I read Finite and Infinite Games per recommendation by Kevin Kelly. It was every bit as transformative and impactful as I could have hoped. I'm still asking myself "how does the metaphor of finite and infinite games apply to this?" and I wager I will be doing that for years and years.
If you are in a hurry, just read the bolded quotes. They are all truly worth your time though.
Some context on his ideas about what a finite or infinite game is useful. In short, "a finite game is played with the purpose of winning (thus ending the game), while an infinite game is played with the purpose of continuing the play." You can read more on its Wikipedia page.
(started underlining on page 32)
Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence.
Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They therefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore a contradiction. They only attempt paradoxically to recognize in themselves the evil that takes the form of attempting to eliminate evil elsewhere.
The interest of infinite players has little in common with such politics, since they are not concerned to find how much freedom is available within the given realities.
This does not mean that infinite players are politically disengaged; it means that they are political without have a politics.
Instead they enter into social conflict dramatically, attempting to offer a vision of continuity and open-endedness in place of the heroic final scene.
If society is all that a people feels it must do, culture "is the realm of the variable, free, not necessarily universal, of all that cannot lay claim to compulsive authority."
Culture so bounded may even be lavishly subsidized and encouraged by society that it has the appearance of open-ended activity, but in fact it is designed to serve societal interests in every case - like the socialist realism of Soviet art.
Rather society is a species of culture that persists in contradicting itself, a freely organized attempt to conceal the freedom of the organizers and the organized, an attempt to forget that we have willfully forgotten our decision to enter this or that contest and continue in it.
Patriotism is one or several of its many forms (chauvinism, racism, sexism, nationalism, regionalism) is an ingredient in all societal play.
Culture is an enterprise of mortals, disdaining to protect themselves against surprise. Living in the strength of their vision, they eschew power and make joyous play of boundaries.
Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture.
Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance.
Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun and not finished in the past. Societal convention, on the other hand, requires that a completed past be repeated in the future. Society has all the seriousness of immortal necessity; culture resounds with the laughter of unexpected possibility. Society is abstract, culture concrete.
Property is an attempt to recover the past. It returns one to pre-competitive status. One is compensated for the amount of time spent (and thus lost) in competition.
Consumption is a kind of activity that is directly opposite to the very form of engagement by which the title was won. It must be the kind of activity that can convince all observers that the possessor's title to it is no longer in question.
The more we use up, therefore, the more we show ourselves to be winners of past contests.
The more effective policy for a society is to find ways of persuading its thieves to abandon their role as competitors for property for the sake of becoming audience to the theatre of wealth.
Another successful defense of society against the culture within itself is to give artists a place by regarding them as the producers of property, thus elevating the value of consuming art, or owning it.
Such museums are not designed to protect the art from people, but to protect the people from art.
Art that is used against a society or its policies gives up its character as infinite play, and aims at an end.
The creativity of culture has no outcome, no conclusion. It does not result in art works, artifacts, products. Creativity is a continuity that engenders itself in others. "Artists do not create objects, but create by way of objects" (Rank)
We do not watch artists to see what they do, but watch what persons do and discover the artistry in it.
The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise.
**Therefore poets do not "fit" in society, not because a place is denied for them but because they do not take their "places" seriously. The openly see its roles as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed, and its metaphysics idealogical.
For this reason it can be said that where a society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon.
Patriots can flourish only where the boundaries are well-defined, hostile, and dangerous.
One never reaches a horizon.
We may say a culture comes into being whenever persons choose to be a people.
War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification.
Infinite players do not rise to meet arms with arms; instead, they make use of laughter, vision, and surprise to engage the state and puts its boundaries back into play.
Whenever what is made (poiema) is separated from the maker (poietes), it becomes metaphysical. As it stands there, and as the voice of the poietes is no longer listened to, the poiema is an object to be studied, not an act to be learned. One cannot learn an object, but only the poiesis, or the act of creating objects. To separate the poiema from the poiesis, the created object from the creative act, is the essence of the theatrical.
You can have what you have only by releasing it to others.
A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play.