FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES: A VISION OF LIFE AS PLAY AND POSSIBILITIES - JAMES P. CARSE

I’m not sure where I came across this book. Looking into it now, it does seem to have something of a cult following, so I’m a bit surprised I didn’t hear about it sooner. I definitely think it would have hit harder in college, it’s a very college-professor-y book. It seems like a book written by the Dead Poets Society guy. Carse is a life-long professor at NYU, the back of the book tells us he won that university’s Great Teacher Award, and you can certainly tell. This book is as if your humanities professor wrote one of those books that you get at graduation. It’s life advice and philosophical musings on the largest scale and it’s written in a very aphoristic style so we get sentences like “no amount of veiling can conceal the veiling itself” or, “Finite Players play within boundaries, Infinite Players play with boundaries.” The book seems to include all of Carse’s loftiest thoughts, we get digressions about gardens and sex and machines, but the premise of the book is that most (all?) human interactions can be thought of as a game. Actually, Carse would say that there are 2 types of games, the titular Finite and Infinite games. Finite games are games one can win, like sports or career advancement, while the Infinite game (the last aphorism tells us that there is only one Infinite Game) is played in order to keep playing. So it is less a game in a traditional sense, it’s rather an outlook on life that privileges play and discovery and openness. In that sense, the book is like Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The theory of social life as a game or series of games also reminded me of Erving Goffman, a sociologist I had to read in college, who uses theater as his metaphor for human society. Theater or games, the conclusions are pretty similar. The shortcoming in the book, I also lay at the feet of Cares’ job. He goes to great length to say that it only counts as a game if you can choose to play. This isn’t how the world outside of a University works. People are forced to play the Finite games of career advancement and wealth acclamation whether they want to or not. Most of us don’t get to work at our dream jobs and most jobs are much more precarious and difficult than university religions professors. Capitalism itself could be considered an Infinite Game in the sense that it only seeks to continue on. Carse tries hard to steer away from anything practical (another professorial tell) but he does, weirdly, take some shots at the USSR. He also quotes Marx so who knows. He’s particularly wrong and confused about crime and sex. As far as crime goes, he says, “But putting a coin in the pocket of the Artful Dodger will hardly convince him that he is no longer a legitimate contender for the coin in mine. The more effective policy for a society is to find ways of persuading its thieves to abandon their roles as competitors for property for the sake of becoming audience (sic) to the theater of wealth.” This is both very wrong and very telling. I like the idea that a college professor thinks first of The Artful Dodger when they consider a criminal and then thinks that people steal and rob because they haven’t been persuaded to appreciate society and wealth as theater. This is the sort of nonsense you can only write about if your life’s experiences are limited to teaching at an elite university. Likewise, regarding sex he writes, “Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the defeated opponent.” He actually puts that sentence in italics to emphasize it. That’s some high-level straight guy nonsense.  The concept of life as games and games as finite or infinite is a good one. I like the term Infinite Player, which he capitalized, as well. To me it suggests an unreleased Outkast song. It’s short and pithy and constantly made me think of the song, “Look at Your Game, Girl.” Some of the aphorisms are strong but overall I got more out of thinking about the concepts of a Finite or Infinite game on my own. I’d recommend this book to teens. 1 Infinite Game