Finite and Infinite Games
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Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse
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There is so much in this book. Ostensibly, it is an obscure piece of cod philosophy from a religious studies professor in the mid nineteen-eighties. It might well have silted into the geological record as nothing more than that, but it is having a fertile third age: it has been picked up by life-coach to the LinkedIn generation, Simon Sinek, and when minds as luminous as Stewart Brand’s speak reverently of it, it may have life above the daisies for a little while yet. Hope so.
Carse, who died last year, is wilfully aphoristic in his literary style, and this is off-putting.[1] He often says things like:
Of infinite players we can also say that if they play they play freely; if they must play, they cannot play.
Now this is important, but the book would be better — and more scrutable — had Carse taken more time to explain exactly this is meant to mean. That may be why Mr. Sinek has been able to make such hay: that is in a sense the job he has done.[2] But, irony: the job of imaginatively deducing what Mr. Carse meant with his gnomic interventions is a kind of infinite game of its own — one that Mr. Sinek is playing pretty well. So let us join in.
See also
- ↑ Notably, Carse’s speaking style is much less cryptic and talks he gavve about the infinite game concept are worth checking out. See for example his talk to the Long Now Foundation: Religious Wars in Light of the Infinite Game.
- ↑ The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek (2019) (see here).