About halfway though the first chapter of "Finite and Infinite Games," I got a sinking feeling that was quickly confirmed. Unfortunately, Carse isn't really writing about game-games, he's writing about society.
A finite game is a game you play with the goal of winning; an infinite game is a game you play with the goal of continuing to play. So anything where people compete with each other, and/or anything that comes to a definite end is a finite game. Going to school and earning a degree, getting a job in a particular profession, winning an election, successfully seducing someone - all these are finite games. Society is a finite game that contains other finite games. Human culture, writ large, is the one and only infinite game, that contains everything else within it.
Of course, where there are games, there are players, and this is where Carse displays his big 'man thinking about society' energy. This book was published in 1987, but feels like it should have been written 20-40 years earlier, when this kind of social theory was more fashionable.
The book is full of declarations like 'finite players do THIS; infinite players do THAT,' that sound profound, I guess, but also don't really sound like real people. Finite players take their games seriously. Infinite player are some sort of enlightened individuals who somehow float above all the petty squabbles beneath them. They sometimes join in finite games, but always with a wink and a nudge, because they know it's just a game.
It's a short book, and it's written in short declarative sentences. You could tweet this book, and it would seem normal there, just another steady stream of hot takes on Twitter. Carse goes in for brevity and wordplay in a way that's sort of poetic, but also isn't really the best way to communicate. Nothing needs to be justified, nothing qualified; it's all just true because he says it like it is.
I find this book interesting and frustrating because there are glimpses of truth in what he's saying, but he usually states them in such a way that there simply must be a better source for the same insight.
I also find his morality troubling. Every action is judged based on its relation to games and their rules. He's fortunately able to say that (successful?) genocide is bad because it erases a portion of human culture (but not because it hurts or kills people?) But slavery, he claims, is just another finite game, which often have rules that let players torture each other, and that's not immoral, because everyone freely chooses to play. Sure, maybe you 'chose' because the alternative was being murdered, but that was still your choice, player! The cooperation of the oppressed is real, and understanding it is necessary to learning how oppression works, but Carse's description of it is facile, simplified to the point of absurdity and falsehood.
I don't recommend this one. If you're really interested in applying his ideas to actual games, just read part 1 and stop there. If you're interested in a good 'man thinks about society' book, read Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life or Anthony Giddens's Modernity and Self-Identity instead. Read something where the author seems to understand what people are actually like, where his commitments to concise writing, binary opposition, and deducing everything from the first principles of a metaphor don't totally overwhelm his commitment to saying something truthful.
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