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A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
Suppose the players all agree, but the spectators and the referees do not. Unless the players can be persuaded that their agreement was mistaken, they will not resume the play—indeed, they cannot resume the play. We cannot imagine players returning to the field and truly playing if they are convinced the game is over.
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.
Numerical boundaries take many forms but are always applied in finite games. Persons are selected for finite play. It is the case that we cannot play if we must play, but it is also the case that we cannot play alone.
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.
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.
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.
If these restraints are not observed, the outcome of the game is directly threatened. The rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won.
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.
the rules of a finite game are unique to that game it is evident that the rules may not change in the course of play—else a different game is being played.
See Rand's Essay on Chess
It is on this point that we find the most critical distinction between finite and infinite 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.
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.
The rule-making capacity of infinite players is often challenged by the impingement of powerful boundaries against their play—such as physical exhaustion, or the loss of material resources, or the hostility of nonplayers, or death.
Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
—We saw that finite players must be selected. While no one is forced to remain a lawyer or a rodeo performer or a kundalini yogi after being selected for these roles, each role is nonetheless surrounded both by ruled restraints and expectations on the part of others.
—It may appear that the prizes for winning are indispensable, that without them life is meaningless, perhaps even impossible. There are, to be sure, games in which the stakes seem to be life and death. In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid for with terrible suffering or death.
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. Even more: we make those roles believable to others.
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.
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 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.
Inasmuch as infinite players avoid any outcome whatsoever, keeping the future open, making all scripts useless,
The rules of a finite game do not constitute a script. A script is composed according to the rules but is not identical to the rules. The script is the record of the actual exchanges between players—whether acts or words—and therefore cannot be written down beforehand.
It is the desire of all finite players to be Master Players, to be so perfectly skilled in their play that nothing can surprise them, so perfectly trained that every move in the game is foreseen at the beginning. A true Master Player plays as though the game is already in the past, according to a script whose every detail is known prior to the play itself.
Surprise is a crucial element in most finite games. If we are not prepared to meet each of the possible moves of an opponent, our chances of losing are most certainly increased.
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.
Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.
Because finite players are trained to prevent the future from altering the past, they must hide their future moves. The unprepared opponent must be kept unprepared. Finite players must appear to be something other than what they are. Everything about their appearance must be concealing.
To appear is not to appear. All the moves of a finite player must be deceptive: feints, distractions, falsifications, misdirections, mystifications.
To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.
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.
A finite game must always be won with a terminal move, a final act within the boundaries of the game that establishes the winner beyond any possibility of challenge. A terminal move results, in other words, in the death of the opposing player as player. The winner kills the opponent. The loser is dead in the sense of being incapable of further play.
Properly speaking, life and death as such are rarely the stakes of a finite game. What one wins is a title; and when the loser of a finite game is declared dead to further play, it is equivalent to declaring that person utterly without title—a person
Death in life is a mode of existence in which one has ceased all play; there is no further striving for titles. All competitive engagement with others has been abandoned. For some, though not for all, death in life is a misfortune, the resigned acceptance of a loser’s status, a refusal to hold any title up for recognition. For others, however, death in life can be regarded as an achievement, the result of a spiritual discipline, say, intended to extinguish all traces of struggle with the world, a liberation from the need for any title whatsoever. “Die before ye die,” declare the Sufi mystics.
Infinite play is inherently paradoxical, just as finite play is inherently contradictory. Because it is the purpose of infinite players to continue the play, they do not play for themselves.
The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.
Names, like titles, are given. Persons cannot name themselves any more than they can entitle themselves. However, unlike titles, which are given for what a person has done, a name is given at birth—at a time when a person cannot yet have done anything. Titles are given at the end of play, names at the beginning.
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.
Titles are abstractions; names are always concrete.
It can happen that when persons are distinctly identified as winners their names can have the force of titles. We sometimes act “to clear our name” of aspersions, or to defend the “good name of our family.” Names can even become titles in the formal sense, such as “Caesar,” or “Napoleon,” or “the name of Jesus which is above every name” (Paul).
Titles, then, point backward in time. They have their origin in an unrepeatable past. Titles are theatrical. Each title has a specified ceremonial form of address and behavior. Titles such as Captain, Mrs., Lord, Esquire, Professor, Comrade, Father, Under Secretary, signal not only a mode of address with its appropriate deference or respect, but also a content of address (only certain subjects are suitable for discussion with the Admiral of the Fleet or the District Attorney or the Holy Mother), and a manner of address (shaking hands, kneeling, prostrating or crossing oneself, saluting,
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The mode and content of address and the manner of behavior are recognitions of the areas in which titled persons are no longer in competition. There are precise ways in which one may no longer compete with the Dalai Lama or the Heavyweight Champion of the World. There is no possible action by which one may deprive them of their titles to contests now in the past.
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 exercise of power also presupposes a closed field and finite units of time. My power is determined by the amount of resistance I can displace within given spatial and temporal limits.
The establishment of the limits makes it possible to know how powerful I am in relation to others.
Power is a concept that belongs only in finite play. But power is not properly measurable until the game is completed—until the designated period of time has run out.
To speak meaningfully of a person’s power is to speak of what that person has already completed in one or another closed field. To see power is to look backward in time.
One can be powerful only through the possession of an acknowledged title—that is, only by the ceremonial deference of others. Power is never one’s own, and in that respect it shows the contradiction inherent in all 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.
There certainly are acts of government, or acts of nature, or acts of god that far exceed any contravening ability of our own, but it is unlikely that we would consider ourselves losers in relation to them. 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;
