Finite and Infinite Games

by James P. Carse

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

there is no question of eligibility since anyone who wishes may play an infinite game.

Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game. Infinite players regard their wins and losses in whatever finite games they play as but moments in continuing play.

The rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won.

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.

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

In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid for with terrible suffering or death. Even in this last, extreme case we must still concede that whoever takes up the commanded role does so by choice. Certainly the price for refusing it is high, but that there is a price at all points to the fact that oppressors themselves acknowledge that even the weakest of their subjects must agree to be oppressed.

To account for the large gap between the actual freedom of finite players to step off the field of play at any time and the experienced necessity to stay at the struggle, we can say that as finite players we somehow veil this freedom from ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

an infinite game cannot be abstracted, for it is not a part of the whole presenting itself as the whole, but the whole that knows it is the whole.

The fact that a finite game is provisionally dramatic means that it is the intention of each player to eliminate its drama by making a preferred end inevitable.

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 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.

Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.