Finite and Infinite Games, Revisited
Perhaps progress is not always progress, though we may have to pull away many veneers to see it.
Note: I think I’m often talking about divestiture in this Substack, and this post is also about divestiture.
Years ago, when I was even more solitary than I am now, I went through a phase when I spent virtually all of my free time developing board games. At the time, I was depressed and I didn’t think I could do anything right, and I supposed that if I succeeded at designing board games I might finally have a sense of identity of which I approved, and through which I could have stronger relationships with other people. It was a hard time which, thankfully, has ended.
One of the upshots of that time, though, is that I developed some board games. The game that I’ve been working on the longest is an abstract strategy game, which I actually started working on over twenty years ago, having first messed around with the idea with an old friend in Albuquerque in the late ‘90s. It borrows some elements from a Norse game called Hnefatafl. You have four types of pieces, and some of them stack and unstuck. There’s a two-player version and a four-player version. The rules are a little complicated to learn in the beginning, but I think it actually gets pretty intuitive once you’re over the hump.
When I introduce people to the game, I set up the pieces and say, “I hope you’ll do this only exactly as long as it’s fun.” People are usually interested in giving it a try. When I explain the rules, about half of people sort of have their heads in their hands before I’m done explaining. But usually they’re still up for playing, and by the time they finish the game, they’re often talking about what they want to try next time — genuinely, I believe — which I think is a good sign.
About eight years ago I made a prototype of this game out of resin, and about six years ago, I took the prototype to an “unpublished game” fair, where four people played the game, and all of them said that if I’d had copies to sell that they’d have been interested in buying one. They signed up for an email list, which I then didn’t maintain because I hadn’t figured out how to make copies to sell. Soon after, life nudged me into some major leaps out of an Old Story into a New Story — and then the pandemic happened, etc., and so I’m just getting back to even the idea of this project recently.
In that time, I’ve figured out that I can use a home 3D printer, custom printing services, and some other materials that the average consumer can get pretty cheaply to make multiple copies of this game — and so that’s what I’ve been doing with a lot of my free time. With a relatively affordable amount of initial cash investment and a heck of a lot of work in my parents’ basement on weekends (it’d be almost impossible to complete this project in a safe, considerate way in my apartment, and it’d be feasible, but a bit of a hassle to try to do it in a local makerspace of some sort), I can conceivably make twenty boxes of this game in a few months. Maybe up to fifty boxes a year, or more, if I really wanted to lean into it. So I plan to make twenty boxes, in two different color schemes, and to sell them to anyone who wants one for more or less what it costs me to make them, which is roughly fifty dollars a box.
There’s no grand strategy for success here. I’m mainly just attracted to the idea of making many copies of this game and seeing finished versions in these two color schemes. I want to give some sets away as gifts, and the list of people I might want to gift a copy now comprises about a third of what I’m planning to make.
I definitely don’t plan to push this game on people too much. As I see it, among the things the world desperately needs right now, none of them is me running around trying to hard-sell a board game. But there does seem to be something kind of dharmic in finishing this project — which I’ve been working at, on and off, for twenty years now — and that’s the message I keep getting when I pray and meditate about it.
I have very mixed feelings, though. The process of making multiple copies of this game involves plastics, paints, sprays, waxes, resins — producing waste bottles and cans, waste plastic from failed prints, and all kinds of dust — including plastic dust. I’m wearing a respirator a lot of the time on weekends. My dad will be out in the back yard working on turning fifty percent of the yard into a pollinator habitat — which, to be fair, was originally my idea — but instead of helping with that, I’m inside making all this inorganic, chemical-y waste and, eventually, a few sets of a board game. By the time I’m finished, I may have produced two or more thirty-gallon trash cans’ worth of waste, give or take, some but definitely not all of which can be recycled, and some of which is microplastics. Fortunately, none of it is “forever chemicals,” I don’t think, if all the manufacturers are telling the truth. And now that I know what I’m doing, any further work would probably produce only a tiny fraction if this waste for the same amount of production — like, maybe only ten or twenty percent, per the same amount of output.
