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)
Note: 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)
Note: 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)
Note: 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)
