From the Vault: Finite and Infinite Games

How do you play the game of life? Do you play it as a finite game or an infinite one? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the 1986 philosophy book “Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility” by American scholar James P. Carse. (Originally published May 31, 2018)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And of course
it's another Vault day. We're going into the vault, this
time to explore the episode we did uh a little
over a year ago. Um mayen about finite and infinite games.
It was about this interesting little philosophy book that I
read that that had this great central metaphor that I

(00:27):
still keep thinking about all the time. That's a finite game.
That's an infinite game. Yeah, yeah, based on the word
bout of American scholar James P. Cars And indeed, this
is one of those things that it's it's kind of
a simple concept, but but once you get in your head, yeah,
you end up applying it to just about everything in
your life. Yeah. You kind of see elements of it
all over the place, and it's just really helpful and

(00:49):
I don't know, helpful and categorizing the whole world like
you should be doing. All right, well, let's do it.
Let's jump in and play the game. Welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind from how stuff works dot com. Hey,

(01:10):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. You know, Joe. I
bring up the books of Ian M. Banks a lot
on the podcast um and and generally because you know,
these are really good books that that tie on a
number of different uh uh, sci fi, psychological, you name
it topics. They're they're they're rich with stuff to blow

(01:31):
your mind content. Can I confess that I've considered reading
them but have actually been hesitant because I want you
to be able to keep explaining m banks books to
me with me actually not knowing them in advance. Okay, well,
then hopefully that's what's gonna happen right now. Because as
we were researching the topic for today, I was reminded
of his nine book, The Player of Games. Okay, so

(01:55):
this is a book that concerns the culture, which is
of course an instellar, interstellar post scarce de civilization in
which AI minds do all or most of the heavy
lifting and humans live in a kind of uh uh,
you know, utopian anarchy. Okay, So this is not the
book that Tron was based on, No, no, but but
it is a wonderful treatment of games. Now, the people

(02:17):
in the culture, they don't really have to do much
beyond just enjoy life, and our protagonist in this particular book,
GGA does this by playing in and excelling at a
multitude of card and board games and other related games. Yeah.
So this is often the positive vision of the sort
of post singularity future, right most A lot of the

(02:37):
visions that you get in science fiction are very negative,
I guess because negative plots are more interesting to play with.
But so this says, basically, you know, once humans aren't
really needed to create the wealth that sustained society anymore,
you can actually just do what you want. You can
be creative, you can have fun, and that's what life is. Yeah,
and uh or am I off base? Is that not

(02:58):
how it is? Um? In culture? It is, but with
lots of dark caveats. Okay. Now, some members of the
culture choose to involve themselves in matters of greater importance,
such as service in Special Circumstances, which deals with pending
and emergent threats to the culture uh and general interplanetary stability.

(03:18):
And they recruit Gurga and send him to the Empire
of Azad uh to to master and play the game
of Azad which is a complex game that consists of
various sub games that serves as the basic system of
all political and social order in the Empire of Azad. Okay,
So what is is it? What like a big board

(03:38):
game or something. It's it's like a board game built
out of board games. It's a kind of like imagine
a board game that is just the center of all culture.
Like I guess it's kind of hard to to to
pick out something in like imagine if the Bible in
say medieval Europe, if the Bible were a board game instead,
if it was like Settlers of Ghatan instead of the

(04:00):
Bible at the center of this, uh, this sort of
Catholic world. And on top of that it was not
just settlers of good time, but are ridiculously complex settlers.
You have to devote your entire life to playing it.
So a labyrinthine game that contains pronouncements of authority that
is intermingled with government. Yes, And so they want they

(04:21):
apparently need to send him there because they want to
disrupt as odd and topple its current systems and bring
about something more in line with culture values. Uh. And
and also because the the the the empire of his
they also are a very brutal people given to spectacles
of fatal violence. So it's a great book and one
I always recommend as a starting point for the culture

(04:42):
and banks in general. But instant interesting how we see
the mixture of different games here. So we see the
contained and restricted board and card games within Gurga's life,
so those are like normal games. We see the open
ended game of Gurga's life, in which he essentially tries
to fill a lengthy trans human lifetime with pleasure and meaning.

(05:04):
We have the complex but ultimately contained game of as Odd.
We have the intricate game of special circumstances, various plots
and operations. We have the greater game that's played by
these minds that are operating, you know, on scales beyond
anything that human intelligence can can really comprehend. And then
we have the looming possibility of the game of interplanetary war. Yeah,

(05:27):
it's interesting the way games so readily serve as metaphors
for almost any kind of human endeavor or for life itself. Right,
a game, in its more narrow definition tends to be
a thing with rules that is done for recreation or
for fun. And yet you can clearly see how that
concept of a game gets mapped onto essentially anything humans

(05:50):
do whatever you're doing right now, in one way or another,
can be thought of as a game. I'm just gonna
read one quick quote from from the player of Games
just to give everyone taste. This is the story of
a man who went far away for a long time
just to play a game. The man is a game
player called Gurga. The story starts with a battle that
is not a battle and ends with a game that

(06:12):
is not a game. And you have to read the
book to get the rest. But but I, like I said,
I couldn't help but think of this book in uh
in comparison to the topic we're discussing today. Right, So
today we're gonna be talking about an interesting little philosophy
book that I read within the past couple of weeks
by an American scholar named James P. Cars, who for

(06:36):
more than thirty years was a professor of the history
and literature of religion at New York University. Now, this
book isn't directly about religion, though it addresses religion and
some of its parts. It's it's a short little philosophy book,
and it's called Finite and Infinite Games, a vision of
Life as Play and Possibility. And it was published in

