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Finite and Infinite Games - James P. Carse
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
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.
While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined.
Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game.
The rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won.
The agreement of the players to the applicable rules constitutes the ultimate validation of those rules.
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.
If the rules of a finite game are unique to that game it is evident that the rules must 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.
Because the purpose of a finite game is to bring play to an end with the victory of one of the players, each finite game is played to end itself.
The contradiction is precisely that all finite play is play against itself.
The contradiction of finite play is that the players desire to bring play to an end for themselves.
The paradox of infinite play is that the players desire to continue the play in others.
Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence.
Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil.
Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They therefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore a contradiction.
If we think of society as all that a people does under the veil of necessity, we must also think of it as a single finite game that includes any number of smaller games within its boundaries.
The power in a society is guaranteed and enhanced by the power of a society.
Because power is inherently patriotic, it is characteristic of finite players to seek a growth of power in a society as a way of increasing the power of a society.
Culture, on the other hand, is an infinite game.
Culture has no boundaries. Anyone can be a participant in a culture - anywhere and at any time.
Finite games can be played again; they can be played an indefinite number of times.
As we have seen, because an infinite game cannot be brought to an end, it cannot be repeated.
Unrepeatability is a characteristic of culture everywhere. Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony cannot be composed again, nor could Rembrandts self portraits be painted twice.
Just as an infinite game has rules, a culture has tradition. Since the rules of play in an infinite game are freely agreed to and freely altered, a cultural tradition is both adopted and transformed in its adoption.
Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.
It is apparent to infinite players that wealth is not so much possessed as it is performed.
If wealth and might are to be performed, great wealth and great might must be performed brilliantly.
A finite game occurs within a world. A world provides an absolute reference without which the time, place, and participants make no sense.
We cannot have a precise understanding of what it means to be the winner of a contest until we can place the game in the absolute dimensions of a world.
World exists in the form of audience. An audience consists of persons observing a contest without participating in it.
No one determines who an audience will be. A world must be its own spontaneous source. Who must be a world, cannot be a world.
An audience does not receive its identity according to the persons within it, but according to the events it observes.
Finite players need the world to provide an absolute reference for understanding themselves; simultaneously, the world needs the theater of finite play to remain a world.
There is an indefinite number of worlds.
A finite game does not have its own time. It exists in a world's time. An audience allows players only so much time to win their titles.
For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have time to be free.
The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning.
For an infinite player there is no such thing as an hour of time. There can only be an hour of love, or a day of grieving, or a season of learning, or a period of labor.
For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have time to be free. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time.
A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play.
The result of approaching nature as a hostile Other whose designs are basically inimical to our interests is the ‘machine’, while the result of learning to discipline ourselves to consist with the deepest discernible patterns of natural order is the ‘garden’.
The most elemental difference between the machine and the garden is that one is driven by a force which must be introduced from without, the other grown by an energy which originates from within itself.
If indifference to nature leads to the machine, the indifference of nature leads to the garden.
According to Jewish and Islamic mythology, God provided us with a garden but did not, indeed could not, do the gardening for us.
This garden was not a machine-like device automatically providing food for us. Neither were we machine-like, driven from without and destined from within.
According to this myth, God did breathe life into us, but in order to continue living we had to do our own breathing.
Myths are like magic trees in the garden of culture. They do not grow on but out of the silent earth of nature.
Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.
We resonate with myth when it resounds in us.
Myths of irrepressible resonance have lost all trace of an author.
The gospel can be heard nowhere except from those who themselves have heard it.
Indeed, myth is the highest form of our listening to other, of offering a silence that makes the speech of the other possible.
That is why listening is far more valued by religion than speaking. Fides ex auditu. Faith comes by listening, Paul said.
The opposite of resonance is amplification. Ideology is the amplification of myth.
Perhaps the Christian myth has been the narrative most disturbing to the ideological mind.
It is, like those of Abraham and the Buddha, a very simple tale: that of a god who listens by becoming one of us.
It is a god “emptied” of divinity, who gave up all privilege of commanding speech and “dwelt among us”, coming “not to be served, but to serve”.
Those Christians who have deafened themselves to the resonance of their own myth have driven their killing machines through the garden of history, but they did not kill the myth.
The emptied divinity whom they have made into an Instrument of Vengeance continues to return as the Man of Sorrows bringing with him his unfinished story, and restoring the voices of the silenced.
The myth of Jesus is exemplary, but not necessary. No myth is necessary. There is no story that must be told.
It is not necessary for infinite players to be Christians; indeed it is not possible for them to be Christians - seriously.
Neither is it possible for them to be Buddhists, or Muslims, or atheists, or New Yorkers - seriously.
All such titles can only be playful abstractions, mere performances for the sake of laughter.
Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish.
There is but one infinite game.
