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Description of  FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES

A fascinating meditation on life as a contest of games to be completed and games to be continued-and on what lies beyond winning and losing. Professor Carse writes in the first chapter, "There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play." From that beginning he broadly defines "game" in a way that includes, defines, and lays an analytical foundation for all relationships. The book's subtitle is "A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility," and it is a profound work, practically a unified-field theory of human relationships. The first step in appreciating this book is understanding that any relationship or process can be characterized in "finite" or "infinite" terms. The second step is recognizing that that characterization is almost always a matter of choice and that, by choosing to characterize a relationship as "infinite," one can redefine it in a meaningful and healthy way. After reading this book, you may never look at the world around you, or at any relationship, or at yourself in quite the same way. This book reconfigures thinking about interpersonal reality as deeply as Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions"