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A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
The opponents in World War II agreed not to bomb Heidelberg and Paris and declared Switzerland outside the boundaries of conflict.
Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care.
Infinite players regard their wins and losses in whatever finite games they play as but moments in continuing 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 rule-making capacity of infinite players is often challenged by the impingement of powerful boundaries against their play
Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
Boom
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.
Is it not possible that when she leaves the stage she does not give up acting, but simply leaves off one role for another,
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.
Playful
(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.”)
seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility.
Nice
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.
Brahman
Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.
With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself.
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.
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.
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birettas
It is a principal function of society to validate titles and to assure their perpetual recognition.
Boom
Finite players play to live; they do not live their playing.
An immortal soul is a person who cannot help but continue living out a role already scripted.
Immortality is the state of forgetting that we have forgotten—that is, overlooking the fact that we freely decided to enter into finite play, a decision in itself playful and not serious.
Nice
infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play.
The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous.
It is laughter with others with whom we have discovered that the end we thought we were coming to has unexpectedly opened.
Nice
Infinite players play best when they become least necessary to the continuation of play. It is for this reason they play as mortals.
Mmmm
A title effectively takes a person out of play.
“Before Abraham was, I am,” Jesus said of himself in the Gospel of John.
Atemporal
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.
To see power is to look backward in time.
I can be powerful only by not playing, by showing that the game is over.
Emperors new clothes
If we defer to titled winners, it is only because we regard ourselves as losers. To do so is freely to take part in the theater of power.
Nice
Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence.
Huh
Evil is never intended as evil.
Huh. Hanna arendth, the banality of evil
the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil.
Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They therefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore a contradiction. They only attempt paradoxically to recognize in themselves the evil that takes the form of attempting to eliminate evil elsewhere.
Niiiice key
As in the Zen image we are not the stones over which the stream of the world flows; we are the stream itself.
Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live.
Nice. Tao
political realities do not precede, but follow from, the essential fluidity of our humanness.
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.
Nice
Culture, on the other hand, is an infinite game. Culture has no boundaries. Anyone can be a participant in a culture—anywhere and at any time.
Key
Culture is an enterprise of mortals, disdaining to protect themselves against surprise. Living in the strength of their vision, they eschew power and make joyous play of boundaries.
Niiice
a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.
Its citizens must find ways of persuading themselves that their own particular boundaries have been imposed on them, and were not freely chosen by them.
Nice, amnesia
the law is powerful for persons only because they obey it.
Property must take up space. It must be somewhere—and somewhere obvious. That is, it must exist in such a form that others will come upon it and take notice of it. Our property must intrude on another, stand in another’s way, causing one to contend with it.
The very poor are typically restricted to narrow geographical limits and are regarded as aliens outside them.
Key
we cannot be justified in owning what we do not need to use or plan to use. One does not earn money merely to store it away where it will be protected from all possible future use.
Key
