VIRTUAL:
Thursday, January 4, 2024 | 7:00 PM US Central

Across disciplines as diverse as marketing, education, health, and management, “gamification” draws on our capacity to play to help us move ourselves and others toward a goal. Books like Burlingham and Stack’s “The Great Game of Business” and Boller and Kapp’s “Play to Learn” provide examples of how to apply this concept. With computers or consoles, balls or marbles, cards or boards, humans love games. The subtitle of this month’s book is “a vision of life as play and possibility.”

In Finite and Infinite Games: a Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, James P. Carse invites us to frame our lives, at work, at home, in society, as play and to choose what kind of game it will be. He says there are at least two kinds of games: “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” When we play a finite game with an opponent playing an infinte game, we’re destined to loose. The forces in our world that oppose peace and justice, as well as the empathy and compassion to leads to peace and justice, are playing an infinite game. We close this series with Carse’s work to inspire infinite strategies in which we might bring to life our role in bending “the arc of the moral universe … toward justice.”