The game within
A game reveals us to ourselves.
Topic: games
Thesis: if life is a game, there is an argument for taking it seriously: committing oneself utterly to a certain path.
This post is the final one in this series on games as they appear in life and in metaphor. It follows “Games in the world” [self-link] which itself follows “What’s in a game?” [self-link]. Now, we look at “seriousness” as it applies to games and what this says about considering human affairs in terms of games.
When I started writing about games, I was motivated by an objection to the central thesis of Carse in Finite and Infinite Games: that all activity is play, that life is divided into finite games and an infinite one, and that the highest good is to live in infinite play, which by its nature brings the same out in others. My objection was simple: that life isn’t a game; it is serious.
Fittingly, Carse has his own definition of seriousness: it is “a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility”. It follows logically that the infinite game cannot be played seriously: the infinite game precludes no possibilities, it brings all boundaries into play. To act with a desired outcome, and, synonymously, to act seriously, is necessarily to play a finite game.
This definition has only a little in common with mine. To me, to play a game seriously is to attach importance to it that persists beyond the game. There are two main ways this happens:
When one is invested in the stakes (e.g., the poker player who bets it all)
When one symbolically connects the elements of the game to the life beyond, e.g.:
the football player who sees his skill in football as an element of who he is in absolute terms
the participant in a fire drill who looks ahead to the real fire for which she is preparing
the one who plays a game with friends, all the while studying the friend’s moves, trying to better know who they are outside of the game.
If seriousness in a game depends on something outside the game, how can one be serious in Carse’s infinite game—that is, in unbounded life? I would answer that unbounded life is exactly where seriousness comes from: the questions that are most serious are those of existence itself, and games are only serious to the extent that they derive seriousness from those questions. Matters of life and death, love and alienation, right and wrong: these are the serious trials for which games may prepare us, or from which they might distract us.
By contrast, Carse’s answer is that one cannot be serious about such matters in the infinite game. To take them seriously is to play the game finitely: that is, to create fixed goals and end conditions. To be serious about love is to make love the object; to be serious about death is to make survival the object; to be serious about right and wrong is to make morality the object.
Is it good to do this?
In Carse’s formulation, it is clear, if not explicitly stated, that one ought to prefer infinite play. Survival, love, morality, freedom from suffering: these might be worthy finite games, and an infinite player may choose to play them. But to take them seriously is to give up infinite play and therefore a part of one’s potentiality.
There is a paradox here. To Carse, infinite play does have an object: it is the continuation of play. This requires one to engage others in play, and to avoid creating rules that make the continuation of play dependent on one’s continued existence.
“Infinite players play best when they become least necessary to the continuation of play. It is for this reason they play as mortals.”
The choice of finite over infinite play is not one Carse presents as a choice of ethics; instead, a commitment to a finite game is simply the choice to internalise a contradiction. It is to live as if there were constraints on you that do not actually apply.
Does an infinite player, when they take the goal of “continue play”, not do exactly the same thing?
In Carse’s system, the difference is that “continue play” is not a terminal goal. To remain alive, however, is a terminal goal, because death concludes the game. But infinite play can also be ended: if it couldn’t, there would be no need for “continue play” to be an explicit goal. Indeed, that would also negate Carse’s definition of evil as “the termination of infinite play in unheard silence”.
Though I find great value in the frame, I believe this point is where I part with Carse. I do not think Carse’s idea of the “infinite game” can adequately explain why an “infinite player” should not be a murderer, a sadist, or a destroyer. The fitting answer to that question hides between two contradictory statements: the first, that infinite play is without boundary; the second, that infinite play must act to continue itself—an implicit boundary against what Carse calls evil.
If the first is true, an infinite player may kill and steal as long as it is done without an internalised contradiction. If the second is true, there must be at least a third type of person—the non-player—who is less inhibited still.
The gap between the non-player and the infinite player is basically the gap of ethics. I could act to increase the amount of play in the world, but why should I? What contradiction am I committing if I just don’t bother—or, indeed, if I follow my own concept of play into lies and cruelty?
