Finite and Infinite Games, James P. Carse

Part 1: There are at least two kinds of games

• “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing to play.”
• Finite or infinite, for play to be play, whoever plays must play freely. “Whoever must play, cannot play.”
• “The rules of a finite game may not change in the course of play…The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play.” They change so that participants are prevented from winning and continue playing
• “Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.”
• “…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.”
• “A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future possibility, but to control the future, to prevent it from altering the past. …Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases.”
• “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.”
• “Death in life is a mode of existence in which one has ceased to play…All competitive engagement with others has been abandoned.”
• “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.”
• A contradiction common to all finite play is that all finite play is played to end itself.
• Infinite players do not play for themselves, since they play to continue the play, and they are mortal, so for play to continue they must cease.
• Infinite play is paradoxical, and finite play is contradictory. “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.”
• “The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. Power is never evident until two or more elements are in opposition. Whichever elements can move another is the more powerful.”
• “Power is always measured in units of comparison [spatial and temporal]. In fact, it is a term of competition: How much resistance can I overcome relative to others?”
• Power is determined by the outcome of a game, therefore one does not win by being powerful but to be powerful. If one had sufficient power to win before the game started, what follows is not a game.
• A contradiction of finite play: I can be powerful only by not playing, by showing that the game is over. I can only have what powers others bestow to me after the play is concluded.
• “We are not defeated by floods or genetic disease or the rate of inflation. It is true that these are real, but we do not play against reality; we play according to reality.” We can’t eliminate these things, rather we accept them as limits within which we are to play.
• “If I accept death as inevitable, I do not struggle against mortality. I struggle as a mortal.”
• I am not strong (strong being the infinite equivalent to powerful) because I can force others to do what I wish, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.
• “Though infinite players are strong, they are not powerful and do not attempt to become powerful.”
• “Evil is not the acquisition of power, but the expression of power. It is the forced recognition of a title…The Nazis did not compete with the Jews for a title, but demanded recognition of a title without competition. This could be achieved, however, only by silencing the Jews…They were to die in silence, along with their culture, without anyone noticing, not even those who managed the institutions and instruments of death.”
• “Evil is never intended as evil…[evil] originates in the desire to eliminate evil.”
• “It is evil to act as though the past is bringing us to a specifiable end…to think history is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society, or with the Islamicitization of all living infidels.”
• “Your history does not belong to me. We live with each other in a common history.”
• Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil, and therefore “attempt to recognize in themselves the evil that takes the form of attempting to eliminate evil elsewhere.”
• “Evil is not the inclusion of finite games in an infinite game, but the restriction of all play to one or another finite game.”

  Part 2: No one can play a game alone

• “We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others.”
• Many playful breaks from being serious, such as vacations or sports time outs, are used as tools to refresh one’s seriousness for higher levels of competitions. Organized play in children is itself a means of preparing the young for serious adult competition.
• An infinite player is political without having a politics. “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 maintain the essential fluidity of human association.”
• Society is a collaboration under rules and constraints, culture is a collaboration by undirected choice. “It is often a strategy of a society to initiate and embrace a culture as exclusively its own. Culture so bounded may even be so lavishly subsidized and encouraged by its society that it has the appearance of an open-ended activity, but in fact it is designed to serve societal interests in every case.”
• “The prizes won by [a society’s] citizens can be protected only if the society as a whole remains powerful in relation to other societies. Those who desire permanence of their prizes will work to sustain the permanence of the whole.”
• “It is in the interest of a society 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.”
• “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.”
• The more powerful we consider someone to be, the less we expect them to do, since their power comes only from that which they have done. And thus we hoist the athlete after a victory as if he were helpless, and carry celebrities around in carriages and limousines.
• “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.”
• Ensuring the performance of wealth stays orderly cannot be done by forceful restraint of competitors, this would descend into chaos. Nor can it be done by guaranteeing everyone, even thieves, a certain amount of property—feeding the thief will hardly convince him that he is no longer a contender for something larger. The more effective policy to maintain social order and wealth is to persuade the thieves to “abandon their roles as competitors for property for the sake of becoming audience to the theatre of wealth. It is for this reason that societies fall back on the skill of those [artists] who can theatricalize…all the inner structure of each society.”
• The deepest struggle for each society is with the culture that exists within itself, the culture that is itself. The fluidity of culture threatens the rigidity of the society. Thus societies find ways to suppress the creators within. “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.”
• “Art that is used against a society or its policies gives up its character as infinite play, and aims for an end. Such art is no less propaganda than that which praises its heroes with high seriousness.”
• “Poets do not ‘fit’ in to society…because they do not take their ‘places’ seriously. They openly see its roles as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed, and its metaphysics ideological.”
• “Where a society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon.”
• “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.”
• “Patriots must create enemies before we can require protection from them. Patriots can flourish only where boundaries are well-defined, hostile, and dangerous.”
• “[A horizon] is not a line; it has no place; it encloses no field…to move toward a horizon is simply to have a new horizon.”
• “Just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so also corruption in nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone ‘perpetual peace’.” (Hegel)
• “Finite players go to war against states because they endanger boundaries; infinite plays oppose states because they engender boundaries.”
• “Metaphysics is about the real but is abstract. Poetry is the making of the real and is concrete. Whenever what is made is separated from the maker, it becomes metaphysical.”
• When we separate the thoughts from the thinker, we’re left with a deathless metaphysical shadow of a once living act.

