional impulse. Then another person says something or in different manner does something connected with the transactional impulse, we call this transactional reaction.

Rituals
Ritual is a sequence of stereotypical simple transaction (for example, short statements like “Hi!”, “Good weather we have today, don’t we?”) determined by outer social factor - these transactions are often specified in each social group and characteristic for it (different statements will be said in a group of students than between adults, etc...). Rituals can be informal, such as informal social welcome, goodbyes, or formal such as mass in church which gives very little choices of the ways of behaving.

Amusements
Amusement is a sequence of semiritual simple transactions. It usually begins and ends with a ritual or a procedure. They are practiced mostly at parties - social meetings or before formal meetings of a social group.

Intimacy
Intimacy is when social modeling weakens and individual programming becomes more intensive, for example when people are close enough to each other not to comply the rituals and procedures.

Activity
Activity is often identified with work. One does not usually need rituals or games while swimming, working in the garden, etc.

Eric Bernie describes games as a periodic, frequently repeated set of transactions that seems faultless, but in fact has a hidden motivation. All games are unfair by definition (the real goal is hidden) with dramatic and not always exciting implication. Games are vastly unconscious behavior of ordinary people entangled in double transactions whose existence is not fully noticed and which are one of the most important evidence of social life in the world.