Finite and Infinite Games

finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. (Location 37)

Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time. Indeed, the only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play. (Location 77)

The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game and to bring as many persons as possible into the play. (Location 105)

On the contrary, they enter into finite games with all the appropriate energy and self-veiling, but they do so without the seriousness of finite players. They embrace the abstractness of finite games as abstractness, and therefore take them up not seriously, but playfully. (Location 169)

To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself. (Location 179)

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. (Location 224)

NO ONE CAN PLAY a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. (Location 412)

is essential to the identity of a society to forget that it has forgotten that society is always a species of culture. Its citizens must find ways of persuading themselves that their own particular boundaries have been imposed on them, and were not freely chosen by them. (Location 522)