Thread by @gxdarz

Thread on some of my favourite quotes and passages from James P. Carse "Finite and Infinite Games"

"A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play"

"There is no finite game unless the players freely choose to play it. No one can play who is forced to play. It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play."

"All finite games carry temporal, spatial and numerical boundaries"

"It is the case that we cannot play if we must play, but it is also the case that we cannot play alone"

"To have such boundaries means that the date, place and membership of each finite game are externally defined"

"The world is elaborately marked by boundaries of contest, its people finely classified as to their eligibilities"

"Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time."

"Indeed, the only purpose of the infinite game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play"

"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."

"There is no duration to an infinite game since duration can be measured only externally to that which endures"

"Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game"

"To agree on internal limitations is to establish rules of play. It is by knowing what the rules are that we know what the game is"

"In the narrowest sense rules are not laws; they do not mandate specific behavior, but only restrain the freedom of the players. 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."

"The rules of a finite game may not change in the course of play. The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play"

"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."

"The rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won, the rules of an infinite game are the contractual terms by which the players agree on continue playing"

"In infinite games we observe rules as a way of continuing discourse with each other; in finite games we observe rules as a way of bringing the speech of anther to an end."

"The rules, or grammar, of a living language are always evolving to guarantee the meaningfulness of discourse, while the rules of debate must remain constant"

"Infinite players use the rules to regulate the way they will take the boundaries or limits being forced against their play into the game itself."

"The task is to design rules that will allow the players to continue the game by taking these limits into play — even when death is one of the limits. It is in this sense that the game is infinite"

"Since limits are taken into play, the play itself cannot be limited.
Finite players play within boundaries; Infinite players play with boundaries."

"In finite games, whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game."

"In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid with terrible suffering or death"

"Even in this last, extreme case we must still concede that whoever takes up the commanded role does so by choice. Even the weakest subject must agree to be oppressed."

"Unlike infinite play, finite play is limited from without; like infinite play, those limitations must be chosen by the player since no one is under any necessity to play a finite game. Therefore, all the limitations of finite play are self-limitations."

"As finite players we somehow veil this freedom to step off the field of play at any time, from ourselves"

"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"

"From the outset of finite play, players must see themselves as roles to take themselves seriously. In the proper exercise of such roles we positively believe we are the persons those roles portray. Even more: we make those roles believable to others."

"To some extent the actress does not see herself performing but feels her performed emotion and actually says her memorized lines — and yet the very fact that they are performed means that the words and feelings belong to the role and not to the actress"

"She never forgets that she has veiled herself sufficiently to play this role. But then, neither do we as audience forget we are audience. Even though we may see this woman as Ophelia, we are never in doubt that she is not"

"We are in complicity with her veil. We allow her performed emotions to affect us, perhaps powerfully. But we never forget that we allow them to do so."

"The issue here is not whether self-veiling can be avoided. Indeed, no finite play is possible without it. 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."

"At which point do we confront the fact that we live one life and perform another, or others, attempting to make our momentary forgetting true and lasting forgetting?"

"What makes this an issue is not the morality of masking ourselves. It is rather that self-veiling is a contradictory act — a free suspension of our freedom."

"I cannot forget that I have forgotten. I may have used the veil so succesfully that I have made my performance believable to myself. But credibility will never suffice to undo the contradictoriness of self-veiling"

"To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.
If no amount of veiling can conceal the veiling itself, the issue is how far we will go in our seriousness at self-veiling, and how far we will go to have others act in complicity with us."