Finite and Infinite Games

Another book that caused a breakthrough and fundamental conceptual shift. I’ve previously heard of the delineation between finite and infinite games verbally from a few Helena members but had not read the “source text” of where the concept derives.

This 1986 book by James P. Carse is truly special; it hits on a deeply intuitive idea that most everything we do in our lives, if we don’t catch ourselves doing it, falls within a closed system-like, finite game, while true creativity and progress often comes from engaging in infinite games, in which perpetuating the game itself supersedes your own life as a player. In fact, to begin a game, or a project, that you cannot “finish” is the ultimate pursuit, an idea that most of us shudder to imagine but innately know is true.

My favorite idea from this book is the difference between being “political” and having a “politics.” One is an “infinite” engagement in the world to enlarge what is possible beyond oneself and for a collective and expanding whole, whereas the other is to operate within a self-selected, closed-loop and self-aggrandizing game that can be “won.”