Finite and Infinite Games

by James P. Carse

Artists cannot be trained. One does not become an artist by acquiring certain skills or techniques, though one can use any number of skills and techniques in artistic activity. The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist. Therefore, poets do not “fit” into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their “places” seriously. They openly see its roles as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed, and its metaphysics ideological.

For this reason it can be said that where a society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon. A boundary is a phenomenon of opposition. It is the meeting place of hostile forces. Where nothing opposes there can be no boundary. One cannot move beyond a boundary without being resisted. This is why patriotism—that is, the desire to protect the power in a society by way of increasing the power of a society—is inherently belligerent. Since there can be no prizes without a society, no society without opponents, patriots must create enemies before we can require protection from them. Patriots can flourish only where boundaries are well-defined, hostile, and dangerous. The spirit of patriotism is therefore characteristically associated with the military or other modes of international conflict. Because patriotism is the desire to contain all other finite games within itself—that is, to embrace all horizons within a single boundary—it is inherently evil.

As the geniuses we are, we do not look but see. To look at something is to look at it within its limitations. I look at what is marked off, at what stands apart from other things. But things do not have their own limitations. Nothing limits itself. The sea gulls circling on the invisible currents, the cat on my desk, the siren of a distant ambulance are not somehow distinct from the environment; they are the environment. To look at them I must look for what I take them to be. I was not looking at the sea gulls as though it was the sea gulls who happened to be there—I was looking for something to make this example. I might have seen them as a sign that land is not far, or that the sea is not far; I could have been looking for a form to reproduce on a canvas or in a poem. To look at is to look for. It is to bring the limitations with us. “Nature has no outline. Imagination has” (Blake).

Theatrically, my birth is an event of plotted repetition. I am born as another member of my family and my culture. Who I am is a question already answered by the content and character of a tradition. Dramatically, my birth is the rupture of that repetitive sequence, an event certain to change what the past has meant.

I first experience the conflict between the theatrical and the dramatic in the felt pressure to take up one of the roles prepared for me: eldest son, favorite daughter, heir to the family’s honor, avenger of its losses. Each of these roles comes, of course, with a script, one whose lines a person might easily spend a lifetime repeating, while intentionally forgetting, or repressing, the fact that it is but a learned script. Such a person “is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past” (Freud). It is the genius in us who knows that the past is most definitely past, and therefore not forever sealed but forever open to creative reinterpretation.

Just as the titles of winners are worthless unless they are visible to others, there is a kind of antititle that attaches to invisibility. To the degree that we are invisible we have a past that has condemned us to oblivion. It is as though we have somehow been overlooked, even forgotten, by our chosen audience. If it is the winners who are presently visible, it is the losers who are invisibly past.

As we enter into finite play—not playfully, but seriously—we come before an audience conscious that we bear the antititles of invisibility. We feel the need, therefore, to prove to them that we are not what we think they think we are or, more precisely, that we were not who we think the audience thinks we were.

As with all finite play, an acute contradiction quickly develops at the heart of this attempt. As finite players we will not enter the game with sufficient desire to win unless we are ourselves convinced by the very audience we intend to convince. That is, unless we believe we actually are the losers the audience sees us to be, we will not have the necessary desire to win. The more negatively we assess ourselves, the more we strive to reverse the negative judgment of others. The outcome b...

The more we are recognized as winners, the more we know ourselves to be losers. That is why it is rare for the winners of highly coveted and publicized prizes to settle for their titles and retire. Winners, especially celebrated winners, must prove repeatedly they are winners. The script must be played over and over again. Titles must be defended by new contests. No one is ever wealthy enough, honored enough, applauded enough...

Whenever we act as the genius of ourselves, it will be in the spirit of allowing the past to be past. It is the genius in us who is capable of ridding us of resentment by exercising what Nietzsche called the “faculty of oblivion,” not as a way of denying the past but as a way of reshaping it through our own originality. Then we forget that we have been forgotten by an audience, and remember that we have forgotten our freedom to play.

who wins empire, fortune, and fame but loses in love has lost in everything.

A finite game does not have its own time. It exists in a world’s time. An audience allows players only so much time to win their titles. Early in a game time seems abundant, and there appears a greater freedom to develop future strategies. Late in a game, time is rapidly being consumed. As choices become more limited they become more important. Errors are more disastrous.

We look on childhood and youth as those “times of life” rich with possibility only because there still seem to remain so many paths open to a successful outcome. Each year that passes, however, increases the competitive value of making strategically correct decisions. The errors of childhood can be more easily amended than those of adulthood.

The outcome of a finite game is the past waiting to happen. Whoever plays toward a certain outcome desires a particular past. By competing for a future prize, finite players compete for a prized past.

An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose of filling up a period of time with work, but for the purpose of filling work with time. Work is not an infinite player’s way of passing time, but of engendering possibility. Work is not a way of arriving at a desired present and securing it against an unpredictable future, but of moving toward a future which itself has a future. Infinite players cannot say how much they have completed in their work or love or quarreling, but only that much remains incomplete in it. They are not concerned to determine when it is over, but only what comes of it.

For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have the time to be free. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time. A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play.

Infinite play remains invisible to the finite observer. Such viewers are looking for closure, for the ways in which players can bring matters to a conclusion and finish whatever remains unfinished. They are looking for the way time has exhausted itself, or will soon do so. Finite players stand before infinite play as they stand before art, looking at it, making a poiema of it.

If, however, the observers see the poiesis in the work they cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry. Infected then by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but possibility ahead of them.

Indeed, prediction is the most highly developed skill of the Master Player, for without it control of an opponent is all the more difficult.

To operate a machine one must operate like a machine. Using a machine to do what we cannot do, we find we must do what the machine does.

Such travel is not through space foreign to us, but in a space that belongs to us. We do not move from our point of departure, but with our point of departure. To be moved from our living room by an automobile whose upholstered seats differ scarcely at all from those in our living rooms, to an airport waiting room and then to the airplane where we are provided the same sort of furniture, is to have taken our origin with us; it is to have left home without leaving home. To be at home everywhere is to neutralize space. Therefore, the importance of reducing time in travel: by arriving as quickly as possible we need not feel as though we had left at all, that neither space nor time can affect us—as though they belong to us, and not we to them. We do not go somewhere in a car, but arrive somewhere in a car. Automobiles do not make travel possible, but make it possible for us to move locations without traveling. Thus, the theatricality of machinery: Such movement is but a change of scenes. If effective, the machinery will see to it that we remain untouched by the elements, by other travelers, by those whose towns or lives we are traveling through. We can see without being seen, move without being touched.