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.

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

The world is elaborately marked by boundaries of contest, its people finely classified as to their eligibilities.

In one respect, but only one, an infinite game is identical to a finite game: Of infinite players we can also say that if they play they play freely; if they must play, they cannot play. Otherwise, infinite and finite play stand in the sharpest possible contrast.

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 must be published prior to play, and the players must agree to them before play begins. 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.

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.

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

One senses a compulsion to maintain a certain level of performance, because permission to play in these games can be canceled. We cannot do whatever we please and remain lawyers or yogis—and yet we could not be either unless we pleased.

Unlike infinite play, finite play is limited from without; like infinite play, those limitations must be chosen by the player since no one is under any necessity to play a finite game. Fields of play simply do not impose themselves on us. Therefore, all the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

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 infinite players avoid any outcome whatsoever, keeping the future open, making all scripts useless, we shall refer to infinite play as dramatic. Dramatically, one chooses to be a mother; theatrically, one takes on the role of mother.

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.

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.

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.

It is a principal function of society to validate titles and to assure their perpetual recognition.

Death, in finite play, is the triumph of the past over the future, a condition in which no surprise is possible.

Life in death concerns those who are titled and whose titles, since they are timeless, may not be extinguished by death. Immortality, in this case, is not a reward but the condition necessary to the possession of rewards. Victors live forever not because their souls are unaffected by death but because their titles must not be forgotten.

Soldiers who die fighting the enemy, however, receive the nation’s highest reward: They are declared unforgettable. Even unknown soldiers are memorialized—though their names have been lost, their titles will not be.

This is a contradiction common to all finite play. Because the purpose of a finite game is to bring play to an end with the victory of one of the players, each finite game is played to end itself.

for discussion with the Admiral of the Fleet or the District

Power is always measured in units of comparison. In fact, it is a term of competition: How much resistance can I overcome relative 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. During the course of play we cannot yet determine the power of the players, because to the degree that it is genuine play the outcome is unknown. A player who is being pushed all over the field by an apparently superior opponent may display an unsuspected burst of activity at the end and take the victory. Until the final hours of the count in the presidential election of 1948 many Americans thought that Harry Truman was a far weaker candidate than Thomas Dewey.

Power is finite in amount. Strength cannot be measured, because it is an opening and not a closing act. Power refers to the freedom persons have within limits, strength to the freedom persons have with limits.

Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence.

“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).

One reason for the necessity of a society is its role in ascribing and validating the titles to property. “The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the preservation of their Property; to which in the state of nature there are many things wanting” (Locke).

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.

War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification. If it is the impulse of a finite player to go against another nation in war, it is the design of an infinite player to oppose war within a nation.

“Sometimes it is possible to kill a state without killing a single one of its members; and war gives no right which is not necessary to the gaining of its object” (Rousseau). For infinite players, if it is possible to wage a war without killing a single person, then it is possible to wage war only without killing a single person.

Metaphysics is about the real but is abstract. Poetry is the making (poiesis) of the real and is concrete. Whenever what is made (poiema) is separated from the maker (poietes), it becomes metaphysical. As it stands there, and as the voice of the poietes is no longer listened to, the poiema is an object to be studied, not an act to be learned. One cannot learn an object, but only the poiesis, or the act of creating objects. To separate the poiema from poiesis, the created object from the creative act, is the essence of the theatrical.

Poets cannot kill; they die. Metaphysics cannot die; it kills.

Indeed, it is only by remembering what we have forgotten that we can enter into competition with sufficient intensity to be able to forget we have forgotten the character of all play: Whoever must play cannot play.

What one wants in the sexual contest is not just to have defeated the other, but to have the defeated other. Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the defeated opponent.

In the complex plotting of sexual encounter it is by no means uncommon for the partners to have played a double game in which each is winner and loser, and each is an emblem for the other’s seductive power.

There is nothing hidden in infinite sexuality. Sexual desire is exposed as sexual desire and is never therefore serious. Its satisfaction is never an achievement, but an act in a continuing relationship, and therefore joyous. Its lack of satisfaction is never a failure, but only a matter to be taken on into further play.

The contradiction of finite speech is that it must end by being heard. The paradox of infinite speech is that it continues only because it is a way of listening. Finite speech ends with a silence of closure. Infinite speech begins with a disclosure of silence.

Genuine travel has no destination. Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else. Since gardening is a way not of subduing the indifference of nature but of raising one’s own spontaneity to respond to the disregarding vagaries and unpredictabilities of nature, we do not look on nature as a sequence of changing scenes but look on ourselves as persons in passage.

“The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes” (Proust).

MYTH PROVOKES Explanation but accepts none of it. Where explanation absorbs the unspeakable into the speakable, myth reintroduces the silence that makes original discourse possible.