Finite and Infinite Games
Metadata
- Author: James Carse
- ASIN: B006W45M38
- ISBN: 1476731713
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B006W45M38
- Kindle link
Highlights
While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined. The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time. For this reason it is impossible to say how long an infinite game has been played, or even can be played, — location: 80
It is also impossible to say in which world an infinite game is played, though there can be any number of worlds within an infinite game. — location: 84
Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game. — location: 85
Really? Cricket, cycling - both contain eternal battles.
On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself. — location: 179
It is a principal function of society to validate titles and to assure their perpetual recognition. — location: 239
Immortality is serious and in no way playful. — location: 288
One’s actions can have no consequence beyond themselves. There are no surprises in the afterworld. — location: 288
but we do not play against reality; we play according to reality. — location: 368
Nice to generate a counterfactual
Infinite players look forward, not to a victory in which the past will achieve a timeless meaning, but toward ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpretation. — location: 373
Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence. — location: 387
This observation places the book in a theological context
This challenge is commonly misunderstood as the need to find room for playfulness within finite games. — location: 425
The executive’s vacation, like the football team’s time out, comes to be a device for refreshing the contestant for a higher level of competition. — location: 428
Therefore, for infinite players, politics is a form of theatricality. It is the performance of roles before an audience, according to a script whose last scene is known in advance by the performers. The United States did not, for example, lose its war in Southeast Asia so much as lose its audience for a — location: 452
This means that a peculiar burden falls on property owners. Since the laws protecting their property will be effective only when they are able to persuade others to obey those laws, they must introduce a theatricality into their ownership sufficiently engaging that their opponents will live by its script. — location: 557
The rich are regularly subject to theft, to taxation, to the expectation that their wealth be shared, as though what they have is not true compensation and therefore not completely theirs. — location: 569
Conflict with other societies is, in fact, an effective way for a society to restrain its own culture. Powerful societies do not silence their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai. — location: 627
Generals can more easily suffer attempts to oppose their warfare with poiesis than attempts to show warfare as poiesis. — location: 639
Therefore, poets do not “fit” into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their “places” seriously. They openly see its roles as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed, and its metaphysics ideological. — location: 658
Because patriotism is the desire to contain all other finite games within itself—that is, to embrace all horizons within a single boundary—it is inherently evil. — location: 672
A horizon is a phenomenon of vision. One cannot look at the horizon; it is simply the point beyond which we cannot see. — location: 674
The Renaissance, like all genuine cultural phenomena, was not an effort to promote one or another vision. It was an effort to find visions that promised still more vision. — location: 682
put its boundaries back into play. — location: 733
In the last decade or so the fundamentals of the conflict have been illuminated by the paradigm of settler colonialism – — location: 179
There is no sign that this conflict is about to end, so understanding it matters more than ever. But that also means that both peoples should heed the wise words of the Palestinian-Israeli writer Odeh Bisharat: ‘If there is no shared narrative for the past, then at least let us write one for the future.’ — location: 382
His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. — location: 442
With them, as the writer Arthur Koestler was to quip memorably – neatly encapsulating the attendant and continuing controversy – ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’. — location: 447