(06:56):
ninety six from Free Press. Now, over years, I've read
several writers and thinkers who I admire in one way
or another mentioned this book as influential on their thinking,
and I recently decided to check it out. And ever
since I started reading it, I have been captivated by
the idea at the core of this book. And really,
the idea is just a very interesting metaphor. It's not

(07:19):
a scientific book. It's not a book really I think
that is necessary for explaining anything important about how things are.
But it's a very interesting metaphorical framework for how to
look at the behavior of beings like you and me
using this metaphor of play right. And I also want
to drive home that it's it's not it's it's rather

(07:39):
different from a lot of the books we've discussed on
the show because it's not filled with a bunch of,
you know, descriptions of various histories or mythologies or other
philosophical topics. It's a very it's a very easily consumed book. Um.
I don't want to criticism I don't I don't want
to relegate it to the bathroom. But this is a
book that you could keep in the bathroom. Him it's

(08:01):
very much a casual read. Yeah, and you you can
pick up any part of it, any page of it.
Usually there will be a short section that you could
read that that will, you know, make you think about things,
that's kind of interesting and provocative. If it were kept
by a toilet, I would call it a butt number.
You know the button numbers button number books. No, I've
never heard this terminol. They're the ones that if you

(08:22):
keep them by the toilet, they're going to keep people
on the toilet a little bit too long because you'd
get interested interesting. I've I've never heard them described as such.
I might have made that up. I'm not sure. I
can't remember if I got that from the culture or
from my own brain. Well, now it's out there so
everyone can use it. Okay, So what is this this
core idea that James P. Cars talks about in his book.

(08:44):
The main idea is that when we do things, we're playing,
and the things we do are games, and Cars's main
move in this book is to separate the games we
play into two major types, finite and infinite. It's there
in the title Finite and Infinite Games and a quote
from the opening of the book. Quote there are at
least two kinds of games. One could be called finite,

(09:07):
the other infinite. A finite game is played for the
purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of
continuing the play. Okay, In fact, I could say that
you could skip reading the rest of the book and
just contemplate that sentence and get a lot of the
same value. For instance, one example that probably comes to
a lot of people's minds is that it's perhaps the

(09:28):
difference between playing tennis and keeping score and just batting
the ball around, right, I mean that could potentially be
a good example where one is played with a finite
definite outcome in mind, where the other is played to
see how long play can go on. Well, let's get
into a little bit. Let's flesh out the core concept here.
Let's look at a few of the characteristics that Car
slays out that that he thinks go along with the

(09:51):
difference between a finite game and an infinite game. So
what are the characteristics of finite and infinite games in
Cars's mind? Alright, So a finite game must come to
an end when a player or a group of players win. Now,
what constitutes winning might be spelled out in some set
of external rules or or you know, it depend on
the judgment of a referee. But ultimately the only thing

(10:12):
that can decide whether the game has been one is
the players agreeing that, hey, the game is over in
this person one or this team one. Right. So if
the players don't agree the game is over in practice,
it is in fact not over right, It ain't over yet.
And if the players agree the game is over in practice,
they can't continue playing sort of by definition, maybe they

(10:32):
could continue some activity, but they're no longer really playing
the same game they were if they all think it's over, right.
And then also there are temporal boundaries in place here.
Time matters. Do you know when your game began? Do
you care? If your answers are yes, then your game
is finite. And then, of course the game again is
over is if someone wins, right. And by contrast, the

(10:54):
purpose of an infinite game is not to win, but
to prevent the game from coming to an end. And
thus there really is no decisive way to win, except
maybe by indefinitely continuing play. Yes, and he says quote,
there is no finite game unless the players freely choose
to play it. No one can play who is forced

(11:15):
to play now. One of the things he talks about
with a finite game is that finite games need to
have players agree on the rules before play starts. Right.
If you've not agreed on the rules and advance, or
players try to change the rules after play begins, the
legitimacy of the outcome could be in danger. Players might
not accept the outcome, they might not accept the winner.

(11:37):
But by contrast, infinite games, by necessity, tend to evolve
over time. Sometimes you change the rules, the teams, the players,
the play space so that play can continue and can
get around obstacles that would impede play. Carstwrights quote, finite
players play within boundaries. Infinite players play with boundaries, and

(11:59):
finite game has encourage players to create predictability and discourage surprise.
So in an infinite game, usually the very purpose is
to be surprised, right, Because if you're playing a finite game,
you want to win. What gets in the way of
you winning you not expecting what comes next, right, Right,
You want to control the conditions of the game when
you're trying to win. When you're playing an infinite game,

(12:21):
where the purpose is not to bring it to an end,
but to let it go on forever. You always want
there there to be the potential for variation, right, Yeah,
it's I think about role playing games a lot with this,
Like playing Dungeons and Dragons. It's not a situation where
the players are necessarily playing against each other, though there
are games that play out like that. It should not, be,
in my opinion, a situation where the dungeon master is

(12:42):
playing against the players. Uh. Instead, it should be, in
my mind, uh, a collective storytelling effort by the players
and the dungeon master. And therefore, it's not about which
which a choice or which which role of the dice
is going to hurt the other side the most. It's
about what is going to create the most engaging situation.

(13:03):
I want to come back to your D and D
example in a bit, because that goes along with something
I think I've observed when when I've been thinking about
finite and infinite games. One more characteristic I want to
mention before I move on to an example is that
Car says finite games tend to engender and attitude of seriousness, focus,
and single mindedness within the players. Meanwhile, infinite games tend

(13:25):
to encourage a spirit of playfulness, exploration and curiosity quote.
Whoever must play cannot play well. That, of course, he says,
applies to both types of games. Right. You might not
like the fact that you say, have to earn money
to make a living or have to eat in order
to survive, but you must agree to play that game
or you're not playing right now. Before we consider dungeons

(13:47):
and dragons or dungeons and dragons at gunpoint any further,
we should probably turn to a more you know, classically
established game as a model for this for this subject,
sure well to understand the simplest version of the difference
I think between a finite game in an infinite game,
consider a game of chess versus the game of chess. So,

(14:10):
in a single game of chess, a player's goal is
to defeat her opponent and become the winner. The game
of chess doesn't have a set number of players who
play against each other and want to win over another.
It's it's an abstract space that allows individual games to
keep on happening. Within it, it goes on forever. It
could have infinitely many finite games within it. You can

(14:32):
win a game of chess, but you can't win the
game of chess. It exists, so people can keep playing it. Now.
I just want to throw in a couple of quick
facts from a two thousand ten Popular Science article by
Natalie Wolchover in which she quotes computer scientists Jonathan Schaefer,
who points out that quote, the possible number of chess

(14:52):
games is so huge that no one will ever invest
the effort to calculate the exact number. Uh. And in
the article she also points out there, while there are
only so many opening moves a player can make, the
possibilities just quickly spiral out of control with each subsequent move.
So in a sense, there are almost an infinite I guess,
maybe not an actually infinite, but but a seemingly infinite

(15:16):
number of chess games that could be played. But even
that doesn't in fact matter, because you could say that
tic tac toe, which has a much smaller number of
possible games, is in a sense an infinite game. If
you're talking about the game of tic tac toes, you
can't win the game. You could win a game that
you play against somebody, right. In fact, there's there's no
excuse not to win a game if you play first. Now,

(15:39):
wait a minute, I can't remember what is that solved
in the first player? Can always win at tic tac toe?
Or can you always force a draw? I don't know.
Playing against a child really kind of screws things up
for me because I've had to throw games of Tic
tac toe, uh, to the point where I don't remember
how it really works because I'm trying to win the

(15:59):
infinite game of parenting. But that's a that's a bad strategy.
You need to teach him the pain of losing. Well, yeah,
but I want to do that with games that are fun. Well,
maybe we should take a quick break and then when
we come back, we can talk a little bit more
about why we think this idea of finite and infinite
games is interesting and some more ways that can be applied. Alright,

(16:24):
we're back, so let's let's get do some some more
examples here. What are some examples of finite games? Okay, well,
we're totally surrounded by finite games, and we're just you know,
they make up the bulk of everyday endeavor. Right, competition
among co workers for a single available promotion, or among
job candidates for a single position at a company, that's

(16:44):
a finite game, right, You there's an end that you
want to win. You want to be the person who
gets that position, and you're competing for it. Another example
would be an actual game, like a game of football.
You're you're trying to win the game. Okay, yeah, and
it has a it has a time even though time
See I don't know much about football, but it does
seem like time works differently in football because the the

(17:06):
time on the ticker there does not equal the the
exact uh length of the game. Well, whatever the length is,
there are boundaries. I mean, you could have a game
that doesn't have a necessary time limit on it, but
it starts at a certain time and you know how
the ending is decided, right. I'm not sure what happens
in football if you don't have a winner, Like if

(17:27):
you're just tied and you just keep going and you
can't win, do they do they just call it a draw?
Or do they play until somebody wins? Oh? Yeah, because
you have other games where you have sudden death over
times or a draw is is permittable. I I am
not sure we're showing how cool we are here knowing
all about football. Well that our football fan listeners will
have to chime in. Okay, So Another clearly finite game

(17:48):
would be a chase, an individual chase between predator and prey.
Right there, there is somehow going to be a decisive conclusion.
Either the predator might get a meal and the prey
will die, or maybe the prey will escape and survive
and the predator will lose and go hungry, and then
there can be all kinds of sort of ranked intermediate outcomes,
but there will be an outcome, right yeah. And that's
the one thing that's important keep in mind with the

(18:10):
infinite versus finite games is you can kind of nitpick
a lot of these. You can say, well, well, you
know what if they both did the predator and pray
both die, that's finite. Yeah, I mean it's it's still finite.
But yeah, you have to the mind can help. But
I said, I think pick at the distinction of finite
and infinite, and you can kind of go down a
rabbit hole with any of these examples. In addition to

(18:32):
predator and pray competition, of course, the other great competition
of the natural world is mating. Oh sure, this is
a finite game though, mating, and I would say mating
and procreation itself is an infinite game, right, it doesn't
have a finite outcome. Reproduction is something that seems to
be designed to go on as long as it can
and just keep the game going. But say in a

(18:54):
more finite contest between two stags fighting for the right
to mate with a female in the area, there is
a winner and a loser. The winner gets to make
there's no way to win the game of reproduction. On
the other hand, it's played so that play may continue
indefinitely down the generations. Yeah, but but but in terms
of the actual encounter, Uh, it's gonna end. Attenborough is

(19:15):
going to tell you when it's over, and then you're
gonna go to the next segment on the Nature documentary. Now,
you actually pointed out something interesting about how it can
get weird when you you think a game is one type,
but then you can nitpick about ways that it could
be the other type. One thing is that wars very
often get presented as a finite game. Right there, there

(19:37):
is a goal to achieve, we will win over the enemy.
But it's interesting to consider the idea of war as
an infinite game, as imagined by George Orwell in nine
four You know, in Orwell's Dystopia in that novel, war
is not fought for the purpose of ultimately winning over
the enemy and achieving some finite goal. The purpose of war,
you know, it's not like to control territory for the

