There have been a lot of thoughts swirling around my head recently about this topic.
Let’s start with the dichotomy between finite and infinite games. Finite games are what are traditionally thought of as “games”. Finite games have players, rules, and a way to win. Infinite games are players and rules, but there is no way to win. I think refer to finite games as “competition” and infinite games as “life”.
Competition
Finite games have winners which means that finite games have hierarchies. You have a choice which games you want to play and thus which hierarchies you’d like to climb. People choose how to allocate their time and energy across games by sampling them to see how much they enjoy playing each game, how good they are at each game, and what the potential benefits of winning are.
The prizes for competitive activities are one or any combination of sex, money, power, or reputation (clout).
Competition and hierarchies are everywhere. Any competitive sport has rankings. Any activity where you can compete on a metric has rankings, whether it’s soccer, chess, comedy, making money, or pulling girls.
The defining characteristics of finite games are:
- Game always ends
- There is always a winner
- Goals are positive, so actions are generally offensive
- Competitors constantly seeking to maximize their skill
- Variance is source of stress
- Performance is judged relative to other performances
The strategy for finite games is to focus your time and energy on developing the skills that will help you win. In other words, it involves focused, offensive effort that builds towards a positive goal (winning).
Resources are scarce, so in order to survive, one must compete. There is no way around this. I like to think of the “work” component of “work-life balance” as competition.
Life
Infinite games are games where the point of the game is to keep the game going. This is what I think of as the “life” part of “work-life balance”. There are no hierarchies in the infinite game of life — nobody is better or more of a person than anyone else. The name of the game here is survival, and this means avoiding things that could end the game on an individual level, on a group level, and so on and so forth. Another defining characteristic of infinite games is that they never end (hence infinite), which means that everything is always subject to reinterpretation as new information comes in.
Michael Jordan won the 1998 NBA Championship with the Chicago Bulls. This is agreed upon and not up to re-interpretation because this was a finite game. Michael Jordan’s effect on succeeding generations of basketball players is constantly up for re-interpretation and thus falls under the realm of life.
I haven’t heard nearly as much about infinite games as I have about finite games, but I believe they are just as important. The defining characteristics of infinite games are entirely orthogonal to those of finite games, and because of this, require a completely different strategy. Applying strategies that work well in finite games to infinite games yields terrible results, and vice versa.
The defining characteristics of life / infinite games are:
- Life never ends (even though it does end)
- There are no winners
- Goals are negative, so actions are generally defensive
- Players seek to round out their skillset defensively instead of offensively maximizing one skill
- Variance gives meaning to the life
- Experience of life is judged independently by each individual
There is no way to win life but there are many ways to lose it. The strategy for life / infinite games involves building a well-rounded skillset that is capable of avoiding/neutralizing/mitigating as many existential threats as possible. Dedicating too much time and energy to one skill means that you are vulnerable in another area, so “good enough” and balance are favored here over maximization and being the best in one area.
Analogs
Many competitive activities have a corresponding infinite game. Some examples include:
- Dating, Picking up girls => Marriage, Relationships
- Increasing Income => Seeking meaningful work
- Working out for physique or increased athletic ability => Exercising to maintain a healthy body and prevent illness
- Playing to win => Playing to continue playing
Playing to win is just as important as playing to continue playing. You just need to know when do what.
