Finite and Infinite Games

The Jolly Contrarian’s book review service™ Go Premium Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Book reviews 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. 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 what he means by this. On the other hand, Carse’s theory is fundamentally relativist; he assigns as much credit for successful communication to the imaginative construction of the listener as the intention of the speaker, and freely asserts that the two may be different:

“The paradox of genius exposes us directly to the dynamic of open reciprocity, for if you are the genius of what you say to me, I am the genius of what I hear you say. What you say originally I can hear only originally. As you surrender the sound on your lips, I surrender the sound in my ear.”

Mr. Carse’s gnomic — and, candidly, mildly irritating — style may be why Mr. Sinek has been able to make such hay: that is in a sense the job he has done. But, irony: the job of imaginatively deducing what Mr. Carse’s aphorisms is a kind of infinite game of its own — one that Mr. Sinek is playing pretty well.

So let us join in.

Historic versus prospective

Many distinctions between finite and infinite games boil down to their historical perspective: those that look backwards, concerning themselves with what has already been established and laid down — as agreed rules, formal boundaries and limited time periods for resolution necessarily do — will tend to be finite in nature; those that are open-ended, forward looking, and indeterminate — concerned with what has yet to happen, and is necessarily unknown, are infinite.

Let me throw in some original research here: historically focused games in and of themselves are fine: there is no harm and much reward to be had from enjoying a game of football; but where one makes the category error of applying finite techniques — a historical view — to the resolution of forward-looking problems that the finite approach creates trouble. It is deceptive in that finite techniques appear to work well in many of the cases, because a given environment in large part functions by reference to what is already known, and here finite approach is efficient and effective and centrally controllable.

In the same way the part of a normal distribution resembles the middle part of a “fat-tailed” power-law distribution: the same approaches will work passably well for both, as long as the events are within the space

Power versus strength

“A powerful person is one who brings the past to an outcome, settling all its unresolved issues. A strong person is one who carries the past into the future, showing that none of its issues is capable of resolution. Power is concerned with what has already happened; strength with what has yet to happen. Power is finite in amount, strength cannot be measured because it is an opening and not a closing act. Power refers to the freedom persons have within limits, strength to the freedoms persons have with limits.

Power will always be restricted to a relatively small number of selected persons. Anyone can be strong.”

The theatrical versus the dramatic

Inasmuch as a finite game is intended for conclusion, inasmuch as its roles are scripted and performed for an audience, we shall refer to finite play as theatrical. [...]

Inasmuch as infinite players avoid any outcome whatsoever, keeping the future open, making all scripts useless, we shall refer to infinite play as dramatic.

Dramatically, one chooses to be a mother. Theatrically one takes on the role of mother.

This is a harder distinction to glom, especially since Carse concedes that during a finite game the action is “provisionally” dramatic, since the players write the script as they go along. But the object of the game is to kill the drama by making the outcome inevitable. So provisional, and hostile, to drama.

See also

• Paradigm failure