I have to say that, apart from the mixed emotions, which never really go away, the whole process is definitely very fun, and watching these raw materials turn into something kind of nice is particularly satisfying. And I’m certainly learning a lot — about the whole process and business of manufacturing, about 3D printing and design, about the meticulous process of repetitive handicraft, about Wetiko, and about whatever is the subject of the audiobook I’m listening to while I work.
Recently, that audiobook has often been Jem Bendell’s “Breaking Together” (which I think everyone ought to read). So I’ve been listening to a narrator articulate Jem’s idea that, because the global industrial system has so little regard for the living world’s natural rhythms — including right relations between humans — it is going to markedly contract in the next ten years, in what could be deemed a slow but unmistakable collapse, and how probably everybody should be learning about farming — while I sand filler paint off of little plastic board game pieces, and a brand new 3D printer whirs away furiously in the next room.
I brought that old prototype of the game to my church small-group a few weeks ago, and one of the young men in the group — the only other man in this Christian group actually — won a four-player game and has been asking me about the game since. So last weekend we got together at the library around the corner from his and his wife’s apartment, and we played a few rounds of the game in one of those little meeting rooms that you can check out for a few hours. It turns out that checking out a little room in a public library, passing through the interior of the library in order to get to the room, seeing everyone in there reading and working quietly along the way, is something that makes me feel good about society and its future — which is not something I often feel when I’m out and about these days. I felt like I was connecting to somewhat timeless, out-of-the box ideas about civilization — a kind of civil imagination that I think is more alive in parts of Europe, for instance. So that was an unexpected pleasure — even though the four chairs in the little public room were dim with worked-in grime and spotted with little black patties of old gum.
My gaming partner is probably about thirty. He’s Haitian, and he works at a big-box hardware store while he’s studying at the University of Maryland. He and his wife just welcomed their first child a few months ago, and I get the sense that the couple of hours we spent paying the game were the some of the few hours he’d had to get away in a while. (And his wife is a strong-souled person, and was approving, and nearby.) He’s one of the most noble, generous, and gracious people I know, and I learn a lot about living close to God when I’m with him, which is about the most important thing in life for me right now. I think he feels like he learns from me what I know about the world and about spirituality in a somewhat more academic way (God and spirituality are intense interests for both of us), but when I’m with this young friend what I know doesn’t feel like the greater attainment. His uprightness, simplicity, faithfulness, and graciousness are extremely humbling to me, and I learn a lot from his example.
Having played this game something like ninety percent of the times it’s ever been played, I’ve played this game more than anyone else by a long stretch, and so out of courtesy I almost never play full out. Even so, I won the first game, and then for the second game my friend asked if I would play as hard as I could, so that he could learn more about the strategy. So I did, and I won the second game, too.
Along the way, I was thinking about zero-sum and harmony situations, and the way they expanded fractally out from our two seats in this little room. Playing this game, I had the advantage. And because the game is important to both of us, I believed I could leverage that advantage, if I wanted to, into a genuine kind of social power. I could have commented on how my friend was playing the game throughout, not in merely benign helpful ways, but in ways that flaunted my superior status. I could have talke smack. I could have taken the role as the alpha.
This is happening for people who work in big box stores, I know. I used to work in a big box store in my early thirties, where I was scheduled for thirty-nine-point-five hours a week so my employer was absolved from any responsibility to help me afford health insurance. On the way up a chain of power, people with the greater advantage asserted that advantage over other people. This is happening to my young friend at his work, I’m sure, though I think he tries not to think about it, doesn’t intend to remain in that job forever, and is unquestionably a person of dignity throughout his life.
This sort of dominance is occurring to many people in Haiti, too, through child labor and debt bondage, through even more pernicious systems as oppressed people attempt to gain some amount of power by in dark ways, by kidnapping women and children and selling them into slavery, for instance. And this sort of dominance is evident throughout where we were, in Silver Spring, Maryland, right on the edge of DC, which is in some ways a radiant, historic capital city and in other ways the seat of one of the great imperial mechanisms in the world — though I’m not sure that the most pernicious empires in the West are primarily structured through the state.
