Finite and Infinite Games

Highlights

• The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.
  • Tags: happiness
• A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
• It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.
• Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care.
• While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined.
• Infinite players regard their wins and losses in whatever finite games they play as but moments in continuing play.
• Rules are not valid because the Senate passed them, or because heroes once played by them, or because God pronounced them through Moses or Muhammad. They are valid only if and when players freely play by them.
• The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play. The rules are changed when the players of an infinite game agree that the play is imperiled by a finite outcome—that is, by the victory of some players and the defeat of others. The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game and to bring as many persons as possible into the play.
• Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
• Although it may be evident enough in theory that whoever plays a finite game plays freely, it is often the case that finite players will be unaware of this absolute freedom and will come to think that whatever they do they must do.
• The constant attentiveness of finite players to the progress of the competition can lead them to believe that every move they make they must make.
• Some self-veiling is present in all finite games. Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them.
• The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask.
• Seriousness always has to do with an established script, an ordering of affairs completed somewhere outside the range of our influence.
• We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out—when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.
• To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.
• Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.
• To the degree that one is protected against the future, one has established a boundary and no longer plays with but against others.
• The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous. Infinite play resounds throughout with a kind of laughter.
• One can be powerful only through the possession of an acknowledged title—that is, only by the ceremonial deference of others. Power is never one’s own, and in that respect it shows the contradiction inherent in all finite play.
• It is evil to assume that the past will make sense only if we bring it to an issue we have clearly in view.
• It is in the interest of a society therefore to encourage competition within itself, to establish the largest possible number of prizes, for the holders of prizes will be those most likely to defend the society as a whole against its competitors.
• Culture, however, does not consider the works as the outcome of a struggle, but as moments in an ongoing struggle—the very struggle that culture is.
• Those who challenge the existing pattern of entitlements in a society do not consider the designated officers of enforcement powerful; they consider them opponents in a struggle that will determine by its outcome who is powerful.
• Property is appropriately compensatory whenever owners can show that what is gained is no more than what was expended in the effort to acquire it.
• What confounds a society is not serious opposition, but the lack of seriousness altogether.
• The sounds of the words you speak may lie on your own lips, but if you do not relinquish them entirely to a listener they never become words, and you say nothing at all.
• The discovery that you are the unrepeatable center of your own vision is simultaneous with the discovery that I am the center of my own.
• The more we are recognized as winners, the more we know ourselves to be losers.
• Illness always has the smell of death about it: Either it may lead to death, or it leads to the death of a person as competitor. The dread of illness is the dread of losing.
• Finite sexuality is a form of theater in which the distance between persons is regularly reduced to zero but in which neither touches the other.
• Just as in finite sexuality where the absence or death of parents has no effect on the child’s determination to prove them wrong, finite players become their own hostile observers in the very act of competing.
• When sufficiently oblivious to their status as audience, the observers of a finite game become so absorbed in its conduct that they lose the sense of distance between themselves and the players.
• Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning.
• Infinite players cannot say how much they have completed in their work or love or quarreling, but only that much remains incomplete in it.
• For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have the time to be free. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time.
• Infinite play remains invisible to the finite observer. Such viewers are looking for closure, for the ways in which players can bring matters to a conclusion and finish whatever remains unfinished.
• “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” (Bacon).
• At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about.
• The unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of language.
• To kill is to impose a silence that remains a silence. It is the reduction of an unpredictable vitality to a predictable mass, the transformation of the remote into the familiar. It is to rid oneself of the need to attend to its otherness.
• Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.
• Infinite speech does not end in the obedient silence of the hearer, but continues by way of the attentive silence of the speaker.
• Finite speech informs another about the world—for the sake of being heard. Infinite speech forms a world about the other—for the sake of listening.
• Were the gods to address us it would not be to bring us to silence through their speech, but to bring us to speech through their silence.
• Instead of placing one body of knowledge against another, storytellers invite us to return from knowledge to thinking, from a bounded way of looking to an horizonal way of seeing.
• To operate a machine one must operate like a machine. Using a machine to do what we cannot do, we find we must do what the machine does.
• True parents do not see to it that their children grow in a particular way, according to a preferred pattern or scripted stages, but they see to it that they grow with their children.
• Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else.
• Waste is the antiproperty that becomes the possession of losers. It is the emblem of the untitled.
• A garden is not something we have, over which we stand as gods. A garden is a poiesis, a receptivity to variety, a vision of differences that leads always to a making of differences.
• Knowledge is what successful explanation has led to; the thinking that sent us forth, however, is pure story.
• We tell myths for their own sake, because they are stories that insist on being stories—and insist on being told. We come to life at their touch.
• Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.
• Indeed, myth is the highest form of our listening to each other, of offering a silence that makes the speech of the other possible.
• Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish.