Finite and Infinite Games

James Carse

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781451657296
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

"There are at least two kinds of games, " states James P. Carse as he begins this extraordinary book. "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." Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life; they are played in order to be won, which is when they end. But infinite games are more mysterious. Their object is not winning, but ensuring the continuation of play. The rules may change, the boundaries may change, even the participants may change—as long as the game is never allowed to come to an end. What are infinite games? How do they affect the ways we play our finite games? What are we doing when we play—finitely or infinitely? And how can infinite games affect the ways in which we live our lives? Carse explores these questions with stunning elegance, teasing out of his distinctions a universe of observation and insight, noting where and why and how we play, finitely and infinitely. He surveys our world—from the finite games of the playing field and playing board to the infinite games found in culture and religion—leaving all we think we know illuminated and transformed. Along the way, Carse finds new ways of understanding everything, from how an actress portrays a role to how we engage in sex, from the nature of evil to the nature of science. Finite games, he shows, may offer wealth and status, power and glory, but infinite games offer something far more subtle and far grander. Carse has written a book rich in insight and aphorism. Already an international literary event, Finite and Infinite Games is certain to be argued about and celebrated for years to come. Reading it is the first step in learning to play the infinite game.

1

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.

2

If 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.

It may appear that the approval of the spectators, or the referees, is also required in the determination of the winner. However, it is simply the case that if the players do not agree on a winner, the game has not come to a decisive conclusion—and the players have not satisfied the original purpose of playing. Even if they are carried from the field and forcibly blocked from further play, they will not consider the game ended.

Suppose the players all agree, but the spectators and the referees do not. Unless the players can be persuaded that their agreement was mistaken, they will not resume the play—indeed, they cannot resume the play. We cannot imagine players returning to the field and truly playing if they are convinced the game is over.

There is no finite game unless the players freely choose to play it. No one can play who is forced to play.

It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.

3

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.

Spatial boundaries are evident in every finite conflict, from the simplest board and court games to world wars. The opponents in World War II agreed not to bomb Heidelberg and Paris and declared Switzerland outside the boundaries of conflict. When unnecessary and excessive damage is inflicted by one of the sides in warfare, a question arises as to the legitimacy of the victory that side may claim, even whether it has been a war at all and not simply gratuitous unwarranted violence. When Sherman burned his way from Atlanta to the sea, he so ignored the sense of spatial limitation that for many persons the war was not legitimately won by the Union Army, and has in fact never been concluded.

Numerical boundaries take many forms but are always applied in finite games. Persons are selected for finite play. It is the case that we cannot play if we must play, but it is also the case that we cannot play alone. Thus, in every case, we must find an opponent, and in most cases teammates, who are willing to join in play with us. Not everyone who wishes to do so may play for, or against, the New York Yankees. Neither may they be electricians or agronomists by individual choice, without the approval of their potential colleagues and competitors.

Because finite players cannot select themselves for play, there is never a time when they cannot be removed from the game, or when the other contestants cannot refuse to play with them. The license never belongs to the licensed, nor the commission to the officer.

What is preserved by the constancy of numerical boundaries, of course, is the possibility that all contestants can agree on an eventual winner. Whenever persons may walk on or off the field of play as they wish, there is such a confusion of participants that none can emerge as a clear victor. Who, for example, won the French Revolution?

4

To have such boundaries means that the date, place, and membership of each finite game are externally defined. When we say of a particular contest that it began on September 1, 1939, we are speaking from the perspective of world time; that is, from the perspective of what happened before the beginning of the conflict and what would happen after its conclusion. So also with place and membership. A game is played in that place, with those persons.

The world is elaborately marked by boundaries of contest, its people finely classified as to their eligibilities.

5

Only one person or team can win a finite game, but the other contestants may well be ranked at the conclusion of play.

Not everyone can be a corporation president, although some who have competed for that prize may be vice presidents or district managers.

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

6

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.

Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time. Indeed, the only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play.

There are no spatial or numerical boundaries to an infinite game. No world is marked with the barriers of infinite play, and there is no question of eligibility since anyone who wishes may play an infinite game.

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. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time.

For this reason it is impossible to say how long an infinite game has been played, or even can be played, since duration can be measured only externally to that which endures. It is also impossible to say in which world an infinite game is played, though there can be any number of worlds within an infinite game.

7

Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game.

Infinite players regard their wins and losses in whatever finite games they play as but moments in continuing play.

8

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.

The rules will be different for each finite game. It is, in fact, by knowing what the rules are that we know what the game is.

What the rules establish is a range of limitations on the players: each player must, for example, start behind the white line, or have all debts paid by the end of the month, charge patients no more than they can reasonably afford, or drive in the right lane.

In the narrowest sense rules are not laws; they do not mandate specific behavior, but only restrain the freedom of the players, allowing considerable room for choice within those restraints.

If these restraints are not observed, the outcome of the game is directly threatened. The rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won.

9

The rules must be published prior to play, and the players must agree to them before play begins.

A point of great consequence to all finite play follows from this: The agreement of the players to the applicable rules constitutes the ultimate validation of those rules.

Rules are not valid because the Senate passed them, or because heroes once played by them, or because God pronounced them through Moses or Muhammad. They are valid only if and when players freely play by them.

There are no rules that require us to obey rules. If there were, there would have to be a rule for those rules, and so on.

10

If the rules of a finite game are unique to that game it is evident that the rules may not change in the course of play—else a different game is being played.

It is on this point that we find the most critical distinction between finite and infinite 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.

If the rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won, the rules of an infinite game are the contractual terms by which the players agree to continue playing.

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. In the former case we observe rules as a way of continuing discourse with each other; in the latter we observe rules as a way of bringing the speech of another person to an end.

The rules, or grammar, of a living language are always evolving to guarantee the meaningfulness of discourse, while the rules of debate must remain constant.

11

Although the rules of an infinite game may change by agreement at any point in the course of play, it does not follow that any rule will do. It is not in this sense that the game is infinite.

The rules are always designed to deal with specific threats to the continuation of play. Infinite players use the rules to regulate the way they will take the boundaries or limits being forced against their play into the game itself.

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.

This is equivalent to saying that no limitation may be imposed against infinite play. Since limits are taken into play, the play itself cannot be limited.

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

12

Although it may be evident enough in theory that whoever plays a finite game plays freely, it is often the case that finite players will be unaware of this absolute freedom and will come to think that whatever they do they must do. There are several possible reasons for this:

—We saw that finite players must be selected. While no one is forced to remain a lawyer or a rodeo performer or a kundalini yogi after being selected for these roles, each role is nonetheless surrounded both by ruled restraints and expectations on the part of others. One senses a compulsion to maintain a certain level of performance, because permission to play in these games can be canceled. We cannot do whatever we please and remain lawyers or yogis—and yet we could not be either unless we pleased.

—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.

—It may appear that the prizes for winning are indispensable, that without them life is meaningless, perhaps even impossible. There are, to be sure, games in which the stakes seem to be life and death. In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid for with terrible suffering or death.

Even in this last, extreme case we must still concede that whoever takes up the commanded role does so by choice. Certainly the price for refusing it is high, but that there is a price at all points to the fact that oppressors themselves acknowledge that even the weakest of their subjects must agree to be oppressed. If the subjects were unresisting puppets or automatons, no threat would be necessary, and no price would be paid—thus the satire of the putative ideal of oppressors in Huxley’s Gammas, Orwell’s Proles, and Rossum’s Universal Robots (Capek).

Unlike infinite play, finite play is limited from without; like infinite play, those limitations must be chosen by the player since no one is under any necessity to play a finite game. Fields of play simply do not impose themselves on us. Therefore, all the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

13

To account for the large gap between the actual freedom of finite players to step off the field of play at any time and the experienced necessity to stay at the struggle, we can say that as finite players we somehow veil this freedom from ourselves.

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.

If the actress is so skillful that we do see Ophelia as this woman, it follows that we do not see performed emotions and hear recited words, but a person’s true feelings and speech. To some extent the actress does not see herself performing but feels her performed emotion and actually says her memorized lines—and yet the very fact that they are performed means that the words and feelings belong to the role and not to the actress. In fact, it is one of the requirements of her craft that she keep her own person distinct from the role. What she feels as the person she is has nothing to do with Ophelia and must not enter into her playing of the part.

Of course, not for a second will this woman in her acting be unaware that she is acting. She never forgets that she has veiled herself sufficiently to play this role, that she has chosen to forget for the moment that she is this woman and not Ophelia. But then, neither do we as audience forget we are audience. Even though we see this woman as Ophelia, we are never in doubt that she is not. We are in complicity with her veil. We allow her performed emotions to affect us, perhaps powerfully. But we never forget that we allow them to do so.

So it is with all roles. Only freely can one step into the role of mother. Persons who assume this role, however, must suspend their freedom with a proper seriousness in order to act as the role requires. A mother’s words, actions, and feelings belong to the role and not to the person—although some persons may veil themselves so assiduously that they make their performance believable even to themselves, overlooking any distinction between a mother’s feelings and their own.

The issue here is not whether self-veiling can be avoided, or even should be avoided. Indeed, no finite play is possible without it. The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only t...