🎲 on infinite games.

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We’ve all heard the line before - life’s a game.

Make moves, accumulate skills, generate income, move up.

(Fun fact - when I was in high school, my friend and I started a clothing brand called “Life’s a Game”. Needless to say, it crashed and burned, but the idea’s been in my head for a while.)

There’s truth to this perspective. But what it doesn’t talk about is what kind of game we’re playing.

Life is infinitely complex - and the type of game you’re playing is what makes all the difference in the end.

In the 1980s, Dr. James Carse defined this concept in a way that had never been articulated before.

“There are at least two kinds of games”, writes Carse in the opening lines of his book Finite and Infinite Games.

“One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing to play.”

Carse offers two simple ways of looking at almost everything we do life.

Finite games are defined by the following.

• known players

• fixed rules

• an agreed-upon objective

Finite games are everything from football, to political elections, to the game of cards you play with around the dinner table.

Infinite games, however, are different to the core. Infinite games have…

• known and unknown players (which means new players can join at any time)

• changeable rules (which means there is often no defined path to success)

• and lastly, the only objective is to keep playing

Marriage, fitness, entrepreneurship. These are all games where the goal is undefined, but the objective is simple. Keep playing. Keep growing. Keep improving.

The point that Carse makes in his book is this: you want your time and energy to be devoted primarily to infinite games - games that you can play your entire life and never win, but continuously improve at.

Of course, nothing is ever black and white.

Take business, for example. Sometimes the day-to-day looks like a finite game with rules and competitors. Winning your next client is a finite game - you’re competing with other businesses in the market, trying to prove your worth.

But let’s say you win the client. Then what? The game transitions to infinite. You can’t win, at least not in any definable way. The only winning is to make sure you keep the client.

Businesses that stand the test of time understand that their purpose is not to turn a profit… their purpose is to bring value to the world that did not exist before.

The companies that define their own niche are often the most successful. They’re not playing someone else’s game, they’re playing their own.

Even school is a finite game.

The rules are defined (criteria, rubrics, etc.), the players are known (students and teachers) and the objective is fixed - score as high as you can on all your year-end tests.

But here’s why school isn’t a complete write-off.

The trick is to look at school as a small part of the much larger game of education. Suddenly, the game becomes infinite.

Think about it.

• There are no fixed rules

  • You learn however you want, at whatever speed you can, from whomever will teach the best

• The players are fluid

  • Anyone can teach, and anyone can learn (in fact, we all do both).

• The objective couldn’t be less agreed-upon;

  • There is an infinite amount of education to be had, in a staggeringly wide array of disciplines. The only real objective is to keep learning til the day you die.

So, in other words - it’s not always about what you’re doing, but how you approach it.

Take two 40-year-old men that both decide they want to regain their athleticism and lose some weight.

One says “I want to become an Iron Man” and commits to a year-long training plan.

The other says “I want to become an endurance athlete” and commits to the same year-long training plan.

Race day comes around, and both men complete the race.

After the race, they hug and celebrate with their families, and go out for a celebration dinner.

The next day, both men wake up. By all intents and purposes, they’ve done the same thing.

But inside, they’re actually very different.

The man who chose to become an endurance athlete gets up, and goes for a run. The Iron Man wasn’t the goal, it was just a stop along the way.

The first man’s game is infinite - become the best endurance athlete he can be.

The other guy, however, takes a few months off. He sits back, rests on his laurels a bit, and tells himself he’s earned a good long break. He might get back to training some day… but maybe he won’t. After all, he completed what he set out to do.

The second man’s game was finite - his goal was to complete the race, and now he’s done.

James Clear talks about this in Atomic Habits. Identity-based change is incredibly effective. Outcome-based change is far less so.

If you’re ever wondering what kind of game you’re playing, here’s a great litmus test.

Finite games have a clear finish line. If winning looks like beating other people, then it’s probably a finite game.

The infinite games in life tend to be identity-based. There is no finish line… the goal is in the becoming.

I think one of the reasons I’m drawn most to the mountains (and to those that climb mountains) is that alpinism is, at the core, an infinite game.

Sure, there are competitions and awards, if that’s the path you choose.

But at the core, alpinism is a never-ending game. You’ll never run out of mountains to climb. You’ll never reach your true potential. But that’s exactly why it’s so alluring.

It’s really not about the summits at all. It’s about the constant progression, the ability to test yourself against whatever the mountain will throw at you. Some days, you don’t summit. Most days, in fact. But that’s not really losing. The only way to lose the game of alpinism is to die.

As with every infinite game, the only way to win is to keep playing.

Finite games force us to constantly compare ourselves to others and take on an attitude of winning.

Infinite games inspire us to adopt an attitude of constant progression, with the victories being mere stepping stones along the way.

There’s no point in playing to be “the best” in a game that has no rules and no set objective.

In conclusion: find games that are infinite in nature.

The best use of your time is to play games where the goal isn’t to beat anyone, but to continue to play forever.

(This was a long one… thanks for reading. If you found this as interesting as I did, check out this video.)