Finite and Infinite Games

by James P. Carse

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.

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.

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.

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

Inasmuch as power is determined by the outcome of a game, one does not win by being powerful; one wins to be powerful. If one has sufficient power to win before the game has begun, what follows

It is evil to think history is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society, or with the Islamicization of all living infidels.

“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.

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.

Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play, culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society.

The power of citizens in a society is determined by their ranking in games that have been played.

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.

But any policy of forceful restraint so extreme that it requires an officer for each potential criminal is a formula for quick descent into social chaos.

putting a coin into the pocket of the Artful Dodger will hardly convince him that he is no longer a legitimate contender for the coin in mine.

The governing bodies of the Soviet Union do not believe that all genuine art must conform to the standards of socialist realism, but they do believe it is always possible to find true art that is compatible with socialist realism; therefore, those artists whose works do not conform to that line may be punished without affecting the integrity of art as such.

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.

Art that is used against a society or its policies gives up its character as infinite play, and aims for an end. Such art is no less propaganda than that which praises its heroes with high seriousness.

from finite and infinite games

Art has no scripted roles for its performers. It is precisely because it has none that it is art.

Therefore, poets do not “fit” into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their “places” seriously.

War is not an act of unchecked ruthlessness but a declared contest between bounded societies, or states.

Under the constant danger of war the people of a state are far more attentive and obedient to the finite structures of their society:

Poets can make it impossible to have a war—unless they tell stories that agree with the “general line” established by the state.

The physicist who sees speaks physics with us, inviting us to see that the things we thought were there are not things at all. By learning new limitations from such a person, we learn not only what to look for with them but also how to see the way we use limitations. A physics so taught becomes poiesis.

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.

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. On the contrary, the visibility of our victories only tightens the grip

This means that we can be moved only by persons who are not what they are; we can be moved only when we are not who we are, but are what we cannot be.

One is never ill in general. One is always ill with relation to some bounded activity. It is not cancer that makes me ill. It is because I cannot work, or run, or swallow that I am ill with cancer. The

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

Seductions are designed to come to an end. Time runs out. The play is finished. All that remains is recollection, the memory of a moment, and perhaps a longing for its repetition. Seductions cannot be repeated.

Lovers often sustain vivid reminders of extraordinary moments, but they are reminded at the same time of their impotence in recreating them.

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.

As an infinite player one is neither young nor old, for one does not live in the time of another. There is therefore no external measure of an infinite player’s temporality. Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning.

Explanations succeed only by convincing resistant hearers of their error. If you will not hear my explanations until you are suspicious of your own truths, you will not accept my explanations until you are convinced of your error. Explanation is an antagonistic encounter that succeeds by defeating an opponent.

What one wins in a title is the privilege of magisterial speech. The privilege of magisterial speech is the highest honor attaching to any title. We expect the first act of a winner to be a speech. The first act of the loser may also be a speech, but it will be a speech to concede victory, to declare there will be no further challenge to the winner. It is a speech that promises to silence the loser’s voice.

The silence of obedience is an unheard silence. It is the silence of death. For this reason the demand for obedience is inherently evil.

Infinite speech does not expect the hearer to see what is already known to the speaker, but to share a vision the speaker could not have had without the response of the listener.

Storytellers enter the historical not when their speaking is full of anecdotes about actual persons, or when they appear as characters in their own tales, but when in their speaking we begin to see the narrative character of our lives.

Oedipus has taken the posture of the Master Player executing terminal moves—but the moves are not terminal. Oedipus is able to bring nothing to an end. Even the act of blinding himself, meant as a kind of concluding gesture, only brings him to a higher vision.

Indeed, prediction is the most highly developed skill of the Master Player, for without it control of an opponent is all the more difficult. It follows that our domination of nature is meant to achieve not certain natural outcomes, but certain societal outcomes.

It is true that the successful detonation of the bomb proved the predictions of the physicists, but it is also true that we did not explode the bomb to prove them correct; we exploded it to control the behavior of millions of persons and to bring our relations with them to a certain closure.

The more clearly we remind ourselves that we can have no unnatural influence on nature, the more our culture will embody a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictability.

To use the machine for control is to be controlled by the machine. 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.

We do not purchase an automobile, for example, merely to own some machinery. Indeed, it is not machinery we are buying at all, but what we can have by way of it: a

Weapons are the equipment of finite games designed in such a way that they do not maximize the play but eliminate it.

Killers are not victors; they are unopposed competitors, players without a game, living contradictions.

Fruits, seeds, vegetables, nuts, grains, grasses, roots, flowers, herbs, berries—all are collected when they have ripened, and when their collection is in the interest of the garden’s heightened and continued vitality. Harvesting respects a source, leaves it unexploited, suffers it to be as it is.

Animals cannot be harvested. They mature, but they do not “ripen.” They are killed not when they have completed the cycle of their vitality but when they are at the peak of their vitality.

Waste, of course, is by no means unnatural. The trash and garbage of a civilization do not befoul nature; they are nature—but in a form society no longer is able to exploit for its own ends.

Waste persons are those no longer useful as resources to a society for whatever reason, and have become apatrides, or noncitizens. Waste persons must be placed out of view—in ghettos, slums, reservations, camps, retirement villages, mass graves, remote territories, strategic hamlets—all places of desolation, and uninhabitable.