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.

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.

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.

Infinite players regard their wins and losses in whatever finite games they play as but moments in continuing play.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid for with terrible suffering or death.

Fields of play simply do not impose themselves on us. Therefore, all the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

Some self-veiling is present in all finite games. Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them.

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.

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. For that reason they regard each participant in finite play as that person playing and not as a role played by someone.

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

Inasmuch as a finite game is intended for conclusion, inasmuch as its roles are scripted and performed for an audience, we shall refer to finite play as theatrical.

This means that during the game all finite play is dramatic, since the outcome is yet unknown. That the outcome is not known is what makes it a true game. The theatricality of finite play has to do with the fact that there is an outcome.

It is therefore by surprising our opponent that we are most likely to win. Surprise in finite play is the triumph of the past over the future. The Master Player who already knows what moves are to be made has a decisive advantage over the unprepared player who does not yet know what moves will be made.

A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future possibility, but to control the future, to prevent it from altering the past. This is the finite player in the mode of seriousness with its dread of unpredictable consequence.

Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases. Surprise causes finite play to en...

The infinite player does not expect only to be amused by surprise, but to be transformed by it, for surprise does not alter some abstract past, but one’s own personal past.

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

Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition. Training repeats a complet...

a liberation from the need for any title whatsoever. “Die before ye die,” declare the Sufi mystics.

A slave can have life only by giving it away. “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jesus).

Infinite players die. Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of play, but in the course of play.

The paradox of infinite play is that the players desire to continue the play in others.

Infinite players play best when they become least necessary to the continuation of play. It is for this reason they play as mortals. The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish. 25

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.

The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. Power is never evident until two or more elements are in opposition. Whichever element can move another is the more powerful. If no one else ever strove to be a Boddhisattva or the Baton Twirling Champion of the State of Indiana, those titles would be powerless—no one would defer to them. The

Power is a concept that belongs only in finite play.

I can be powerful only by not playing, by showing that the game is over. I can therefore have only what powers others give me. Power is bestowed by an audience after the play is complete. Power is contradictory, and theatrical.

All the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

Power is a feature only of finite games. It is not dramatic but theatrical. How then do infinite players contend with power? Infinite play is always dramatic; its outcome is endlessly open. There is no way of looking back to make a definitive assessment of the power or weakness of earlier play. Infinite players look forward, not to a victory in which the past will achieve a timeless meaning, but toward ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpretation. Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own.

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

“We must learn the fine arts of war and independence so that our children can learn architecture and engineering so that their children may learn the fine arts and painting” (John Quincy Adams).

No nation can go to war until it has found another that can agree to the terms of the conflict.

Before I can have an enemy, I must persuade another to recognize me as an enemy.

Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

Whoever is unable to show a correspondence between wealth and the risks undergone to acquire it, or the talents spent in its acquisition, will soon face a challenge over entitlement. The rich are regularly subject to theft, to taxation, to the expectation that their wealth be shared, as though what they have is not true compensation and therefore not completely theirs.

Consumption is a kind of activity that is directly opposite to the very form of engagement by which the title was won. It must be the kind of activity that can convince all observers that the possesser’s title to it is no longer in question.

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.

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. 43

Since art is never possession, and always possibility, nothing possessed can have the status of art. If art cannot become property, property is never art—as property. Property draws attention to titles, points backward toward a finished time. Art is dramatic, opening always forward, beginning something that cannot be finished.

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.

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.