(19:59):
long haul. In the end, it is to be continuously
at war, to fight continuously for political purposes. And in
this circumstance, the purpose of war is not to win,
but to be at war. And in the sense, this
makes war an infinite game. Of course, you know, many
critics have argued that there are elements of this in
the rationale for some real wars taking place in the

(20:20):
real world. Now I've seen this example brought up before,
specifically by motivational speaker A Simon Cynic who used the
Vietnam War as an example of of an infinite war.
But but I kind of want to go with a different,
broader example, just to to lay it out. So in
any story that pits besiegers against the besieged, and you know,

(20:42):
in terms of like an army that is besieging a fortress, uh,
there are two games at play, So you can argue
that the besiegers and attackers are playing a finite game.
They are playing to take the castle. Their game ends
when they actually conquer Troy or Gondor or gall got Or.
But the besiegers that offenders, their game is more infinite.

(21:03):
Their game is survival. So they don't have to conquer
their enemy. They just have to avoid being conquered. They
have to survive. Well, yeah, that's interesting, because Cars ultimately says,
though I think this sort of undercut some of the
interesting parts of his metaphor. He says in the very
last chapter of his book, there is but one infinite game.
So therefore he's implying that life itself really is the

(21:26):
infinite game, and the things within it are the finite games.
But I think it's useful to imagine the other types
of infinite games there can be within life. But of course,
the way you point out there, there's sort of like
levels that a finite game can be close or distant
from the infinite game. The attackers on a city are
playing a finite game to achieve a finite goal, and

(21:48):
for the people within the city, what's at risk in
the finite game of defending the city is ultimately the
viability of the infinite game of getting to continue living. Yeah,
if you if you really sort of picking a part
enough you can you can bring a lot of these
games back to the infinite game of survival. So we
discussed the game of war, But how about one of
the other great games that is continually covered by the media,

(22:10):
the game of politics. Well, sure, I mean there are
ways of thinking about politics as a finite game or
as an infinite game. There are lots of obviously finite
games within politics, like an election, you know, as a
clear outcome there's a winner and you're trying to win,
or an attempt to pass a bill. Uh, these have
finite win loss outcomes. But the entire political structure itself

(22:31):
should be designed primarily to allow the continued existence and
evolution of a civil society. You've got people and they
want to live, and the goal of of a politics
should be allow them to allow them to live and
allow play to continue. But sometimes, of course, you get
political actors who seem to lose sight of the infinite
nature of the game, right, and that they have a

(22:51):
kind of more finite total orientation towards politics. It's almost
like you can win the game of politics. And I
guarantee no matter where you are listening to this episode,
you're gonna be able to find examples of that in
your own political sphere. Yeah, I mean when we see it,
that's like one of the most troubling and distasteful things
we tend to see in politics, right when you see

(23:14):
somebody who's who doesn't seem to have a an infinite
view of what the future of their political system could be,
but almost like they want to conquer it as a
single act with an end goal. Yeah. Though I will
say on the buffet of distasteful things about politics that
that does cover a number of the different steamer trays
that are available. Yeah, that's the whole seafood section. Yeah.

(23:37):
On the other hand, it's you think about the infinite game,
and you think about how you interact with the infinite game,
and a lot of that does come down to breaking
it up into finite games, right, So, and even with politics,
it can you can see where it can happen where
it's a situation of like, well, yes, I want ultimately
I want this, but in the short term, I need
to get this bill passed and may and getting that

(23:57):
bill passed is a part of the infinite game, but
it is a finite battle. And yeah, I guess it
comes down to you lose sight of the infinite in
pursuing the finite. This is where I want to come
back to your D and D example. So I think
this is true about what I'm about to say. I
think it's true about politics, but I think it's true
about all kinds of things, and I'm sure it's going
to be somewhat relevant to your D n D example.

(24:20):
One of the things I keep thinking about ever since
I started reading cars is how so much of our
frustration with other people in life comes as a result
of our belief that other people are not playing a
game under its correct finite versus infinite distinction. And so
when you're trying to play a finite game and other

(24:41):
people engaged in the same activity or treating it as
an infinite game, it can feel very annoying and tedious
and pointless and frustrating. Right You're like, I'm trying to
get this done, I'm trying to get this outcome, and
other people around me are just playing around as if
they don't want to get to the point. And then,
on the other hand, when you're trying to play an

(25:02):
infinite game and other players around you are treating it
like a finite game, it can feel cruel and hopeless
and depressing and unfair. And there are all kinds of
games that are gonna have mixed players within them, right,
some people treating a certain type of play space is
finite and other people treating it as more infinite. And
I bet you get that kind of conflict within a

(25:23):
D and D game, Right, You've got some people there
who would be happy for the campaign to just go
on and evolve forever and just continue being fun, versus
other people who are very goal and outcome oriented within
the game. Would you agree, Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, luckily,
I think a game like Dungeons and Dragons tends it
has stuff in it for for both types of players.

