Finite and Infinite Games

"This book is almost like poetry. When I was reading it I was highlighting each paragraph and at some point, I gave up. It’s densely aphoristic — each sentence represents what would have taken another author several pages. It is well worth the effort and completely repays your thinking. The basic idea is that life can be understood as a basic contrast between two kinds of games that we play: games that we play to win, and games that we play to continue playing. This is a crucial distinction. Everything that’s generative, open-ended, curious, and creative about the human condition tends to be an infinite game. What we associate with surface-level beauty but also static, impoverished, finite in its vision, and closed off in time and possibility space is a finite game. The terms aren’t finite in time — rather finite in possibilities. It turns out to be an extraordinarily powerful way to look at the human condition. There’s a rough mapping between finite games and traditional sorts of religion, sports, ideas of what it means to have a good life, and infinite games are about curiosity, exploration. Even though you can be infinite-game oriented in a religious sense—Carse was a Christian theologian—I think they’re fundamentally more scientific in their sensibility because they’re open to all possibilities."