Quotes About Play

Like the bee, we should make our industry our amusement.

sharing knowledge is power." "I think the actual saying goes, 'Knowledge is power.'" "Not in Washington. Here, the real power is in deniability. If I share knowledge with you, I take away your deniability. It's the ultimate power play.

I switched to thoughts of the play. It was by far the healthiest item to concentrate on. Rehearsals were only days away; there is something wildly exciting about a company assembling for the first time on stage. There is also something strangely sexy about it. I can't pin it down, there just is.

As I played the venereal game, like Tom Sawyer whitewashing his fence, I found that spectators didn't stay spectators long. If you should feel the urge, there are more brushes in the pail.

Everything is already integrated within this mind so it is not about keeping the good and the bad separate. The good and the bad have no essence or substance; they are the ceaseless play of the clarity of the mind.

The invention of basketball was not an accident. It was developed to meet a need. Those boys simply would not play "Drop the Handkerchief."

The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play. The rules are changed when the players of an infinite game agree that the play is imperiled by a finite outcome-that is, by the victory of some players and the defeat of others.

It is the desire of all finite players to be Master Players, to be so perfectly skilled in their play that nothing can surprise them, so perfectly trained that every move in the game is foreseen at the beginning.

Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases.

Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.

A finite game must always be won with a terminal move, a final act within the boundaries of the game that establishes the winner beyond any possibility of challenge. A terminal move results, in other words, in the death of the opposing player as player. The winner kills the opponent. The loser is dead in the sense of being incapable of further play.

The rule-making capacity of infinite players is often challenged by the impingement of powerful boundaries against their play-such as physical exhaustion, or the loss of material resources, or the hostility of non-players, or death.

Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own.

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.

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.

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.

The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time.