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.

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.

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. The task is to design rules that will allow the players to continue the game by taking these limits into play—even when death is one of the limits. It is in this sense that the game is infinite.

Some self-veiling is present in all finite games. Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them. From the outset of finite play 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.

Since finite games can be played within an infinite game, 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. They embrace the abstractness of finite games as abstractness, and therefore take them up not seriously, but playfully.

To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other 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.

By relating to others as they move out of their own freedom and not out of the abstract requirements of a role, infinite players are concrete persons engaged with concrete persons. For that reason 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. 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.

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.

Death in life is a mode of existence in which one has ceased all play; there is no further striving for titles. All competitive engagement with others has been abandoned. For some, though not for all, death in life is a misfortune, the resigned acceptance of a loser’s status, a refusal to hold any title up for recognition. For others, however, death in life can be regarded as an achievement, the result of a spiritual discipline, say, intended to extinguish all traces of struggle with the world, a liberation from the need for any title whatsoever. “Die before ye die,” declare the Sufi mystics. 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.

If the prize for winning finite play is life, then the players are not properly alive. They are competing for life. Life, then, is not play, but the outcome of play. Finite players play to live; they do not live their playing. Life is therefore deserved, bestowed, possessed, won. It is not lived. “Life itself appears only as a means to life” (Marx).

Infinite players die. Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of play, but in the course of play. 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.

Where the finite player plays for immortality, the infinite player plays as a mortal. In infinite play one chooses to be mortal inasmuch as one always plays dramatically, that is, toward the open, toward the horizon, toward surprise, where nothing can be scripted. It is a kind of play that requires complete vulnerability. To the degree that one is protected against the future, one has established a boundary and no longer plays with but against others.

Although infinite players choose mortality, they may not know when death comes, but we can always say of them that “they die at the right time” (Nietzsche). 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.

When a person is known by title, the attention is on a completed past, on a game already concluded, and not therefore to be played again. A title effectively takes a person out of play. When a person is known only by name, the attention of others is on an open future. We simply cannot know what to expect. Whenever we address each other by name we ignore all scripts, and open the possibility that our relationship will become deeply reciprocal. That I cannot now predict your future is exactly what makes mine unpredictable. Our futures enter into each other. What is your future, and mine, becomes ours. We prepare each other for surprise.

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.

Inasmuch as power is determined by the outcome of a game, one does not win by being powerful; one wins to be powerful. If one has sufficient power to win before the game has begun, what follows is not a game at all. One can be powerful only through the possession of an acknowledged title—that is, only by the ceremonial deference of others. Power is never one’s own, and in that respect it shows the contradiction inherent in all finite play. I can be powerful only by not playing, by showing that the game is over. I can therefore have only what powers others give me. Power is bestowed by an audience after the play is complete. Power is contradictory, and theatrical.

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.

Power is a feature only of finite games. It is not dramatic but theatrical. How then do infinite players contend with power? Infinite play is always dramatic; its outcome is endlessly open. There is no way of looking back to make a definitive assessment of the power or weakness of earlier play. Infinite players look forward, not to a victory in which the past will achieve a timeless meaning, but toward ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpretation. 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.

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.” Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion. 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.” It is evil to think history is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society, or with the Islamicization of all living infidels.

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 the others with whom we are in relation are themselves in relation. We cannot relate to anyone who is not also relating to us. Our social existence has, therefore, an inescapably fluid character. This is not to say that we live in a fluid context, but that our lives are themselves fluid. As in the Zen image we are not the stones over which the stream of the world flows; we are the stream itself. As we shall see, this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons. Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live.

This does not mean that infinite players are politically disengaged; it means rather that they are political without having a politics, a paradoxical position easily misinterpreted. To have a politics is to have a set of rules by which one attempts to reach a desired end; to be political—in the sense meant here—is to recast rules in the attempt to eliminate all societal ends, that is, to maintain the essential fluidity of human association.

No nation can go to war until it has found another that can agree to the terms of the conflict. Each side must therefore be in complicity with the other: Before I can have an enemy, I must persuade another to recognize me as an enemy. I cannot be a hero unless I can first find someone who will threaten my life—or, better, take my life. 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.

Muslims and white supremacists come to mind.

The power in a society is guaranteed and enhanced by the power of a society. 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. Because power is inherently patriotic, it is characteristic of finite players to seek a growth of power in a society as a way of increasing the power of a society. It is in the interest of a society therefore to encourage competition within itself, to establish the largest possible number of prizes, for the holders of prizes will be those most likely to defend the society as a whole against its competitors.

Society is a manifestation of power. It is theatrical, having an established script. Deviations from the script are evident at once. Deviation is antisocietal and therefore forbidden by society under a variety of sanctions. It is easy to see why deviancy is to be resisted. If persons did not adhere to the standing rules of the society, any number of rules would change, and some would be dropped altogether. This would mean that past winners no longer warrant ceremonial recognition of their titles and are therefore without power—like Russian princes after the Revolution.

Or whites after Civil Rights.

What the winner of a finite game wins is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. I cannot entitle myself. Titles are theatrical, requiring an audience to bestow and respect them. Power attaches to titles inasmuch as those who acknowledge them accept the fact that the struggle in which the titles were won cannot be taken up again. Possession of the title signifies an agreement that competition is forever closed in that particular game. It is therefore essential to the effectiveness of every title that it be visible and that in its visibility it point back at the contest in which it was won. The purpose of property is to make our titles visible. Property is emblematic. It recalls to others those areas in which our victories are beyond challenge.

