Finite and Infinite Games

by James P. Carse

Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time.

The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time. For this reason it is impossible to say how long an infinite game has been played, or even can be played, since duration can be measured only externally to that which endures. It is also impossible to say in which world an infinite game is played, though there can be any number of worlds within an infinite game.

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.

If 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 are the contractual terms by ...

Since limits are taken into play, the play itself cannot be limited.

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

is in the nature of acting, Shaw said, that we are not to see this woman as Ophelia, but Ophelia as this woman. If the actress is so skillful that we do see Ophelia as this woman, it follows that we do not see performed emotions and hear recited words, but a person’s true feelings and speech.

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.

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

To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.

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.

Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition. Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.

A slave can have life only by giving it away. “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jesus).

Of course, immortality of the soul—the bare soul, cleansed of any personality traces—is rarely what is desired in the yearning for immortality. “The information that my soul is to last forever could then be of no more personal concern to me than the news that my appendix is to be preserved eternally in a bottle” (Flew).

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.

Immortality is therefore the supreme example of the contradictoriness of finite play: It ...

If I accept death as inevitable, I do not struggle against mortality. I struggle as a mortal.

A powerful person is one who brings the past to an outcome, settling all its unresolved issues. A strong person is one who carries the past into the future, showing that none of its issues is capable of resolution.

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

When Europeans first landed on the North American continent the native population spoke as many as ten thousand distinct languages, each with its own poetry and treasury of histories and myths, its own ways of living in harmony with the spontaneities of the natural environment. All but a very few of those tongues have been silenced, their cultures forever lost to those of us who stand ignorantly in their place.

Evil is not the attempt to eliminate the play of another according to published and accepted rules, but to eliminate the play of another regardless of the rules.

Evil is not the acquisition of power, but the expression of power. It is the forced recognition of a title—and therein lies the contradiction of evil, for recognition cannot be forced.

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.”

It is evil to act as though the past is bringing us to a specifiable end. It is evil to assume that the past will make sense only if we bring it to an issue we have clearly in view. It is evil for a nation to believe it is “the last, best hope on earth.”

We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others.

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

The United States did not, for example, lose its war in Southeast Asia so much as lose its audience for a war. No doubt much of the disillusion and bitterness of its warriors comes from the missing final scene—the hero’s homecoming to parades or ceremonial burial—an anticipated scene that carries many into battle.

In their own political engagements infinite players make a distinction between society and culture. Society they understand as the sum of those relations that are under some form of public constraint, culture as whatever we do with each other by undirected choice.

The prizes won by its citizens can be protected only if the society as a whole remains powerful in relation to other societies. Those who desire the permanence of their prizes will work to sustain the permanence of the whole. Patriotism in one or several of its many forms (chauvinism, racism, sexism, nationalism, regionalism) is an ingredient in all societal play.

Culture is an enterprise of mortals, disdaining to protect themselves against surprise.

Society is a manifestation of power. It is theatrical, having an established script.

because an infinite game cannot be brought to an end, it cannot be repeated. Unrepeatability is a characteristic of culture everywhere.

Conflict with other societies is, in fact, an effective way for a society to restrain its own culture.

Another successful defense of society against the culture within itself is to give artists a place by regarding them as the producers of property, thus elevating the value of consuming art, or owning it.

A boundary is a phenomenon of opposition. It is the meeting place of hostile forces. Where nothing opposes there can be no boundary. One cannot move beyond a boundary without being resisted.

This is why patriotism—that is, the desire to protect the power in a society by way of increasing the power of a society—is inherently belligerent.

Abstracted thought—thought without a thinker—is metaphysics. A society’s metaphysics is its ideology: theories that present themselves as the product of these people or those.

What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision, and not what we are viewing, that is limited.

When we separate the metaphysics from the thinker we have an abstraction, the deathless shadow of a once living act. It is no longer what someone is saying but what someone has said.

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 the origin of myself I am not also the cause of myself, as though I were the product of my own action. But then neither am I the product of any other action. My parents may have wanted a child, but they could not have wanted me.

My birth, when understood in terms of causal continuity, marks no absolute beginning. It marks nothing at all except an arbitrary point in an unbroken process.

Each of these roles comes, of course, with a script, one whose lines a person might easily spend a lifetime repeating, while intentionally forgetting, or repressing, the fact that it is but a learned script. Such a person “is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past” (Freud).

When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I am behind all the theatrical masks, but at the same time I am changed from within—and whoever touches me is touched as well.

When I am healed I am restored to my center in a way that my freedom as a person is not compromised by my loss of functions. This means that the illness need not be eliminated before I can be healed. I am not free to the degree that I can overcome my infirmities, but only to the degree that I can put my infirmities into play. I am cured of my illness; I am healed with my illness.

If speaking about a process is itself part of the process, there is something that must remain permanently hidden from the speaker.

Historians who understand themselves to be historical abandon explanation altogether. The mode of discourse appropriate to such self-aware history is narrative.