Rating: 
Summary: Game Time!
Review: I buy this book in bulk when I can and give it as gifts to people I care about. Carse makes a profound distinction between games that are essentially futile and games that support and maintain life and creates a beautiful little handbook for living. There are games that end in X amount a time with a clear loser and winner and there are games that are played for their own sake where competition is not a factor and all participants are winners. Carse's distinctions remind me of Eric Berne's concepts of Good Games and Bad Games. Carse's descriptions are much more general and are not as difficult to understand as Berne's -- they don't require the background of Transactional Analysis to understand making "Finite and Infinite Games" more generally applicable and useful. Pretty good work for a Methodist minister! :-)
Rating:
Summary: Game Time!
Review: I buy this book in bulk when I can and give it as gifts to people I care about. Carse makes a profound distinction between games that are essentially futile and games that support and maintain life and creates a beautiful little handbook for living. There are games that end in X amount a time with a clear loser and winner and there are games that are played for their own sake where competition is not a factor and all participants are winners. Carse's distinctions remind me of Eric Berne's concepts of Good Games and Bad Games. Carse's descriptions are much more general and are not as difficult to understand as Berne's -- they don't require the background of Transactional Analysis to understand making "Finite and Infinite Games" more generally applicable and useful. Pretty good work for a Methodist minister! :-)
Rating:
Summary: paradigm shift in easy to understand examples
Review: i first read this book in japan, and the guy who lent it to me almost lost it to me. it consolidates thousands of "self-help" and mysticism books into elegant, geometric-proof style summations of personal experience. i've been sent to organizational training seminars for work purposes and have read various martial arts and bodywork texts, also for work purposes. the principles in "finite and infinite games" added immensely to all of it. carse's ideas are like alexander technique for the mind and soul. and if you're interested in alexander technique, check out the new book by macdonald.
Rating:
Summary: All the world's a stage
Review: I read this book a few years ago, and it confirmed a lot of what I thought about life, and completely changed some others. Some books present ideas that are so fundamental, that you have to go and re-write whole chapters of your view on life when you read them. This is one of those books. The pilosophy present is so clear cut, so obvious, and so simple, that it, if it doesn't change your life, it will at the very least change the way you think life should be, and can be lead.
Rating: 
Summary: What is necessary?
Review: I think this is one of the most important books I have ever read. It could probably be reread 25 times and you would still never completely "get it." It is like visiting a planet where, if you drop something, it falls to the ceiling, and a 24-hour cycle is assumed to start with night, instead of daybreak. But it is very simple and straightforward; the author is not trying to play any tricks. The main point of the book is that everything we agree is inevitable, necessary, and unalterable, is really a collective choice to consider it so. That is not to claim that conventionally moral behavior is "bad"--only that it can be used in two different ways. One way is to circumscribe and control people's thinking and behavior. Another is to open up more possibilities. A fictional depiction of the ideas in this book is Finny, the hero of "A Separate Peace." When Finny and his friends are playing an improvised ball game, Leper, something of a stick in the mud, will not accept the ball when it is passed to him, even though he is "supposed to," by any conventional thinking about sports. In normal terms, this "ought" to "end the game"--but Finny, instead, immediately improvises a variation called the "Lepellier refusal," if I remember correctly, thus finding a way to keep Leper in the game. That is what Infinite Games are about: finding ways to continue the play. Finite games, on the other hand, seek to end themselves as soon as possible and declare winners and losers. Carse has also written "The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple," an imaginative and provocative rethinking of the gospel story, and "Breakfast at the Victory," an excellent book of reflections on the mystical in ordinary experience. These books, and "Finite and Infinite Games," could also be read profitably along with Clark Strand's "The Wooden Bowl," which touches on some of the same ideas: that moments of grace and self realization are spontaneous, and we then proceed to invent various paraphernalia and apparatus, organizational structures and chains of command, gurus and sacred scriptures.
Rating:
Summary: New Age Nonsense? PSHAW!
Review: I want to specifically respond to the reviewer who wrote that this book is "new age nonsense" and that it encourages Christianity. Firstly, that's an impossible juxtaposition if I've ever heard one. Secondly, the book explains quite succintly that an infinite player could never seriously be a Christian. Read the book again, and you'll see that, while it does offer a way of viewing life that could dictate how one acts spiritually, it actually offers a very logical way of appreciating the world. There's far more to this book than just an analysis of spirituality, but of war, nature, technology -- if it's in our world, it's covered somehow in this extrodinary book.
Rating:
Summary: Two words: 1) Mind 2) Blowing
Review: In a cutthroat competitive society such as ours, where "winner take all" isn't just a slogan, but the guiding metaphysical principle, this book comes like a cool refreshing glass of water, gently nudging us into a wonderful paradigm shift.
Rating: 
Summary: Ripe, but a little game-y :)
Review: In a way, this book fulfills Wittgenstein's prediction that the philosophy of the future will be written as a poetic composition. Whether that's good or bad for philosophy, well... I wouldn't call "Finite and Infinite Games" a 'willful complication of thought,' as one reviewer put it; if it is, it is only in the sense that new ways of looking at the world seem complicated at first. That said, Carse's enthusiasm for his concept of finite and infinite games tends to get the better of him, inasmuch as he is often too quick to file phenomena into either the 'finite' category or the 'infinite' category, when a more subtle approach would be appropriate. But, as I said, this is more poetry than science. Which is not to say that Carse's book is useless, or 'metaphysical': in fact, I found it to be one of the more profound books I've ever read, if only for the many startling thoughts contained in it. Carse's treatments of sexuality, the unspeakability of nature, indeed, the whole idea of an infinite activity, all resonated with me, if not for their truth, then for the possibility of their truth. Possibility, in fact, is a major theme of this book: as Carse puts it: "Who must play cannot play." Which means, you have a lot more freedom than you think, if you are aware of the customary nature of human activities and how their boundaries can be played with. One doesn't have infinite power; indeed, infinite players, according to Carse, do not seek power as an end but only as a means to continuing play. How much truth there is in such a claim I leave to the reader, where it is sure to be much more lively. In short, read this book, be captivated by it, but don't expect any final answers.
Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking view of decisions, relationships, and self
Review: Interesting and thought provoking. A bit scholastic but quite readable. Opens a whole new dimension of thought by catagorizing all decisions and relationships within the framework of finite games (those that must be won by someone) and infinite games (those that must never be won). Guaranteed to make you take at least a little closer look at yourself..
Rating: 
Summary: What is this?
Review: It must be me...but this book is absolutely senseless. It does not say ANYTHING that I don't already know..and whatever little it does convey, it does so again and again and again....and again! Boring!
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