Finite and Infinite Games

by James P. Carse

THERE ARE at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.

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.

Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.

“To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe” (Sartre).

“To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe”

To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.

Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.

There are two ways in which death is commonly associated with the fate of the body: One can be dead in life, or one can be alive in death.

Immortality is therefore the supreme example of the contradictoriness of finite play: It is a life one cannot live.

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

Inasmuch as power is determined by the outcome of a game, one does not win by being powerful; one wins to be powerful.

We are not defeated by floods or genetic disease or the rate of inflation. It is true that these are real, but we do not play against reality; we play according to reality. We do not eliminate weather or genetic influence but accept them as the realities that establish the context of play, the limits within which we are to play.

Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.

Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live.

One does not win by power; one wins to be powerful.

What would Nazism have been without its musicians, graphic artists, and set designers, without its Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl? Even the rigid authoritarian shell of Plato’s Republic will be “filled with a multitude of things which are no longer necessities, as for example all kinds of hunters and artists, many of them concerned with shapes and colors, many with music; poets and their auxiliaries, actors, choral dancers, and contractors; and makers of all kinds of instruments, including those needed for the beautification of women” (Plato).

society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon.

“Nature has no outline. Imagination has”

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.

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 brings the contradiction to perfection: by proving to the audience they were wrong, we prove to ourselves the audience was right.

Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the defeated opponent.

The most serious struggles are those for sexual property. For this wars are fought, lives are generously risked, great schemes are initiated. However, who wins empire, fortune, and fame but loses in love has lost in everything.

The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Because infinite play is dramatic and has no scripted conclusion, its time is time lived and not time viewed.