💯Playing Infinite Games💯
🔥Welcome to volume #00035!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
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💯Playing Infinite Games 💯
It hit me like a bolt of lighting—the words jumped from the page, penetrating deep into the recess of my mind.
My core rattled as I digested the idea of an infinite game.
I ran into this concept, reading Kevin Kelly's book, What Technology Wants. Chapter 14 is titled Playing the Infinite Game, based on the book by James Carse.
As James Cares** wrote in his book Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Play and Possibilities:
There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are those instrumental activities - from sports to politics to wars - in which the participants obey rules, recognize boundaries and announce winners and losers. The infinite game - there is only one - includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game. A finite player seeks power; the infinite one displays self-sufficient strength. Finite games are theatrical, necessitating an audience; infinite ones are dramatic, involving participants...
Working in investing and being a breathing homosapien, I run into many people playing finite games. Money, homes, and other trophies dominate people’s scoreboards. Everyone has read one too many Warren Buffet biographies. You begin to think life culminates in getting F you money.
We've all seen enough people lose themselves to money and power. Using Carse's lens, money and power become other finite games that we play. We find finite games hidden inside infinite games. When we work with people we enjoy being around, we play infinite games. When we work for money and world domination, we find ourselves on the wrong side of the coin.
We want to play infinite games. Where playing is the goal of the game and we need others to play or we don’t have a game.
The ultimate infinite game is life. Where we play in service of not just ourselves, but of everyone. The infinite game is like culture, we participate in the collective.
The infinite game is the flow state. When we think about things that put us in flow states: dancing, singing, and deep conversations, we find infinite games. We do the thing because we enjoy it and enjoy the people we do it with.
The infinite game is growth, change and adapting. We keep our minds open to new ideas, thoughts and potential. We flow like water. When we do it right, we live to keep the game going and are always becoming. We find joy, love and harmony.
The question we need to ask is, are we playing infinite or finite games? Are we creating possibilities, potential and play? Or are we chasing the false gods of finite games?
**Sadly, James Carse passed away last week. Another mentor who I've never met yet whose imprint goes deep into my soul.
“Infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own life; they live for their own play. But since that play is always with others, it is evident that infinite players both live and die for the continuing life of others.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
📓Articles to Read📓
Oliver Berkman’s Last Column: 8 Things for a Fulling Life
There is always too much to do and that is liberating
Choose enlargement vs. happiness —> we can’t predict what will make us happy, but we can choose things that will help us grow
The capacity to tolerate mild discomfort is a super power
The advice you don’t want to hear is usually the advice you need
The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it
The solution to imposter syndrome it to see that you are one
Selflessness is overrated
Know when to move on
How Oliver Sacks Saved His Own Life by Maria Popova
Oliver found himself with a broken leg, alone on a hiking trip. He needed a way to save his life as death knocked on the door.
While splinting my leg, and keeping myself busy, I had again “forgotten” that death lay in wait. Now, once again, it took the Preacher to remind me. “But,” I cried inside myself, “the instinct of life is strong within me. I want to live — and, with luck, I may still do so. I don’t think it is yet my time to die.” Again the Preacher answered, neutral, non-committal: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time …” This strange, profound emotionless clarity, neither cold, nor warm, neither severe nor indulgent, but utterly, beautifully, terribly truthful, I had encountered in others, especially in patients, who were facing death and did not conceal the truth from themselves; I had marvelled, though in a way uncomprehendingly, at the simple ending of Tolstoy’s “Hadji Murad” — how, when Hadji has been fatally shot, “images without feelings” stream through his mind; but now, for the first time, I encountered this — in myself.
It’s the story of how he fought off the impending death by chanting and digging deep within his being and using the power of music
There came to my aid now melody, rhythm and music. Before crossing the stream, I had muscled myself along — moving by main force, with my very strong arms. Now, so to speak, I was musicked along. I did not contrive this. It happened to me. I fell into a rhythm, guided by a sort of marching or rowing song, sometimes the Volga Boatmen’s Song, sometimes a monotonous chant of my own, accompanied by these words “Ohne Haste, ohne Rast! Ohne Haste, ohne Rast!” (“Without haste, without rest”), with a strong heave on every Haste and Rast. Never had Goethe’s words been put to better use!
The Elevator Opening by Seth Godin
Not a pitch but a question! Questions open people up. Questions help us connect and see what each other is about.
The alternative is the elevator question, not the elevator pitch. To begin a conversation–not about you, but about the person you’re hoping to connect with. If you know who they are and what they want, it’s a lot more likely you can figure out if they’re a good fit for who you are and what you want. And you can take the opportunity to help them find what they need, especially if it’s not from you.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
James Carse and at the Stoa - Playing the Infinite Game during the Crisis
Rethink our future and our lives
Change our relation to the land
Change our relation to race
Look toward a new world —> schooling
Intellectual revolution --> rethinking what we do. Hebrew traditions and Greek traditions - talmud and dialectic -- conversation begins to become community... get conversation that creates community and deeper thinking -- that is the jam at the Stoa
Modern university became about money vs. Plato and searching to see what you could find
Faculty has sold themselves to the moneyed class
Open the university --> break them up into longer term learning centers vs. this four year situation.. shit money from military to
Environmental crisis --> alternative to the automobile and our form of transportation 1903 kitty hawk and internal combustion engine and then 66 years later on the moon
Meta game during the crisis --> how to play the infinite game during the crisis--> talk about our greviences, how we use money, how we play games... pinning our identity on a job --instead being thinkers vs. comfortable positions of today and living in a way that extends your wealth beyond you... how we develop surburs and cities... how we create art and museums were art ends up vs. treating as a place where we create art like a school and jails like schools vs. jails
Discourse that has no end - Aristotle. Like an infinite game. Aristotle was never fixed on anything he kept his mind open 1
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse (Goodreads)
TLDR: Play infinite games, where the point of the game is to continue to play.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
“Only that which can change can continue.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
“What the winner of a finite game wins is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. I cannot entitle myself. Titles are theatrical, requiring an audience to bestow and respect them.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
“The purpose of property is to make our titles visible. Property is emblematic. It recalls to others those areas in which our victories are beyond challenge.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
“Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
“Our first response to hearing a story is the desire to tell it ourselves-the greater the story the greater the desire. We will go to considerable time and inconvenience to arrange a situation for its retelling. It is as though the story is itself seeking the occasion for its recurrence, making use of us as its agents. We do not go out searching for stories for ourselves; it is rather the stories that have found us for themselves.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
“NO ONE CAN PLAY a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
“Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What finite games do you need to stop playing? What infinite games are you playing? How an you turn any of the finite games into infinite games?
Big thanks to James Carse who played the infinite game well. Much gratitude and appreciation for all the wisdom and ideas he shared. We will keep the game going in his honor.
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
If you know anyone that would enjoy The Middle Way, please send it their way.
Namaste,
Christian
