Finite and Infinite Games Quotes

“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.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“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.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“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.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“To speak meaningfully of a person’s power is to speak of what that person has already completed in one or another closed field. To see power is to look backward in time.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Power is a concept that belongs only in finite play.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Power is always measured in units of comparison. In fact, it is a term of competition: How much resistance can I overcome relative to others?”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. Power is never evident until two or more elements are in opposition.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“The exercise of power always presupposes resistance.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“The titled are powerful. Those around them are expected to yield, to withdraw their opposition, and to conform to their will—in the arena in which the title was won.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Titles, then, point backward in time. They have their origin in an unrepeatable past.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“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.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in a game in order to win it. Whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game. The constant attentiveness of finite players to the progress of the competition can lead them to believe that every move they make they must make.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“If finite games must be externally bounded by time, space, and number, they must also have internal limitations on what the players can do to and with each other. To agree on internal limitations is to establish rules of play.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined. The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Indeed, the only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“In one respect, but only one, an infinite game is identical to a finite game: Of infinite players we can also say that if they play they play freely; if they must play, they cannot play. Otherwise, infinite and finite play stand in the sharpest possible contrast.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“To have such boundaries means that the date, place, and membership of each finite game are externally defined.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“What is preserved by the constancy of numerical boundaries, of course, is the possibility that all contestants can agree on an eventual winner.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Just as it is essential for a finite game to have a definitive ending, it must also have a precise beginning. Therefore, we can speak of finite games as having temporal boundaries—to which, of course, all players must agree. But players must agree to the establishment of spatial and numerical boundaries as well. That is, the game must be played within a marked area, and with specified players.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“a finite game is to be won by someone it must come to a definitive end. It will come to an end when someone has won. We know that someone has won the game when all the players have agreed who among them is the winner. No other condition than the agreement of the players is absolutely required in determining who has won the game.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“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.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“If one of the reasons for uniting into commonwealths is the protection of property, and if property is to be protected less by power as such than by theater, then societies become acutely dependent on their artists—what Plato called poietai: the storytellers, the inventors, sculptors, poets, any original thinkers whatsoever.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been—and therefore of all that we are.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“True parents do not see to it that their children grow in a particular way, according to a preferred pattern or scripted stages, but they see to it that they grow with their children. The character of one’s parenting, if it is genuinely dramatic, must be constantly altered from within as the children change from within. So, too, with teaching, or working with, or loving each other.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“I can explain nothing to you unless I first draw your attention to patent inadequacies in your knowledge: discontinuities in the relations between objects, or the presence of anomalies you cannot account for by any of the laws known to you. You will remain deaf to my explanations until you suspect yourself of falsehood.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“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.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“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.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“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.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Infinite play is inherently paradoxical, just as finite play is inherently contradictory. Because it is the purpose of infinite players to continue the play, they do not play for themselves. 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 paradox is precisely that they play only when others go on with the game. Infinite players play best when they become least necessary to the continuation of play. It is for this reason they play as mortals. The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games