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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Just as compensation makes itself conspicuous by taking up space, consumption draws attention to itself by the length of time it continues. Property must not only intrude on others, it must continue to intrude on others.

What confounds a society is not serious opposition, but the lack of seriousness altogether.

Since there can be no prizes without a society, no society without opponents, patriots must create enemies before we can require protection from them. Patriots can flourish only where boundaries are well-defined, hostile, and dangerous.

culture is not anything persons do, but anything they do with each other, we may say that a culture comes into being whenever persons choose to be a people. It is as a people that they arrange their rules with each other, their moralities, their modes of communication.

My freedom does not depend on your loss of freedom. On the contrary, since freedom is never freedom from society, but freedom for it, my freedom inherently affirms yours.

Plato suggested that some of the poets be driven out of the Republic because they had the power to weaken the guardians. Poets can make it impossible to have a war—unless they tell stories that agree with the “general line” established by the state.

Waste is the antiproperty that becomes the possession of losers. It is the emblem of the untitled.

We resonate with myth when it resounds in us. A myth resounds in me when its voice is heard in mine but not heard as mine.