Finite and Infinite Games

Whoever plays a finite game plays freely, but it is often the case that finite players will be unaware of this freedom and will think that whatever they do they must do.

No one is forced to be a lawyer, but once you decide to be a lawyer, there are rules you must follow to continue being a lawyer.
Since you play a finite game to win, every move must be in the goal of winning, and so you believe you must make whatever moves are necessary to win.
It may seem that the prizes of winning are indispensible, that life is meaningless without them, but few games are life and death.
The fields of play do not impose themselves on us, all limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

A degree of self-veiling (self-deception) is necessary in all finite games, since we must forget they are optional in order to be motivated to win. This is true with all roles. You step freely into the role of mother, but once in it, you must suspend your freedom to give the role the attention it requires.

Infinite players do not avoid finite games, they enter into them with the appropriate energy and self veiling, but without the seriousness of finite players. They embrace the abstractness, and take them up playfully.

The desire of all finite players is to be a “Master Player,” one who is perfectly skilled at the game and who can play as if they already know the outcome.

Finite players avoid surprise and try to plan around them, infinite players expect to be surprised and continue their play in pursuit of it.

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained, to be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Training regards the past as finished and the future to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.

People who take on special diets and regimens to extend their youth and postpone aging choose to hate their life now in order to have it later.

The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, is in learning to start something we can’t finish.

Infinite players don’t oppose the actions of others, but initiate the actions of their own so that others will respond by initiating actions of their own.

Schools are a form of finite game, to the degree that they give ranked awares to those who win degrees from them. Those awards qualify graduates for competition in still higher games, like pretigious colleges, and then professional schools beyond that, with a continuing sequence of higher games in each profession, and so forth.

The loudspeaker, muting all other voices and therefore all possibility of conversation, is not listened to at all, and therefore loses its voice and becomes mere noise.