(25:45):
Because on one hand, some may say, yeah, I just
I want to finish the story. I want to finish
this campaign. I want to I want to beat the
game like it's a typical video game. Or they might
they're they're they're thinking about leveling up. I want to
get to that next level because then I get more
more powers, more stats, you know what have you? Or
I want to get more loot. So you can think
of all these sort of finite levels within what is

(26:07):
ultimately an infinite game. It's about the storytelling and the
experience and the possibilities within this uh, this this mutually
created world. Though. That highlights to me in an interesting way,
the differences between finite and infinite storytelling. Um, I mean,
they're there are very different ways that you can approach

(26:27):
telling a story. Do you ever think about how different
it feels to be in the hands of, say, a
well written movie that has a tight plot, you know,
well well conceived story structure, versus being in one of
the opening seasons of a TV show where you're you know,
you're in one of those first couple of seasons and
the writers very likely do not know how the show

(26:50):
is going to end yet. Um, I mean, we must assume,
based on the laws of physics and of economics, that
at some point the show will come to an end.
But it's not being written that way yet. It's just
going on and expanding. And that can feel very different
and almost more enticing in a way, because it feels
like it feels more like life itself, Like this could
just go on. Yeah, I mean, I feel that definitely

(27:12):
with the Game of their own series right now, because
the the earlier books and earlier seasons everything, Everything is possible.
You don't know where it's going, but at this point
in the in the TV series, at any rate, it's
become very finite, Like you know, everything is wrapping up
in a set number of episodes, and there's so there's
only so there are only so many battles that can happen,
there are only so many shocking twists that can occur.

(27:35):
You know. I couldn't help but think about Fallout four
in all of this, I can't. I can't recall if
you've played the Fallout games before. For you, okay, so
you know in that game, you you you level up,
as is typical in these role playing games, but the
higher level becomes, the more work it requires, more time
it requires to reach that next level. For people who

(27:57):
haven't played, can we basically say what it is? It's
post apocalyptic ultimately. I mean, there's a there's a set
storyline in it, but it's also a sandbox world. It
also has this open aspect and you can keep playing
it no matter where you are in the various big
and small storylines. So so there's a finite storyline in

(28:17):
the middle of it, but you can just keep going
around and doing different things. And you'd never run out
of things to do. It's just sort of a limitless world. Well, yes,
and no, right, because you can run out of worthwhile
things to do, you can run out of interesting things
to do. That there will always be some sort of rand.
There will always be random monster encounters there will, you know,

(28:37):
And I imagine there'll be a sort of a repetition
on some of the random quests that pop up. But
I was looking into this, and according to the Fallout wiki,
Fallout for does not have an actual level cap. So
you can keep becoming more godlike. Yeah, you can keep
you can tend to you essentially, you can keep playing forever. However,
they say that there is a hard limit at level

(29:00):
sixty five hundred and thirty five. If you try to
level past this point by any means, uh, then you'll
crash the game due to the value overflowing back to zero.
Oh that's so. That seems like a kind of maybe
not well articulated, but finite limited on something that seemed
like it could be infinite. Right, But I maintain that

(29:20):
you would you would either go insane or just becoming
just increasingly bored before you got anywhere close to level
say sixty. Yeah, well, I don't know how you can
get past, you know, level thirty. If you if you
were in Stephen kinge short story of the Jaunt, and
you were like sucked into the timeless, another realm between

(29:42):
the fabric of reality, and you happen to bring your
Xbox three sixty with you, then then I think maybe
you could get close to that level more tedious than
you think, more tedious than you think. Well, this, this
doesn't make me think though about the fact that, on
one hand, you could actually say, if we accept the
laws of physics, there is no such thing as any

(30:02):
infinite game in an objective sense, and that objectively no
game will go on forever, right, You'd run out of
you'd run out of energy, you'd run out of useful energy,
you'd run out of the ability to do work at
some point, an entropy in the future. But so that
makes me think that I still think the idea of
infinite games is very useful and it reflects not really

(30:23):
like what the actual potential future of the game is,
but what the mindset of the player is. That an
infinite game could in fact come to an end within
an hour. But what makes it an infinite game is
the way the players treat it. They're treating it as
if it could never come to an end. Right, So
in that respect, fallout for is it's it's it's an

(30:44):
infinite game as long as you have an infinite gaming
attitude about it. Yeah, and that and that difference in
attitude can come through in all kinds of other things.
I mean, one example that I keep thinking about is
the distinctions in how you might approach running a business. Now,
I don't want to you know, this isn't gonna become
a bit in this podcast. Robert and are not known
for our insights in business, But just one thing to

(31:06):
think about is does a business exist in order to
create things of value employee people live and grow and
keep on doing stuff in the economy and for its employees,
or does it exist on a sort of path of
financial conquest with a terminal end goal. Uh? Does the
leadership of a business think about like, Okay, we're going

(31:26):
to grow this until the point where we, you know,
can sell or something like sell our position or something
like that, or dominate the market. And this can get
even more complicated because a business is usually going to
be run by multiple leaders at various levels who might
have somewhat different ideas about this, and the unspoken conflicts
between the finite players and the infinite players in a

(31:48):
business can create dysfunction. Yeah, I can see that. On
one hand, someone saying we we created this company to
change the world. This other player in the game is saying, well, actually,
we created this company so we can sell it to
Microsoft next quarter. Now, in both cases, the company may
continue existing after a certain point that's being perceived as

(32:09):
finite by the players, or a company may not continue.
In fact, there is probably no such thing as an
infinite company right that that will go on for the
rest of time. But again it's about the mindset of
the players. Are they thinking about this as something that
is designed to be continuous and continue going on or
something that has a winning condition? Now, Joe, you turned

(32:29):
me onto a two thousand fourteen interview with Cars on
CBC's Ideas with Paul Kennedy. Yeah, I actually haven't listened
to that, but I saw that Cars did it. And
I know you're big into Paul Kennedy and his optimist
prime his Canadian optimist prime voice. Uh so I I
let you know about that, knowing that you would go
investigate and find out if it was worthwhile. Was it
it is? It's it's very interesting. The title you can