A thief, however, does not mean to steal the title. A thief does not want to take what belongs to someone else. The thief does not compete with me for the articles I have title to, but for the title to those articles. The thief means to win the title, believing that those things to which I claim title belong to no one and are there for the taking. “If you don’t take pocket-handkechers and watches,” explains the Artful Dodger to Oliver, “some other cove will; so that the coves that lost ’em will be all the worse, and you’ll be all the worse too and nobody half a ha’p’orth the better, except the chaps wot gets them—and you’ve just as good a right to them as they have.”

When we ask precisely how a society will go about preserving its citizens’ property, we can expect the reply that it will do so by the use of force. This reply introduces a dilemma. While it is true that there are ways of forcibly restraining a thief, it is also true that no amount of force can lead the Artful Dodger truly to acknowledge a gentleman’s title to the handkerchief in his pocket. Until the young ruffian is persuaded freely to respect that title, he will remain a thief. By extension, this observation applies to the society as a whole. There is no effective pattern of entitlement in a society short of the free agreement of all opponents that the titles to property are in the hands of the actual winners. No force will establish this agreement. Indeed, the opposite is the case: It is agreement that establishes force. Only those who consent to a society’s constraints see them as constraints—that is, as guides to action and not as actions to be opposed. Those who challenge the existing pattern of entitlements in a society do not consider the designated officers of enforcement powerful; they consider them opponents in a struggle that will determine by its outcome who is powerful. One does not win by power; one wins to be powerful.

Venkat Rao riffs on this in The Gervais Principle.

Property is an attempt to recover the past. It returns one to precompetitive status. One is compensated for the amount of time spent (and thus lost) in competition. This attempt to recover the past is, however, a theatrical attempt which can succeed only to the degree that it is conspicuous to its audience. 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. Propertied persons typically have large estates and freedom of movement through the society. At the same time, the property of the rich has the effect of crowding and confining the less propertied. The very poor are typically restricted to narrow geographical limits and are regarded as aliens outside them.

Consumption is an activity so different from gainful labor that it shows itself in the mode of leisure, even indolence. We display the success of what we have done by not having to do anything. The more we use up, therefore, the more we show ourselves to be winners of past contests. “Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of reputability; and conversely, since application to productive labour is a mark of poverty and subjection, it becomes inconsistent with a reputable standing in the community” (Veblen). 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. The amount of property we have is measurable according to the length of time we remain conspicuous, requiring others to adjust their freedom of movement to our spatial dimensions. It is the common goal of the rich to establish a mode of visibility that will extend itself over generations by executing wills that prevent the rapid exhaustion of their fortune, by endowing societally important institutions, by erecting great buildings in their name. Persons of small victories, of lower rank, do not have property of great temporal value; what they have will be exhausted quickly. Those persons whose victories the society wishes never to forget are given prominent an...

Some societies develop the belief that they can eliminate thievery by guaranteeing all their members, including thieves, a certain amount of property—the impulse behind much social welfare legislation. But putting a coin into the pocket of the Artful Dodger will hardly convince him that he is no longer a legitimate contender for the coin in mine. The more effective policy for a society is to find ways of persuading its thieves to abandon their role as competitors for property for the sake of becoming audience to the theater of wealth. It is for this reason that societies fall back on the skill of those poietai who can theatricalize the property relations, and indeed, all the inner structures of each society. Societal theorists of any subtlety whatever know that such theatricalization must be taken with great seriousness. Without it there is no culture at all, and a society without culture would be too drab and lifeless to be endured. What would Nazism have been without its musicians, graphic artists, and set designers, without its Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl?

The deepest and most consequent struggle of each society is therefore not with other societies, but with the culture that exists within itself—the culture that is itself. Conflict with other societies is, in fact, an effective way for a society to restrain its own culture. Powerful societies do not silence their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai. Original thinkers can be suppressed through execution and exile, or they can be encouraged through subsidy and flattery to praise the society’s heroes. Alexander and Napoleon took their poets and their scholars into battle with them, saving themselves the nuisance of repression and along the way drawing ever larger audiences to their triumph. 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. It is notable that very large collections of art, and all the world’s major museums, are the work of the very rich or of societies during strongly nationalistic periods. All the principal museums in New York, for example, are associated with the names of the famously rich: Carnegie, Frick, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Whitney, Morgan, Lehman. Such museums are not designed to protect the art from people, but to protect the people from art.

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. 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. The spirit of patriotism is therefore characteristically associated with the military or other modes of international conflict. Because patriotism is the desire to contain all other finite games within itself—that is, to embrace all horizons within a single boundary—it is inherently evil.

Might as well argue that life itself is inherently evil.

One never reaches a horizon. It is not a line; it has no place; it encloses no field; its location is always relative to the view. To move toward a horizon is simply to have a new horizon. One can therefore never be close to one’s horizon, though one may certainly have a short range of vision, a narrow horizon. We are never somewhere in relation to the horizon since the horizon moves with our vision. We can only be somewhere by turning away from the horizon, by replacing vision with opposition, by declaring the place on which we stand to be timeless—a sacred region, a holy land, a body of truth, a code of inviolable commandments. To be somewhere is to absolutize time, space, and number.