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.

No other condition than the agreement of the players is absolutely required in determining who has won the game.

There are many games we enter not expecting to win, but in which we nonetheless compete for the highest possible ranking.

if they play they play freely; if they must play, they cannot play.

While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined.

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

For this reason the rules of an infinite game have a different status from those of a finite game. They are like the grammar of a living language, where those of a finite game are like the rules of debate.

Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them.

Seriousness is always related to roles, or abstractions.

Although script and plot do not seem to be written in advance, we are always able to look back at the path followed to victory and say of the winners that they certainly knew how to act and what to say.

Surprise is a crucial element in most finite games. If we are not prepared to meet each of the possible moves of an opponent, our chances of losing are most certainly increased.

Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there.

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

Death in life is a mode of existence in which one has ceased all play; there is no further striving

Victors live forever not because their souls are unaffected by death but because their titles must not be forgotten.

If life is a means to life, we must abstract ourselves, but only for the sake of winning an abstraction.

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 contradiction of finite play is that the players desire to bring play to an end for themselves. The paradox of infinite play is that the players desire to continue the play in others.

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

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

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.

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

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 power of citizens in a society is determined by their ranking in games that have been played.

The power of a society is determined by its victory over other societies in still larger finite games.

It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces.

Property must be seen as compensation.

Whoever is unable to show a correspondence between wealth and the risks undergone to acquire it, or the talents spent in its acquisition, will soon face a challenge over entitlement.

“Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of reputability;

The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise.

Every move an infinite player makes is toward the horizon. Every move made by a finite player is within a boundary.

For a bounded, metaphysically veiled, and destined society, enemies are necessary, conflict inevitable, and war likely.

The strategy of finite players is to kill a state by killing the people who invented it. Infinite players, however, understanding war to be a conflict between states, conclude that states can have only states as enemies; they cannot have persons as enemies.

Whenever what is made (poiema) is separated from the maker (poietes), it becomes metaphysical.

A dog taught the action of shaking hands does not shake your hand. A robot can say words but cannot say them to you.

The sounds of the words you speak may lie on your own lips, but if you do not relinquish them entirely to a listener they never become words, and you say nothing at all. The words die with the sound.

it is because I cannot see what you see that I can see at all.

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.

We feel the need, therefore, to prove to them that we are not what we think they think we are or, more precisely, that we were not who we think the audience thinks we were.

There is an outside to every finite game. Its limits are meaningless unless there is something to be limited, unless there is a larger space, a longer time, a greater number of possible competitors.

Because the seriousness of finite play derives from the players’ need to correct another’s putative assessment of themselves, there is no requirement that the audience be physically present, since players are already their own audience.

Late in a game, time is rapidly being consumed. As choices become more limited they become more important. Errors are more disastrous.

What we thought we read in nature we discover we have read into nature.

no one can look in on an age, even if it is one’s own age, without looking out of an age as well.

You will remain deaf to my explanations until you suspect yourself of falsehood.

prediction is the most highly developed skill of the Master Player, for without it control of an opponent is all the more difficult.

The contradiction in our relation to nature is that the more vigorously we attempt to force its agreement with our own designs the more subject we are to its indifference, the more vulnerable to its unseeing forces.

Growth promotes growth.

“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”