(32:50):
look it up and I'll try and link to it
on the landing page. It's stuffitably your Mind dot com.
But it's titled After Atheism, New Perspectives on God and
Religion and it's a wonderful episode. Dealing mostly with the
ideas presented in Cars. Cars is two thousand and eight book,
The Religious Case against Belief, and he makes a compelling
case that belief is actually the enemy of religion and

(33:11):
that the true beauty of religion is its ability to
foster new ideas and approaches to life. And this all
ends up tying in with with this idea of finite
and infinite games as well. He argues that when you
start walling religion up in belief, you rob it of
that power. I believe this, and by the extension, I
do not believe in that it becomes a dogmatic exercise

(33:34):
and authority and pits us not only against our fellow humans,
but against ourselves. He makes the case that the closed
mindedness and hostility of belief has corrupted religion and spawned
violence all over the world. Yeah, that's interesting. I've encountered
this type of belief before, like the idea that UM
that at its core, if you go back far enough
in history, religion may not necessarily have been about about

(33:57):
dogmatic beliefs like here is what God is and here's
what you must do, but instead was more akin to
a type of culture, like it involved settings and practices,
ways of giving getting people into a certain state of minds,
a contemplative state of mind or a thankful state of mind. Yeah,

(34:18):
and and Cars touches on some of these ideas UH
in Finite and Infinite Games as well, particularly the topic
of myth and religion. So chapter seven UM in Finite
Infinite Games is titled Myth provokes explanation but accepts none
of it. So the idea is that a culture can
be no stronger than its strongest myths. He says that

(34:39):
stories attain the status of myth when they are retold
and persistently retold solely for their own sake, so that
essentially the core of a myth is a is an
infinite storytelling tradition. It's the infinite game of telling a story. Yeah, yeah,
I mean he he points something out that I think
this is rather obvious to anyone who's ever crafted, or

(35:00):
or or consumed any amount of fiction or art. But
he says that whenever you stop telling the story for
the story's sake and tell it to drive home like
a clear social or political message, then you're no longer
a storyteller. You've become a you know, a preacher or
a propagandist. Yeah, it is weird how stories. I feel
like a stories can demonstrate values. I wouldn't argue with that.
But at the same time, when you start to get

(35:22):
a sense that a story is being told to make,
say a political point or an educational point or something
like that, it becomes immediately far less interesting as a story. Yeah.
And and the thing is, even kids, little kids can
tell when a children's book has an ax to grind
when it's clearly about it's it's not about the joy
of sharing a story, it's about driving home some point

(35:44):
about how they should clean up their room. So Car
says quote, great stories cannot be observed anymore than an
infinite game can have an audience. Once I hear the story,
I enter into its own dimensionality, I inhabit its base
at its time. I do not therefore understand the story
in terms of my experience, but my experience in terms

(36:06):
of the story. Stories that have the enduring strength of
strength of myths reach through experience to touch the genius
in each of us. But experience is the result of
this generative touch, not its cause. So far is this
the case that we can even say that if we
cannot tell a story about what happened to us, nothing
has happened to us. I love this. I mean I

(36:28):
if you're a listener to the show, you'll probably know
that we have generally a pretty healthy respect for the
mythological storytelling tradition. And yet at the same time can
can take plenty of issue with what dogmatic religions and
stuff like that due to the world, especially when you've
got a specific destructive belief that's being insisted on. Right,

(36:49):
But yeah, the mythological storytelling tradition is a wonderfully generative
thing because one of the things that I think doesn't
get brought up enough in discussion of creativity is how
experience of the creativity of the other spawns the creativity
within yourself. That people are inspired to tell stories because

(37:09):
they consume stories, and that a lot of times the
way stories happen is that you hear a story that's
been told many times and you want to tell not
exactly the same story, but a variation on it. Yeah,
what would have happened if this had happened? Or what
if this character had thought this instead of what we've
merely assumed to be the case. But of course, variation
on the mythological storytelling tradition is great if that's allowed.

(37:33):
But if you're insisting on a very finite point of
view that the myth must convey, then variations on the
myth are not going to be accepted. Right, And this
is where he gets into the idea that ideology is
the apple. It is the amplification of myth. He gets
into this concept in the Ideas interview as well, that
that belief in sacred text fix fixes the past and

(37:54):
the future. He says, quote, it is the assumption that
since the beginning and the end of history are known,
there's nothing more to say. Uh So it's it's it's
a treatment of myth that no longer promotes infinite interpretation.
Uh it's it's no longer a situation of saying, hey,
what do you think this means? Instead you're saying This
is the Mets message of the Holy Word. This is

(38:16):
what the text means, and nothing else. So he proposes
the use of religion as the necessary template for interacting
with the world, for imagining the cosmos, etcetera. Uh. And
I really like this, this treatment of myth and religion.
I mean, I think back on stories that I grew
up with, be it you know, the Christian Bible, or
Greek myth the Lord of the Rings, or or my

(38:38):
dad telling me the story the Battle of Hastings and
Stamford Bridge. You know, I can't help but carry those
with me and summon them in consideration of new myths
and news stories and new ideas. So when I reached
the point in my life where I started learning about Hinduism,
for example, I could look at a character like Krishna
and say, oh, well, you know, he kind of lines

(38:58):
up with say this Jesus character in some respects. Uh.
You know, as far as A, B and C are concerned,
Like you bring the story, these stories with you to
make sense of new stories and interpret them, but not
as a like finite text about what is true and
what should be believed, but as a sort of like
generative mechanism it causes you to be creative to think