It is evident in the surplus wealth that allows me to buy machines that will print plastic shapes to make game pieces, and the mining and manufacturing involved in producing these machines.
At the same time, between the two of us in that public room, which had been assigned for our use for two hours, there was a basic enjoyment of friendship. I had no intention of lording any advantage over my friend. Because of his spiritual talents, I don’t feel remotely like the superior. Certainly not because I was winning my game.
When two people are going somewhere, it’s inevitable that one will find the journey a little easier. When my friend and I try to go to God, for instance, I believe that he finds it easier than I do. This could be plied to some advantage. But it doesn’t have to be. He can slow down and wait for me. Or, when I’m going faster, I can slow down and wait for him. We can make the effort to go together. We can be a tiny little bubble of that going together in a world that is doing so very, very little of it right now. This, I believe, is in many respects the absolutely better way.
And a board game is a delightful, wholesome, and ancient pastime — in many ways, a very simple pleasure. I think that my young friend, who spent much of his early life owning far less than many people in the DC area, is someone who knows how to live richly apart from wealth, and watching him enjoy this game, I was reminded of this myself.
I suddenly became aware of how much of my social world is driven by a completely fervid neurosis about progress. It’s so constant that you might never notice how deep it really goes, but it inflects everything. I was briefly in Nepal, in 2000 — right around the time that nobody was sure whether the whole global data infrastructure might collapse over the Y2K thing — and I remember watching a man in his forties walk out of the front of his shop, squat down into a relaxed sitting position, and just watch the world go by. He seemed neither indolent nor neglectful. He was a business owner. But he was taking a few moments out of his time on Earth just to be at rest and to watch the world. There’s something to think about, there.
As I’m writing this, it also occurs to me that all along I could have woven in James Carse’s terminology of finite and infinite games: The purpose of a finite game is to win. The purpose of an infinite game is to continue play.
If I assert dominance over my friend, I have won the finite game, but I may have damaged the infinite game. The same with how employers win over employees, the way industrialism has won over the living planet. Progress has been treated like a victory over nature — like a finite game — when in fact it has always been an infinite game. And when an infinite game is treated like a finite game, eventually the finite aspect collapses — as we may be seeing in our own world soon.
Am I really laying this out as I experienced it? It occurs to me how fundamentally I have lived much of my life within the assumption that Western industrialized culture is ahead in the long race of human progress — when it’s possible that the race is actually supposed to be a long journey on foot — at a much different pace than a race — and the industrialized world has not only leaped ahead, but in fact gone much to far, much too fast.
It isn’t just about structures of empire. It’s about another misdirecting notion. The lapse is not only to be materially behind. The lapse is also to be materially ahead. And that that is a glaring, basic, unmistakable reality that nearly the entirety of this culture has overlooked.
Suddenly the entire remedy seemed to be encapsulated in this moment. The thing to do is to rent a room in a public library for two hours. Sit in the public imperfection of that little room, that space simultaneously sanitized and still a little grimy, and play games with a friend. Be good and gentle. Be generally inclined toward diligence. But also, let life course as it wants to. Perhaps the absolutely most important thing is that we are in God’s hands, and perhaps God’s hands are good hands. There’s so much value in gearing the heck down.
I drove home in a completely different frame of mind. My dilemma about working with plastic and all those chemicals remained unresolved. But I had some new ideas.
It’s good to be good — to be kind, to make good effort, to try to be the most moral person one can be — to make a good, effortful offering, toward goodness, with all of the moments of our lives. But there’s something very liberating about the idea that we are inextricably in the infinite game, too — which, even in its most unadorned simplicity, is ceaselessly marvelous.
To create marvels within this universe is sometimes, not always, to guild the lily. And I realize that, for me, there is wisdom in being unafraid to amount to nothing more than what I am in any given moment.