Finite and Infinite Games

by James P. Carse

THERE ARE at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

Of infinite players we can also say that if they play they play freely; if they must play, they cannot play.

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 agreement of the players to the applicable rules constitutes the ultimate validation of those rules.

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.

The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play.

The rules are always designed to deal with specific threats to the continuation of play. Infinite players use the rules to regulate the way they will take the boundaries or limits being forced against their play into the game itself.

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.

In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid for with terrible suffering or death.

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 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.

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. It is in the nature of acting, Shaw said, that we are not to see this woman as Ophelia, but Ophelia as this woman.

Only freely can one step into the role of mother. Persons who assume this role, however, must suspend their freedom with a proper seriousness in order to act as the role requires. A mother’s words, actions, and feelings belong to the role and not to the person—although some persons may veil themselves so assiduously that they make their performance believable even to themselves, overlooking any distinction between a mother’s feelings and their own.

The issue here is not whether self-veiling can be avoided, or even should be avoided. Indeed, no finite play is possible without it. The

“To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe” (Sartre).

no amount of veiling can conceal the veiling itself, the issue is how far we will go in our seriousness at self-veiling, and how far we will go to have others act in complicity with us.

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.

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.

we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.

We cannot say a person played this infinite game or that, as though the rules are independent of the concrete circumstances of play. It can be said only that these persons played with each other and in such a way that what they began cannot be finished.

inasmuch as its roles are scripted and performed for an audience, we shall refer to finite play as theatrical.

infinite players avoid any outcome whatsoever, keeping the future open, making all scripts useless, we shall refer to infinite play as dramatic.

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.

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.

Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future ov...

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.

The infinite player does not expect only to be amused by surprise, but to be transformed by it, for surprise does not alter some abstract past, but one’s own personal past.

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.

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

The death of an infinite player is dramatic. It does not mean that the game comes to an end with death; on the contrary, infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own life; they live for their own play. But since that play is always with others, it is evident that infinite players both live and die for the continuing life of others.

The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous. Infinite play resounds throughout with a kind of laughter. It is not a laughter at others who have come to an unexpected end, having thought they were going somewhere else. It is laughter with others with whom we have discovered that the end we thought we were coming to has unexpectedly opened. We laugh not at what has surprisingly come to be impossible for others, but over what has surprisingly come to be possible with others.

Infinite play is inherently paradoxical, just as finite play is inherently contradictory.

The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.

If finite players acquire titles from winning their games, we must say of infinite players that they have nothing but their names.

Power is contradictory, and theatrical.

power seems to be consistent with the principle arrived at earlier: Whoever must play cannot play. The intuitive idea in that principle is that no one can engage us competitively unless we fully cooperate, unless we join the game and join it to win. Because power is measurable only in comparative—that is, competitive—terms, it presupposes some kind of cooperation. 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.

we do not play against reality; we play according to reality.

If I accept death as inevitable, I do not struggle against mortality. I struggle as a mortal. All the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

Power is a feature only of finite games. It is not dramatic but theatrical.

Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own.

We need a term that will stand in contrast to “power” as it acquires its meaning in finite play. Let us say that where the finite player plays to be powerful the infinite player plays with strength.

Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.

Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

NO ONE CAN PLAY a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. Simultaneously

Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live.

theatricality of politics that infinite players do not take sides in political issues—at least not seriously. Instead they enter into social conflict dramatically, attempting to offer a vision of continuity and open-endedness in place of the heroic final scene.

In doing so they must at the very least draw the attention of other political participants not to what they feel they must do, but to why they feel they must do it.