  Part 3: I am the genius of myself

• “What you say originally I can hear only originally. As you surrender the sound on your lips, I surrender the sound in my ears.”
• “To speak, or act, or think originally is to erase the boundary of the self. It is to leave behind the territorial personality.”
• “Things do not have their own limitations. Nothing limits itself. The sea gulls circling in the invisible currents…are not somehow distinct from the environment; they are the environment.”
• “Speaking in purely causal terms, I cannot say I was born; I should say rather that I have emerged as a phase in the process of reproduction. A reproduction is a repetition, a recurrence of that which has been. Birth, on the other hand, in causal terms, is all discontinuity.”
• “Unless we believe we actually are the losers the audience sees us to be, we will not have the necessary desire to win.”
• “The more negatively we assess ourselves, the more we strive to reverse the negative judgment of others.”
• This brings out a clinical contradiction: “by proving the audience they were wrong, we prove to ourselves the audience was right.”
• “No one conceives a child; a child is conceived in the conjunction of sperm and ovum. The mother does not give birth to a child; the mother is where the birth occurs.”
• “While society does serve a regulatory function [toward sexuality], it is probably more correctly understood as sexuality making use of society to regulate itself.”
• “Society is where we prove to parents qua audience that we are not what we thought they thought we were.”
• “The most serious struggles are those for sexual property. For this wars are fought, lives are generously risked, great schemes are initiated. However, who wins empire, fortune, and fame but loses in love has lost in everything.”
• Finite sexuality is veiled, a performance that attempts to end in victory by acquiring the vanquished. Sexual desires are thus concealed under a series of feints, styles, and showy behaviours. Seductions are staged and costumed, certain responses are sought. Skillful seductions employ delays and special circumstances.
• “Seductions are designed to come to an end. Time runs out. The play is finished. All that remains is recollection, the memory of a moment, and perhaps a longing for its repetition…Lovers often sustain vivid reminders of extraordinary moments, but they are reminded at the same time of their impotence in recreating them. The appetite for novelty in lovemaking—new positions, the use of drugs, exotic surroundings, additional partners—is only a search for new moments that can live on only in recollection.”
  • The appetite for novelty—period—is only a search for new moments that can live on only in recollection. We can perform a novel act twice, thus they remain locked away in memory never to be lived again.
• “Sexual desire is exposed as sexual desire and is never therefore serious. Its satisfaction is never an achievement, but an act in a continuing relationship, and therefore joyous. Its lack of satisfaction is never a failure, but only a matter to be taken on into further play.”

  Part 4: A finite game occurs within a world

• “Just as…the absence or death of parents has no effect on the child’s determination to prove them wrong, finite players become their own hostile observers in the very act of competing.”
• “Early in a game time seems abundant, and there appears a greater freedom to develop further strategies. Late in a game, time is rapidly being consumed…For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have time to be free.”
• “Whoever plays toward a certain outcome desires a particular past. By competing for a future prize, finite players compete for a prized past.”
• If observers see the creativity in work they cease at being observers, and find themselves in its time and aware it remains unfinished, “aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry.”

