Finite and Infinite Games

by James P. Carse

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

If a finite game is to be won by someone it must come to a definitive end. It will come to an end when someone has won.

There is no finite game unless the players freely choose to play it. No one can play who is forced to play. It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.

Just as it is essential for a finite game to have a definitive ending, it must also have a precise beginning. Therefore, we can speak of finite games as having temporal boundaries—to which, of course, all players must agree. But players must agree to the establishment of spatial and numerical boundaries as well. That is, the game must be played within a marked area, and with specified players.

To have such boundaries means that the date, place, and membership of each finite game are externally defined.

Only one person or team can win a finite game, but the other contestants may well be ranked at the conclusion of play. Not everyone can be a corporation president, although some who have competed for that prize may be vice presidents or district managers. There are many games we enter not expecting to win, but in which we nonetheless compete for the highest possible ranking.

Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time. Indeed, the only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play. There are no spatial or numerical boundaries to an infinite game. No world is marked with the barriers of infinite play, and there is no question of eligibility since anyone who wishes may play an infinite game. While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined. The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time. For this reason it is impossible to say how long an infinite game has been played, or even can be played, since duration can be measured only externally to that which endures. It is also impossible to say in which world an infinite game is played, though there can be any number of worlds within an infinite game.

Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game. Infinite players regard their wins and losses in whatever finite games they play as but moments in continuing play.

If finite games must be externally bounded by time, space, and number, they must also have internal limitations on what the players can do to and with each other. To agree on internal limitations is to establish rules of play.

It is, in fact, by knowing what the rules are that we know what the game is.

The rules must be published prior to play, and the players must agree to them before play begins. A point of great consequence to all finite play follows from this: The agreement of the players to the applicable rules constitutes the ultimate validation of those rules. Rules are not valid because the Senate passed them, or because heroes once played by them, or because God pronounced them through Moses or Muhammad. They are valid only if and when players freely play by them. There are no rules that require us to obey rules. If there were, there would have to be a rule for those rules, and so on.

The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play. The rules are changed when the players of an infinite game agree that the play is imperiled by a finite outcome—that is, by the victory of some players and the defeat of others. The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game and to bring as many persons as possible into the play. If the rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won, the rules of an infinite game are the contractual terms by which the players agree to continue playing.

For this reason the rules of an infinite game have a different status from those of a finite game. They are like the grammar of a living language, where those of a finite game are like the rules of debate. In the former case we observe rules as a way of continuing discourse with each other; in the latter we observe rules as a way of bringing the speech of another person to an end.

The rules, or grammar, of a living language are always evolving to guarantee the meaningfulness of discourse, while the ru...

Although it may be evident enough in theory that whoever plays a finite game plays freely, it is often the case that finite players will be unaware of this absolute freedom and will come to think that whatever they do they must do.

—Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in a game in order to win it. Whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game. The constant attentiveness of finite players to the progress of the competition can lead them to believe that every move they make they must make.

—It may appear that the prizes for winning are indispensable, that without them life is meaningless, perhaps even impossible.

Unlike infinite play, finite play is limited from without; like infinite play, those limitations must be chosen by the player since no one is under any necessity to play a finite game. Fields of play simply do not impose themselves on us. Therefore, all the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them.

From the outset of finite play each part or position must be taken up with a certain seriousness; players must see themselves as teacher, as light-heavyweight, as mother. In the proper exercise of such roles we positively believe we are the persons those roles portray.

So it is with all roles. Only freely can one step into the role of mother. Persons who assume this role, however, must suspend their freedom with a proper seriousness in order to act as the role requires. A mother’s words, actions, and feelings belong to the role and not to the person—although some persons may veil themselves so assiduously that they make their performance believable even to themselves, overlooking any distinction between a mother’s feelings and their own.

The issue here is not whether self-veiling can be avoided, or even should be avoided. Indeed, no finite play is possible without it. The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask.

What makes this an issue is not the morality of masking ourselves. It is rather that self-veiling is a contradictory act—a free suspension of our freedom. I cannot forget that I have forgotten. I may have used the veil so successfully that I have made my performance believable to myself. I may have convinced myself I am Ophelia. But credibility will never suffice to undo the contradictoriness of self-veiling. “To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe” (Sartre). If no amount of veiling can conceal the veiling itself, the issue is how far we will go in our seriousness at self-veiling, and how far we will go to have others act in complicity with us.

Since finite games can be played within an infinite game, infinite players do not eschew the performed roles of finite play. On the contrary, they enter into finite games with all the appropriate energy and self-veiling, but they do so without the seriousness of finite players. They embrace the abstractness of finite games as abstractness, and therefore take them up not seriously, but playfully. (The term “abstract” is used here according to Hegel’s familiar definition of it as the substitution of a part of the whole for the whole, the whole being “concrete.”) They freely use masks in their social engagements, but not without acknowledging to themselves and others that they are masked.

Seriousness is always related to roles, or abstractions. We are likely to be more serious with police officers when we find them uniformed and performing their mandated roles than when we find them in the process of changing into their uniforms.

Seriousness always has to do with an established script, an ordering of affairs completed somewhere outside the range of our influence. We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out—when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.

To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious i...

What one wins in a finite game is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game.

