Quotes from James P Carse

We need a term that will stand in contrast to "power" as it acquires its meaning in finite play. Let us say that where the finite player plays to be powerful the infinite player plays with strength.

We cannot do whatever we please and remain lawyers or yogis-and yet we could not be either unless we pleased.

What the winners of finite games achieve is not properly an afterlife but an afterworld, not continuing existence but continuing recognition of their titles.

A slave can have life only by giving it away. "He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life." (Jesus)

If the losers are dead, the dead are also losers. There is a contradiction here: If the prize for winning finite play is life, then the players are not properly alive. They are competing for life. Life, then, is not play, but the outcome of play. Finite players play to live; they do not live their playing. Life is therefore deserved, bestowed, possessed, won. It is not lived.

This is a contradiction to all finite play. Because the purpose of a finite game is to bring play to an end with the victory of one of the players, each finite game is played to end itself. The contradiction is precisely that all finite play is play against itself.

Power will always be restricted to a relatively small number of selected persons. Anyone can be strong.

Infinite players die. Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of the play, but in the course of play.

The death of an infinite player is dramatic. It does not mean that the game comes to an end with death; on the contrary, infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own life; they live for their own play. But since that play is always with others, it is evident that infinite players both live and die for the continuing life of others.

Where the finite player plays for immortality, the infinite player plays as a mortal. In infinite play one chooses to be mortal inasmuch as one always plays dramatically, that is, toward the open, toward the horizon, toward surprise, where nothing can be scripted. It is a kind of play that requires complete vulnerability. To the degree that one is protected against the future, one has established a boundary and no longer plays with but against others.

The rules are always designed to deal with specific threats to the continuation of play. Infinite players use the rules to regulate the way they will take the boundaries or limits being forced against their play into the game itself.

Unlike infinite play, finite play is limited from without; like infinite play, those limitations must be chosen by the player since no one is under any necessity to play a finite game. Fields of play simply do not impose themselves on us. Therefore, all the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

Death is a defeat in finite play. It is inflicted when one's boundaries give way and one falls to an opponent. The finite player dies under the terminal move of another.

Though infinite players are strong, they are not powerful and do not attempt to become powerful.

Although infinite players choose mortality, they may not know when death comes, but we can always say of them that "they die at the right time" (Nietzsche).

I cannot forget that I have forgotten. I may have used the veil so successfully that I have made my performance believable to myself.

Unheard silence does not necessarily mean the death of the player. Unheard silence is not the loss of listeners for that voice. It is an evil when the drama of a life does not continue in others for reason of their deafness, or ignorance.

There are silences that can be heard, even from the dead and from the severely oppressed. Much is recoverable from an apparently forgotten past. Sensitive and faithful historians can learn much of what has been lost, and much therefore that can be continued.

The power of citizens in a society is determined by their ranking in games that have been played. A society preserves its memory of past winners. Its record-keeping functions are crucial to societal order. Large bureaucracies grow out of the need to verify the numerous entitlements of the citizens of that society.

Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in the game in order to win it. Whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game. The constant attentiveness of finite players to the progress of the competition can lead them to believe that every move they make they must make.

There is no effective pattern of entitlement in a society short of the free agreement of all opponents that the titles to property are in the hands of the actual winners.

Those who challenge the existing pattern of entitlements in a society do not consider the designated officers of enforcement powerful; they consider them opponents in a struggle that will determine by its outcome who is powerful. One does not win by power; one wins to be powerful.

There is, however, a familiar form of playfulness often associated with situations protected from consequence-where no matter what we do (within certain limits), nothing will come of it. This is not playing so much as playing at, a harmless disregard for social constraints. While this is by no means excluded from infinite play, it is not the same as infinite play.

Only by free self-concealment can persons believe they obey the law because the law is powerful; in fact, the law is powerful for persons only because they obey it. We do not proceed through a traffic intersection because the signal changes, but when the signal changes.