(39:18):
about things, right, Yeah, And he argues that the appeal
of Christ and of Buddha both come down to the
infinite nature of their quests. So God it becomes human
in order to listen to humanity, immortal prince undertaking a
spiritual quest to release everyone from all forms of bondage.
And he says, quote, those Christians who deafened themselves to

(39:40):
the residence of their own myth have driven their killing
machines through the garden of history, but they did not
kill the myth. The empty divinity, whom they have made
into an instrument of vengeance, continues to return as the
Man of Sorrows, bringing with him his unfinished story and
restoring the voices of the silenced woe. Now that as
a sermon, so yeah, I wouldn't have necessarily originally thought

(40:04):
how to apply the framework of finite and infinite games
to types of mythology and religious storytelling. But that's a
really interesting place to take it. And I you know,
when he does get into that in the book, it
it does make sense because he is a scholar of religion.
But when I first encountered the idea, I originally started
thinking about it in terms of technology. All Right, we'll

(40:27):
hold that thought, Joe, because we're gonna take one more
break and then we're back. Thank alright, we're back. So
I wanted to talk a little bit about the idea
of conceptions of technology in terms of finite or infinite
games along carses framework. So we've talked on the show
before about Jarren Lannier, right, Yes, I believe so. Yeah,

(40:48):
he's so. He's a computer scientist, technology philosopher, one of
the most important minds behind the history and development of
virtual reality. And interestingly, though he says that in his
earlier years he was in many ways kind of a
techno utopian guru, in recent years he has become increasingly
critical of the role of digital technology in our lives
and of the techno utopian mindset. Though I think you

(41:11):
can still sound very positive about the potential of virtual
reality when you get him going on it while acknowledging
the dangers as well. But he was very critical, for example,
of the crowdsourcing trends of web two point oh in
his two thousand tin book You Are Not a Gadget, Robert,
I know you remember that crowdsourcing era. Oh yes, I
do remember it well because it it does. It reared

(41:32):
its ugly head in our own business here. Why should
we write the articles. Let's get the people to write
the Yeah. Yeah, let's you know, free content coming right
out of the mouths of the mass. Yeah. And I
mean I And I say that as someone who loves
Wikipedia and I love browsing crowdsourced articles about the various things.
In case you're wondering, I did mean to say mass
singular and not mass because it is a monolith, isn't

(41:55):
at once you're you're monetizing it. Yes. So. Lenear has
also been very critical of the role of social media,
the advertising driven model of digital content, with the idea
that you know, advertising driven media platforms like social media
tend to trend toward manipulation and the stoking of negative emotions,
degrading the quality of relationships. One example I found is

(42:17):
that he writes that if you can say you have
thousands of friends on Facebook, quote, this can only be
true if the idea of friendship is reduced. I think
that's pretty true. He's also been really critical of singularity
type thinking, which he's called cybernetic totalism, a sort of
you know, reduces humans and human creativity towards this single

(42:37):
achievement sort of point in history that we can get to,
and then the machines will be able to take over
and really everything that humans can do now, and all
human creativity and culture and all that can ultimately be
represented by computing power. Anyway, I found a section on
his website that is a sort of cut chapter. He
called it a deleted scene from his book You Are

(42:57):
Not a Gadget, where he talks about the idea of
his old techno utopian guru talk and uh, in some
ways in which he still agrees with it, in some
ways he doesn't agree with it anymore. So he's talking
about this idea of post symbolic communication, which is something
that he envisions in the world of virtual reality. So, Robert,
imagine you've got a virtual reality machine where you can

(43:21):
use it to essentially, at very high fidelity, translate the
contents of your imagination directly into some digital space that
can be shared with other people without having to use
symbolic encoding of things like words. Okay, so instead of
writing a short story about a world that I've imagined,

(43:42):
instead of painting it on a canvas. I am just
like brain blasting it right in your face. Yeah, you
can transmit the contents of your imagination in a very
high fidelity and convincing way into a place where you
can experience them in a sensory way, and other people
can experience them as well. And that's sort of what
he calls the idea of post symbolic communication is like

(44:04):
you can get around having to use things like digital
encoding of of you know, like drawings and words and stuff,
all these things that are sort of bottlenext towards sharing creativity.
He contrasts that path towards post symbolic communication with other
types of quote ramps or visions of the progress or
visions of possible progress in technology, like singularitarian thinking, where

(44:28):
the power of technology through computation and artificial intelligence will
will sort of cross an event horizon of power and progress.
And here's where he brings in cars. He uses cars
is framework of finite and infinite games to think about
types of ramps or visions of technological progress. And this
is a major reason some ramps are better than others,

(44:49):
he argues. Quote, here's how I like to put it.
Good technology connects people in new and deeper ways, while
bad technology merely grants people more raw our. Once you
have the fastest car, the biggest bomb, the most capacious computer,
what then it is an empty form of ambition. A
drive for pure technological power is not only a finite game,

(45:12):
but often a destructive one. And he writes, quote improving
computation for its own sake instead of for the cause
of empathy results in misfortunes like the plague of fragments
were now enduring. Uh and also quote an approach to
any underlying technological capability that solely expands human powers will
probably lead to evil. And I really think about this

(45:35):
in the context of the conversations we had earlier this
year about social media, Like think about how the pure,
open minded drive towards expanding the power of a social
media platform like Facebook ended up manifesting in terms of
horrible finite games like get as many users as possible
onto the platform and then monetize you know, like that

(45:57):
is a finite game, and that is a very destructive
finite game ultimately, right, because it's it's in so many
ways limiting of what good is actually possible through technology.
So Ultimately, I think Landier is saying that if we
want technology to serve us, we can't just make it
more powerful, because technology that in a blind way is