Any given finite game can be played many times, although each occasion of its occurrence is unique. The game that was played at that time by those players can never be played again. Since titles are timeless, but exist only so far as they are acknowledged, we must find means to guarantee the memory of them. The birettas of dead cardinals are suspended from the ceilings of cathedrals, as it were forever; the numbers of great athletes are “retired” or withdrawn from all further play; great achievements are carved in imperishable stone or memorialized by perpetual flames. Some titles are inherited, though only when the bloodline or some other tangible connection with the original winner has been established, suggesting that the winners have continued to exist in their descendants. The heirs to titles are therefore obliged to display the appropriate emblems: a coat of arms or identifiable styles of speech, clothing, or behavior. It is a principal function of society to validate titles and to assure their perpetual recognition.

What the winners of finite games achieve is not properly an afterlife but an afterworld, not continuing existence but continuing recognition of their titles.

The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.

When a person is known by title, the attention is on a completed past, on a game already concluded, and not therefore to be played again. A title effectively takes a person out of play. When a person is known only by name, the attention of others is on an open future. We simply cannot know what to expect. Whenever we address each other by name we ignore all scripts, and open the possibility that our relationship will become deeply reciprocal. That I cannot now predict your future is exactly what makes mine unpredictable. Our futures enter into each other. What is your future, and mine, becomes ours. We prepare each other for surprise.

It is, therefore, this fluidity that presents us with an unavoidable challenge: how to contain the serious within the truly playful; that is, how to keep all our finite games in infinite play. This challenge is commonly misunderstood as the need to find room for playfulness within finite games.

The executive’s vacation, like the football team’s time out, comes to be a device for refreshing the contestant for a higher level of competition. Even the open playfulness of children is exploited through organized athletic, artistic, and educational regimens as a means of preparing the young for serious adult competition.

The interest of infinite players has little in common with such politics, since they are not concerned to find how much freedom is available within the given realities—for this is freedom only in the trivial sense of playing at—but are concerned to show how freely we have decided to place these particular boundaries around our finite play. They remind us that political realities do not precede, but follow from, the essential fluidity of our humanness.

Once under way, warfare and acts of heroism have all the appearance of necessity, but that appearance is but a veil over the often complicated maneuvers by which the antagonists have arranged their conflict with each other.

Therefore, for infinite players, politics is a form of theatricality. It is the performance of roles before an audience, according to a script whose last scene is known in advance by the performers.

Society remains entirely within our free choice in quite the same way that finite competition, however strenuous or costly to the player, never prevents the player from walking off the field of play. Society applies only to those areas of action which are believed to be necessary.

Culture so bounded may even be so lavishly subsidized and encouraged by society that it has the appearance of open-ended activity, but in fact it is designed to serve societal interests in every case—like the socialist realism of Soviet art.

Society and culture are therefore not true opponents of each other. Rather society is a species of culture that persists in contradicting itself, a freely organized attempt to conceal the freedom of the organizers and the organized, an attempt to forget that we have willfully forgotten our decision to enter this or that contest and to continue in it.

A large society will consist of a wide variety of games—though all somehow connected, inasmuch as they have a bearing on a final societal ranking. Schools are a species of finite play to the degree that they bestow ranked awards on those who win degrees from them. Those awards in turn qualify graduates for competition in still higher games—certain prestigious colleges, for example, and then certain professional schools beyond that, with a continuing sequence of higher games in each of the professions, and so forth. It is not uncommon for families to think of themselves as a competitive unit in a broader finite game for which they are training their members in the struggle for societally visible titles.

Because power is inherently patriotic, it is characteristic of finite players to seek a growth of power in a society as a way of increasing the power of a society. It is in the interest of a society therefore to encourage competition within itself, to establish the largest possible number of prizes, for the holders of prizes will be those most likely to defend the society as a whole against its competitors.

Culture, on the other hand, is an infinite game. Culture has no boundaries. Anyone can be a participant in a culture—anywhere and at any time.

If persons did not adhere to the standing rules of the society, any number of rules would change, and some would be dropped altogether. This would mean that past winners no longer warrant ceremonial recognition of their titles and are therefore without power—like Russian princes after the Revolution.

It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces. Such procedures as academic accreditation, licensure of trades and professions, synodical ordination, parliamentary confirmation of official appointments, and the inauguration of political leaders are acts of the larger society allowing persons to compete in the finite games within it.

Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the pa...

Society preserves these works as the prizes of those who have triumphed in their respective games. Culture, however, does not consider the works as the outcome of a struggle, but as moments in an ongoing struggle—the very struggle that culture is.

Just as an infinite game has rules, a culture has a tradition. Since the rules of play in an infinite game are freely agreed to and freely altered, a cultural tradition is both adopted and transformed in its adoption.

If one of the reasons for uniting into commonwealths is the protection of property, and if property is to be protected less by power as such than by theater, then societies become acutely dependent on their artists—what Plato called poietai: the storytellers, the inventors, sculptors, poets, any original thinkers whatsoever.

Another successful defense of society against the culture within itself is to give artists a place by regarding them as the producers of property, thus elevating the value of consuming art, or owning it. It is notable that very large collections of art, and all the world’s major museums, are the work of the very rich or of societies during strongly nationalistic periods. All the principal museums in New York, for example, are associated with the names of the famously rich: Carnegie, Frick, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Whitney, Morgan, Lehman. Such museums are not designed to protect the art from people, but to protect the people from art.