15 - The Best Game in Town

B-RAD with Brad Toews

"You can lose when you outscore somebody in a game. And you can win when you're outscored." — John Wooden

My kids love playing the game Shotgun. This is not a game with real guns, we're urban Canadians. I'm referring to the game where a person claims the front passenger seat when riding in the car.

Shotgun, the game, is a finite game. It has known players, fixed rules, and an agreed upon objective. There is a winner and everyone else is a loser and losers sit in the backseat, obviously.

What is a finite game?

The term finite game originally comes from the work of 21st century philosopher James P. Carse who wrote the book Finite and Infinite Games. Carse's ideas were picked up and made accessible to the masses by Simon Sinek, most notably in his popular TED Talk - What game theory teaches us about war.

In this podcast I'm not primarily concerned with what game theory teaches us about war, but with what game theory teaches us about life.

How does the idea of finite and infinite games inform how we live?

Perhaps you want to pick up Carse's book for deep dive in this topic. Or, you can listen to my take on this episode.

Have you seen The Hunger Games movie, or read the book? The Hunger Games, where twelve teenage children fight to the death, arena-style with one victor and eleven dead losers, were perceived by the characters as a finite game. But as Katniss and Peeta find out, The Hunger Games were actually an infinite game with unknown players, rules that change, and an objective to perpetuate the system.

We all understand the concept of finite games, we play them all the time. Shotgun is a prime example, so is baseball.

But what about the game of life? (Not the board game, but your actual life.) Do you play it like a finite game? With metrics for success and getting ahead. A definition of winners and losers, who's in and who's out.

It's easy to play your life this way. We do it without thinking.

Within the boundary of a finite game we either win or we lose. Whereas an infinite game offers more possibility.

If we choose to play the infinite game, we don't play to win, we play to play.

Which is to say, we live for the sake of living, not for the sake of what we can achieve by living.

The finite game offers win or lose outcomes and the finite game will fail us at some point. Both in our success and in our loss.

But if we're already endowed, embedded, or encoded with the infinite and all its possibilities, beyond simply winning or losing, why do we play a finite game?

What if we stop playing to win and simply play to play?

Join me in this episode as I consider the game Shotgun, The Hunger Games, and a finely brewed espresso as examples of finite and infinite experience, and challenge you to re-think the game you're playing.

In-depth shownotes, images, links, and other resources at Brad Toews.