Finite and Infinite Games — The Philosophy Book That Changed How I Think About Marketing

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Nov 14, 2019

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A review of James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games — and why its framework for thinking about competition, culture, and purpose is unexpectedly useful for marketers and entrepreneurs.

The Client Meeting That Made Me Think Differently

A few years into running the agency, I sat across from a brand director who was frustrated. Their Douyin numbers were strong — follower growth on target, engagement rates healthy, content performing well against benchmarks. By every metric we'd agreed on at the start of the year, the account was succeeding.

But she felt like something was missing. The brand had an audience. It didn't have a community. People were watching but not talking. They were clicking but not caring. The numbers were good and the relationship with the platform felt hollow.

I didn't have clean language for what she was describing at the time. I do now, mostly because of a short, strange, deeply useful book by an American philosopher named James Carse.

Finite and Infinite Games was published in 1986 and runs to fewer than 200 pages. It has been recommended to me by multiple people over the years in completely different contexts — a founder, a strategist, someone who works in education. The book has that quality of being useful to almost everyone who reads it, for reasons specific to their own situation. What I took from it was a framework for understanding a tension I'd been observing in marketing for years without having the right words for it.

The Core Idea — And Why the Chinese Translation Gets It Wrong

The book's central distinction is simple: there are finite games, played to win and end, and infinite games, played to continue.

A quick note on terminology: the Chinese translation renders "game" as 游戏, which implies something light and recreational. A more accurate translation would be 博弈 — the term used in game theory, which carries the sense of strategic interaction with genuine stakes. This matters because Carse is not writing about entertainment. He is writing about every form of human activity in which people engage with purpose and consequence.

Finite games have defined rules, defined players, a beginning and an end, and a winner. The purpose of a finite game is to win it. Chess. A job interview. A quarterly sales target. A political election. Finite games are characterised by their boundaries — once you know the rules and the endpoint, you know how to optimise your play.

Infinite games have no fixed endpoint and no final winner. The purpose is not to win but to keep the game going — to ensure that play continues and that more players can join. Marriage. Culture. Language. A creative field. A meaningful career. Infinite games change their rules over time when necessary, specifically to avoid the game ending.

Carse's insight, which sounds obvious until you think about how rarely it gets applied: most of the things that matter most to us are infinite games, but we keep trying to play them with finite game logic.

What This Has to Do With Marketing

When I think about the tension that brand director was describing — good numbers, hollow relationship — the finite/infinite framework maps directly onto it.

Most marketing is organised around finite games. Campaigns have start dates and end dates. KPIs have targets. Quarterly reviews assess whether the number went up or down. Budgets get allocated based on what "won" last period. This is all rational and largely necessary — businesses need measurable outcomes, and campaigns need parameters.

The problem is when finite game logic gets applied to things that are fundamentally infinite games. Brand trust is an infinite game. Community is an infinite game. The relationship between a brand and its audience — the kind of relationship where people actually care what happens to a company, where they defend it when it makes mistakes, where they tell their friends without being incentivised to — that is an infinite game. And it cannot be optimised the way a campaign can be optimised.

I've watched this play out in both directions across the markets I work in.

In North America, I've seen brands with genuinely impressive engagement metrics that have no idea who their audience actually is. They've run enough campaigns to generate numbers. They haven't had enough real conversations to generate understanding. The metrics win the finite game. The relationship, which is the infinite game, stays underdeveloped.

In the Greater China market — on Xiaohongshu and Douyin especially — the brands that build lasting presence aren't necessarily the ones with the best content schedules. They're the ones that engage like a person rather than a brand manager. They respond to comments with genuine opinions. They notice what their community is actually talking about and join the conversation rather than redirect it. They play the infinite game, which means they're willing to invest in the relationship before the return is visible in any metric.

The follower count is a finite game score. The follower who mentions your brand unprompted to a friend because they actually like it — that's an infinite game outcome. Both matter. They require different kinds of attention.

Finite and Infinite in Business and Agency Work

The framework extended further for me when I started applying it to the business of running a consultancy.

Project-based work is, structurally, a finite game. There's a scope, a timeline, a deliverable, a sign-off. When the project ends, the game ends. This is how most agency relationships are structured, and it creates a particular dynamic: both sides optimise for the deliverable rather than the relationship, because the deliverable is what the finite game is scored on.

The client relationships that have meant most to me professionally — the ones that have lasted years and grown in scope and generated real mutual investment — are the ones where both sides consciously shifted to infinite game logic at some point. Not "what do we need to deliver to close this project?" but "what does this brand actually need to grow, and how do we keep solving that problem together over time?" The conversation changes. The stakes change. The quality of the work changes too, usually.

This shift is harder to make than it sounds, particularly when business development incentives are structured around new clients rather than deepening existing relationships. Finite game metrics (new accounts, project revenue, team utilisation) can actively work against infinite game relationship building if you're not paying attention to both simultaneously.

The Part About "Playing Toward Death"

There's a section of Finite and Infinite Games that I've thought about more than any other — Carse's concept of "living toward death."

His point is not morbid. It's clarifying: finite games derive meaning from their endings. A match matters because it ends and someone wins. But if life itself is an infinite game, then death is not the thing that gives life meaning — it's the thing that marks its limit. The question, for infinite games, is not "how do I win before this ends?" but "how do I play in a way that keeps something valuable continuing beyond me?"

For entrepreneurs and small business owners, I find this reframe genuinely useful. There's a version of building a business that is purely a finite game — build to exit, optimise for a transaction, define success as the moment you cash out. That's a legitimate approach and some people play it well. But many people I've worked with, including myself, are actually playing a different game — building something they care about continuing, growing a team they want to keep working with, developing expertise they want to keep deepening. When you're playing an infinite game and using finite game metrics to evaluate it, you'll feel constantly behind even when things are going well.

Naming the game you're actually in is more than half the work of playing it well.

What I'd Tell Someone Reading This Today

Finite and Infinite Games is not a business book, and it shouldn't be read as one. It's a philosophy book — genuinely strange in places, deliberately aphoristic, written by someone who was more interested in asking good questions than providing actionable frameworks. Simon Sinek wrote a more accessible business-oriented version of a similar idea in The Infinite Game, if that's what you're after.

But Carse's original is worth the effort precisely because it isn't practical in the conventional sense. It changes the way you see the categories, not just the tactics. And that shift — from optimising a finite game to understanding which game you're actually playing — tends to be worth more, over time, than any specific technique.

The question I came away with, and still return to: which of the things I'm working on are finite games I'm treating as infinite, and which are infinite games I'm mismanaging by applying finite game logic? The answer is almost always clarifying, and usually uncomfortable in the most useful way.