Finite and Infinite Games
* Book: Finite and Infinite Games. by James P. Carse. MacMillan/NY, 1986
URL =
Review
Bobby Matherne:
"This reminds me of the Radical Therapy Conference in Madrid, Iowa in 1977 where I played volleyball without keeping score. It was really more fun because everyone accepted that the purpose of play was for the fun of it, and the fun was maximized by the absence of arguments or discussions about the score, about how many people were on each side, about whose side who was on. You could even swap sides at will, but few did. It was obvious to all, though unspoken, that the purpose of the game was to continue the game as long as possible. That made it the first finite game that I can remember encountering as an infinite game. I can remember many infinite games from my youth when my brothers and I played shoot'em up games that involved climbing over, crawling under, and sneaking around things to get the jump on the other person and shoot them before they could shoot back. No one counted how many times you shot the other person first because he immediately jumped back to life and the game continued as long as our energy and our parents allowed. Thus it was a surprise to me to find out that someone had given the name "infinite game" to the very type of game I enjoyed most as a child. To summarize: normal volleyball is a finite game and scoreless volleyball is an infinite game."