  Part 5: Nature is the realm of the unspeakable

• “We experience the unspeakability of nature as its utter indifference to human culture.”
• “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” (Heisenberg)
• Since nature is unspeakable, when we speak of it we speak in metaphor. We call things by names, but to address things themselves and not their names would be to “presume…that we know precisely what it is we have, that we can see it in its entirety, and that we can speak nature as itself.”
• “Matters do not end as they must but as they do. Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.”
• “Explanation is an antagonistic encounter that succeeds by defeating an opponent…I will press my explanations on you because I need to show that I do not live in the error that I think others think I do.”
• “The silence of nature is the possibility of language. By subduing nature the gods give it their own voice, but in making nature an opponent they make all their listeners opponents. By refusing the silence of nature they demand the silence of obedience. The unspeakability of nature is therefore transformed into the unspeakability of language itself.”
• “One is speechless before a god, or silent before a winner, because it no longer matters what one has to say. To lose a contest is to become obedient…The silence of obedience is an unheard silence…For this reason the demand for obedience is inherently evil.”
• “A god can create a world only by listening.”
  • Because if it speaks, and the speakable is that which has already happened in the past, nothing is created by its speech. To create requires an intercourse of speech
• “Were the gods to address us it would not be to bring us to silence through their speech, but to bring us to speech through their silence.”
  • Author speaks to the importance of silence in bringing out a response. Without the ability to pause and listen as a speaker, conversations will die and remain finite.

    Part 6: We control nature for societal reasons

• “To garden is not to engage in a hobby or amusement; it is to design a culture capable of adjusting to the widest possible range of surprise in nature. Gardeners are acutely attentive to the deep patterns of natural order, but are also aware that there will always be much lying beyond their vision.”
• Nature is neither chaotic nor ordered. Chaos and order describe our subjective experience of nature, “the degree to which nature’s indifferent spontaneity seems to agree with our current manner of cultural self-control.”
• A hurricane or plague will seem chaotic to those who don’t expect them, and orderly to those who expect them.
• “Machines do not make us into machines when we operate them; we make ourselves into machinery in order to operate them. Machinery does not steal our spontaneity from us; we set it aside ourselves, we deny our originality. There is no style in operating a machine. The more efficient the machine, the more it either limits or absorbs our uniqueness into its operation.”
• “Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead decrease it, we use machines against ourselves.”
• “When machinery functions perfectly it ceases to be there—but so do we. …Automobiles do not make travel possible, but make it possible for us to move locations without traveling. Thus, the theatricality of machinery. Such movement is but a change in scenes.”
• “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.”
• “It is in the garden that we discover what travel truly is. We do not journey to a garden but by way of it.”
• “Genuine travel has no destination. Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else.”
• “The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pairs of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.” (Proust)
• Machines require power, and power is gathered and consumed from the materials of nature. Nature is not consumed however, just transformed into waste: material unusable by civilization. “The trash and garbage of a civilization do not befoul nature; they are nature—but in a form society no longer is able to exploit for its own ends.”
• Waste is like anti property: no one owns it, or wants to. Treating nature as though it belongs to us leads to treating nature as if it belongs to nobody, as finite productivity produces waste. Waste then becomes the anti property of the losers.
• “Waste is unveiling, because it persists in showing itself as waste, and as our waste…Looking about at the wasteland into which we have converted our habitation, we can plainly see that nature is not whatever we want it to be.”
• “The more waste a society produces, the more unveiling that waste is, and thus the more vigorously must a society deny that it produces any waste at all; the more it must dispose, or hide, or ignore, its waste.”

  Part 7: Myth provokes explanation but accepts none of it

• Explanations establish islands of order and predictability, which were first charted by adventurers who found them by mythic journey into the wayless open. Less adventurous settlers then arrive to work out the details, and lose the sense that all the “firm knowledge does not expunge myth, but floats in it.”
• “The very liveliness of a culture is determined not by how frequently these thinkers discover new continents of knowledge but by how frequently they depart to seek them. A culture can be no stronger than its strongest myths.”
• “A story attains the status of myth when it is retold, and persistently retold, solely for its own sake.”
• Story tellers become metaphysicians or ideologists when they believe they know the entire story of a people, theatricalizing history and presuming to know the beginning and end.
• “A psychoanalyst who looks for the Freudian myth in patients imposes a filter that lets through nothing the psychoanalyst was not prepared to find.”
• “Myths are significantly unresolved—but unresolved in the way of an infinite game…that allow any number of participants at any time to enter the drama without fixing its plot or bringing it to closure in a final scene…much will be said about closure, or death, but their telling will always disclose the way death comes in the course of play and not at its end.”
• Amplification, as opposed to resonance, silences speech. A bell resonates, a cannon amplifies. An amplified voice seeks obedient action from hearers and an end to their speech.
• “Ideology is the amplification of myth. It is the assumption that since the beginning and end of history are known there is nothing more to say.”