Carse might respond that we do not need cajoling: we can see that the world of multiplied play is more conducive to our own play; hence, we should voluntarily adopt rules in our own play that lead toward this world of multiplied play. And because (Carse argues) play is always between people, one’s play never belongs to oneself alone. Infinite play takes the boundaries of ego away, making negative-sum pleasures of violence and theft (if they be pleasures at all) lose their savor.
Perhaps this argument is correct. Perhaps what is best for us is to play unreservedly with others, and through that play to share in an abiding joy and a dissolution of ego. Perhaps, when others go against this high path and engage in evil, there is nothing to be done but to invite them away; and, if they refuse, to continue play in the shadow of the order they impose: “evil… originates in the desire to eliminate evil.” The infinite player cannot entertain the idea that evil will be eradicated, or even mitigated, by forceful acts against it.
If that argument is incorrect, it would be because some things were, after all, worthy of being taken seriously: worthy of committing to. Seriousness in this sense—the seriousness with which one might treat love, death, suffering, or evil—is perhaps the willingness to sacrifice play to the service of a goal: to see play as a means, not an end. It is, in Carse’s sense, equivalent to committing to the finite game of that goal. Thus, if Carse’s argument indeed fails, it is because some finite games are worth committing to, are even imperative to commit to in service of good.
This comes to another, related point of contention in Carse’s system: the distinction between the infinite player whose action springs from infinite play, and the infinite player whose action springs from a finite game they have chosen to participate in. The infinite player can, it seems, play finite games; what they can’t do is take them seriously. But what if the “finite game” in question is the saving of children from fire? What does it mean, and how is it done, to play such a game without seriousness?
Carse, I think, underemphasizes the value of finite games to an infinite player. Some finite games are casual, valuable for learning or fun; others are games of status that the infinite player may play with a lightness of heart that finite players will envy. But other finite games have supervening stakes, stakes of love, death, suffering, and evil, that slice through the game’s veil and cut to the player’s heart.
Carse undervalues the idea that an infinite player may freely choose to commit themselves to a finite game and follow it to its end. They may do this because they recognize in the game a stake of such importance that they cannot let the outcome float: they must commit all of themselves to the game, as a free choice and as the fullest expression of what they are. They do this not as an internalisation of a contradiction, a voluntary forgetting, but in harmony with their deepest concerns and what matters most to them. They choose to take the game seriously.
Outside of Carse’s frame, the expression of this idea is not so different: one may affirm one’s potentiality and formlessness (be an infinite player), and yet still direct all one is, go down even unto death, in service of a set goal. In a way, this is the only aspect of identity one chooses: the final endpoint of all the potentiality that was given at birth.
It also, strangely, meets my definition of a game. When we direct all we are toward a singular goal, we accept a constraint on our actions in exchange for certainty of outcome. The constraint is that we serve; the certainty is that our life is forfeit. All that remains is the fun. How will my chosen goal surprise me? What will the pouring-out of my life make possible that I could not have foreseen?
Perhaps we’ve arrived at the final synthesis of my concept with Carse’s. If the maximisation of infinite play is simply rational, there is no need for such a synthesis; but if it is an ethical choice, a willful leap from ought to is, then it is itself a game. This is true of any ethic: it is a game one chooses, a constraint one imposes on oneself unto death.
Why do we choose this ethic, and not that? Why do we abstain from any ethic, and instead freely drift in play? These are questions we can only answer in the quietness of our own hearts. We are wise to recognize the existence of that great choice, and even to know that it can be reversed in the course of infinite play; but also to know that to make the great choice and unmake it over and over again is little different from making no choice at all.
To me, this is a peaceful resolution of my conflict with Carse over seriousness. To play the infinite game is to take infinite play seriously; to take infinite play seriously is to commit to its game. As in any serious game, one does it to take the measure of oneself: to choose, and, in the fulness of time, to see, what one truly is.