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Finite and Infinite Games (MM to TR Promotion) | 
 enlarge | Author: James P. Carse
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book
Used (10) from $3.74
Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 1120765
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.5
ISBN: 0345419022
Dewey Decimal Number: 160
EAN: 9780345419026
ASIN: 0345419022
Publication Date: June 23, 1997
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 35 more reviews...
 meh January 5, 2009
Reading this book reminded me why I haven't read any philosophy in 10 years, and thus it'll be another 10 years before I try again (it'll probably be Foucalt's prison book next time). It's a mildly logical tract with some nice, pithy passages masquerading as a profound statement of truth. In the end, it doesn't tell us more about our milieu than we could have learned in 5 pages. The rest is fluff which might give the impression of profoundness and novelty.
I'm perhaps in violent agreement with hangedman's statement of the character of the book, differing only the conclusion about whether said character is a positive or a negative. If you want poetry which imposes a world view about human nature, there are many better places to look.
 Human Condition as Gaming Theory September 30, 2008
The author is a professor of religion at NYU but the book is not about religion. It is about spirituality as seen through the lens of gaming theory. I mean that in a very left brain, non-linear sense. It is not about any geo-political or historical materialist games that all dominant churches play. It is as visionary as Schrodinger's What Is Life?: with "Mind and Matter" and "Autobiographical Sketches" and as canonical as G. Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form. I write more about this book at http://www.transitionchoices.com/cgi-bin/article.pl?id=2
 Skip this one July 9, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is basic philosophy wrapped in a poor metaphor. To sum the book, there are things that we must cast off as trivial and there are things that transcend our immediate concerns. Pay attention to the larger concerns and forget the "small stuff." Read Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius instead if you wish to explore your own place in life.
Starts out well, then descends to nonsense June 5, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I enjoyed the first chapter of this book. His explanation of what he calls finite games is interesting and can be useful in looking at relationships, politics, entertainment, etc. He draws some nice distinctions between those and what he calls "infinite games," but since infinite games are much harder to explain the book goes awry in the later chapters.
The book is written in a sort of Tralfamadorian-style series of brief sections, each with its own paradoxical and sometimes interesting idea. After the first chapter, though, the style begins to pall and by the third chapter--"I am the Genius of Myself"--paradox becomes an end in itself and a book that had been interesting descends to the merely clever and then to the meaningless. For example, here is the difference between infinite and finite players on the subject of war: "For infinite players, if it possible to wage war without killing a single person [an idea he takes from Rousseau], then it is possible to wage war only without killing a single person." He does not offer any reasons why this is true, or even what it means. In the last five chapters, Carse makes many statements like this. Some are unexplained, some perhaps inexplicable and many that are just silly.
Eventually, the book becomes banal: finite players are bad, infinite players are good. If you must read the book, stop after the second chapter.
Open the book, open your mind March 21, 2008
All the reviews of this book - good, bad, indifferent - are correct. But not because of ambiguity, but because it talks about the essential duality of life - ying/yang, I/thou, theory of mind, stimulus/response, conservation of energy - with us stuck in between. I read it as a phenomenology with us in tension between object and subject. This book has no purpose other than to get people - everyman - to think. The reviews indicate it has clearly achieved that objective.
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