Not for everyone

Power games are the norm, because fear and greed necessitate zero sum games. Positive sum games require complete trust and alignment, which is the only way to cooperate without power games. This is why almost all people play little games - insufficient trust and alignment means acting at someone else’s expense to secure your interests - that is to say, you believe the only way to secure your interests is to undermine theirs, and thus seek to deceive and extract from them.

Naturally, to play positive sum games each side must agree to cooperate and share an overarching vision or end goal - to quibble the how is far less of a quibble than to quibble the what. As such, there must be a certain mutuality, otherwise the asymmetry causes exploitation which fundamentally collapses the cooperative structure, devolving a high trust structure into a power game based one.

This is why, for all intent and purpose, paradise is a place where there is no need for such games - something many people in either their exhaustion or desire for “something real” secretly long for. And yet, you will find almost all scenarios with sufficiently weighty stakes demand them. If you can sustainably earn money or manage a family without playing such games, just being truly transparent and honest and cooperative - you are part of a privileged minority. For everybody else, the game is on.