Finite and Infinite Games: Difference between revisions

From The Jolly Contrarian
Jump to navigation Jump to search
No edit summary
No edit summary
Line 6: Line 6:
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.<ref>{{br|The Infinite Game}} by {{author|Simon Sinek}} (2019) ([https://g.co/kgs/J4Mg35 see here]).</ref> 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.
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.<ref>{{br|The Infinite Game}} by {{author|Simon Sinek}} (2019) ([https://g.co/kgs/J4Mg35 see here]).</ref> 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.


 
===Training versus education===
 
===Power versus strength===
 
===Society versus culture===
===Poeitas===


{{sa}}
{{sa}}
*[[Paradigm failure]]
*[[Paradigm failure]]
{{ref}}

Revision as of 11:14, 11 March 2022

The Jolly Contrarian’s book review service™

Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse

Index: Click to expand:

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you.
Sign up for our newsletter.

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.

Training versus education

Power versus strength

Society versus culture

Poeitas

See also

References

  1. 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.
  2. The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek (2019) (see here).