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.

So much in this book — a rather obscure piece of cod philosophy from a religious studies professor in the mid nineteen-eighties that is having a fertile third aged, having been picked up by life-coach to the LinkedIn generation, Simon Sinek, and spoken of reverently by Stewart Brand and those of the Long Now persuasion.

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 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. 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

• Paradigm failure