Finite and Infinite Games

I got it for under $20 (I paid with a 20 and got dollars back) at McNally Jackson in downtown Brooklyn. I had been there, to that same store, because Kait's aunt had gotten me a gift card and we went and I got two books by Philip K. Dick. This was during my sci-fi kick, last summer.

I found out it was there by searching “Infinite Games James Case NYC”. Google lead me to McNallyJackson.com which reported that, at 5am this morning, the book was there. I walked over. I had two interactions with the people working there, someone upstairs helped me find it in the self help section and someone downstairs checked me out. I paid cash and the cashier even knocked a couple bucks off, he looked at it and said, this is shelf worn, like a wine expert tasting a wine, this is shelf worn, ill knock dollars off. Nice.

As I read the first 60 pages, it stood out to me when he quoted Lacan, Hegel, Marx, Jesus, Paul, but only for single sentences without really taking the time to expound or incorporate their ideas. I found myself unproductively nitpicking the various things he quoted or cited or interpretations of historical events. I wanted to know why we were assigned this reading. Turning to research, I found writing of its mixed reviews, but also, its openness to interpretation. Its been influential as a text in business and therapy. I kept digging. A strange guy I know said it was about how to start a cult, I was talking to him about it on some roof of an apartment off the J train at late at night and we smoked and his teeth were hyper visible in the dark, “you can never play the game alone” he told me. Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired and the Whole Earth Catalog said it changed his life.

Finally, last night over drinks, I discussed it again with another friend of mine, Alex, who also loved it, speaking highly of the way it framed artistic play as an infinite game. I said “what is the only infinite game?” and he said, “isnt it obviously like, the great mystery?” His mentor, a digital painter named Jefferey had shown him. When I brought up the cult allegations, he denied them, but looking back, He Jefferey and Alex’s partner Camille has been in a cult, “ironically.” I decided okay, if its controversial enough and inspirational enough for all these people I like and admire, and its assigned in this course, I am going to approach interpret Case’s work to wretch out some meaning of my own.

Case is setting out a way of moving through the world which he describes in contrast to something he terms as finite play. Play of this sort is defined by limits in space and time and enforced by universal consent, the intended outcome being the creation of dramatic scenarios which follow the narrative structure of winners and losers. Society then is built on these narratives with broad reaching implications broadly reinforce its structure.

He criticizes the recreation of this structure in the psyche, a process he refers to as veiling. In short, the structure of finite games prefigures rolls in which its participants must fill and in this process they are alienated from the abstract nature of their reality.

Infinite play then is posited as a liberality state where a participant seeks to outmaneuver the limits of time and space while undermining the essential drama of finite play through a re-embodiment of their veil as a veil, through an interpretation of such as such. Mode of understanding is fostered which leans on the absurdity of finite play and seeks to transcend its ideological mode.

Case then sets into the concept of the Master Player, a being driven by statistic predictability, by foreclosure, by the creation of limits, by the past, by constant reference to past forms, by the regurgitation of past forms as a creation of limits which forecloses the future from the endless possibilities which case believes are inherent.

So here then, do society and culture butt heads, Here then are master players and infinite players set to opposition. Society is this great object of consent, repetition, norms, of boundaries. Culture is a sort of mystic object which resists the grasp, a transcendental ideal suited towards the types of engagement infinite players desire.

Infinite players are driven towards the total opposite. Infinite players exist in the realm of creation through reinterpretation, through continuation. Culture, case writes, is essentially infinite. It exists between people throughout time without a goal, without winners, as the valuation of each of its part as a mode of the whole.

I guess, of course I want to be an infinite player, duhhhhhh. It seems like the obvious position from which to move through life. This is where the book gets its reputation as a self help classic, Just be infinite bro, trust me! Realistically, I find this troubling as Case nears on the Stoic ideal of freedom in slavery. If the slave simply cast their mind into embodying their roll as a performance, not as dragged behind the oxcart but skipping along happily, taking in the beauty of each moment, they are liberated! This idea is very easy to embrace while not in slavery, because it offloads responsibility for an individuals condition onto the individual. It sort of justifies the whole thing. Case here fails to make real suggestions towards any sort of mass liberation other than, just imagine it.

It stood out to me in the lecture, the mention of an original idea vs an original thought. This is interesting to me because there is this struggle sometimes to make “something new,” which is wholly unproductive in the activity of making new things. As a thing gets made, it shifts and move around the person or people that made it, taking them in.

I also had this moment which felt very infinite games where I have to confirm with NYU my USA Citizenship, the best possible document towards this end being my passport. What a contradiction! The very identification I procured from the state in order to travel is in itself the most solid ground from which to prove my belonging to the society its existence helps me to escape!