(46:18):
just made more powerful will tend naturally towards becoming a
tool in a series of increasingly destructive finite games played
by the people who have the most power to wield
the technology. Instead, as technology progresses, we have to have
an ethic of progress, and the ethic of progress should
be one where the considering technology as part of an

(46:39):
infinite game must be built into the technological advance itself. Okay,
so it's not just about say, I can't help to
think of it like a loud speaker creating a powerful loudspeaker,
But then you have to also think about the message
that's going through the loudspeaker. Yeah, there must be a
way of shaping the progress of developing louder and louder
loudspeakers so that I don't know, so that it's used

(47:02):
for purposes that make people's lives better, maybe for playing
loud concerts and public that people would enjoy or something
like that, and not to be used as a sonic
weapon to pacify crowds of protesters. Or something like that,
because if you just say, well, it's just brought you know,
it's just increasing our power to do whatever. It's a tool,
it could be good or evil. You know. He's pointing
out the many ways that if you just give people

(47:25):
more tool power that's morally neutral, it will just tend
to get used for evil purposes, even unintentionally. People at
Facebook or other social media platforms that have created all
these things we've been pointing out and complaining about. Again,
I want to emphasize I don't think they're necessarily evil people.
They're not trying to do bad in the world. They
just allowed a process to have evil consequences. Yeah, I

(47:48):
mean because basically finite players are going to flock to
whatever your technology is. Yeah, to think about another way
that technological power could affect the balance of finite and
infinite games. You know, remember that distinction we were making
earlier about how you can win a finite game of
an individual chess match, but you can't win the infinite

(48:09):
game of chess itself. Right, You can't walk out and
say I just won chess. Everybody, I'm done. But what
if you're a computer program like Alpha zero? That might
actually change things, because then it's you know, so Alpha
zero is, as of the time of recording this, I think,
currently the most powerful AI chess engine, but even a
generation beyond that, maybe a chess engine that can just

(48:31):
win without question a hundred out of a hundred games
against any human player or any other player of any type.
At this point, could you actually say that you've not
just won mini games of chess, but the game of
chess itself. You have reached a level of mastery within
the game where you literally cannot be challenged by any
conceivable player. So if you were able to do that,

(48:54):
have you turned what was supposed to be an infinite
game into a finite game? Yeah? I mean, you can
make an argument that this is a case where you've
broken the game by becoming too good at it. Yeah,
And of course, you know, card counters are in a
way accused of that all the time in uh in
the in Vegas game houses. Yeah. And under this scenario,

(49:15):
it seems like like the new incarnation of the game
could actually be designing better and better AI chess engines, right, Like,
maybe human players can no longer participate in this infinite
game as chess players against them, but they can still
play the meta game of working on designing AI players.
I guess until the AI AI designers outstripped the human
AI designers. Well, you know, Banks got into that a

(49:37):
little bit in the player of games because Gurga is
a master gamer, but he's no match for any of
the minds He's He's practices some of these games on
the way to the Empire of Azad and Uh, and
he's no match for a powerful AI. But there's this
distinction between the games that emans play in the games
that the minds play. Well, maybe that's an important distinct

(50:00):
to keep in mind as we consider technological progress and
how that affects human endeavor. I mean, there's a lot
of talk about like will humans become obsolete? People always
ask variations on that question, like, as you know, automation
becomes more productive, you know, suddenly, well, we have an
economy where humans can't really do any meaningful work. You know,
there's not much we can do that can't be done

(50:21):
better by a robot. There are a lot of critics
of that idea, by the way, um and I think
Jared Landier is one of them. But if there's anything
to that idea, one wonders like, does that even undercut
our motivation to participate in the infinite game? You know? Uh?
And how do we have to adapt ourselves to think
differently about the infinite games we play and that make
life worth living if we can't really compete in any

(50:44):
of the smaller finite games within them. Yeah? I agree,
and I think in in the culture books you do again,
you see computers playing more of the the infinite game,
but leading space either for definance, certainly for the finite
games in which humans may play and the infinite game
of their lives, but also realizing where they can play

(51:07):
a pivotal role within these these overarching schemes. If you will,
may there always be a place for us within the schemes. Yes,
that's all. That's all I ask of our future AI overlords.
Just let me. Let me have a role in your
scheme whatever it is. I'm sure I could do it.
I can smuggle some sort of sensor into a factory.
I don't know. I leave it to you. I'm not

(51:28):
the the artificial intelligence here. Yes, our power is finite,
and so is our is our episode length? Because once
more we have reached the end of an episode of
stuff to Blow your Mind. But that's not the end,
because you have well a finite number of episodes. But still,
it's a long list of episodes you can seek out
at stuff to blow your Mind dot com. We have

(51:49):
them all listed there, as well as links out to
our various social media accounts. And hey, if you want
to support this show, I've said it, uh plenty of
times before, but really, infinite numbers an infinite number the
death of a finite number of times I have said
you can help us out by rating and reviewing the
show at any of the finite number of podcast websites

(52:10):
out there that distribute our work. Give us infinite stars, Yes,
infinite stars. Insist on it. I'm sorry if I was
laughing while you were talking. I was imagining already the
infinite number of emails we're gonna get where people are
explaining the rules of football to us. Yeah, well, I'm
I welcome it, uh and more and more emails about
finite and infinite. Really, anytime you start breaking down infinity,

(52:31):
it just it complicates everything, doesn't it. Yeah, anyway, infinite
Thanks to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tarry Harrison.
If you would like to get in touch with us
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(52:56):
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