“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing to play.” —Richard Powers, Playground
“Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.” —Robin Sloan, Sourdough
Allow me to introduce you to two fictional programmers—one each from the novels Playground by Richard Powers (2024) and Sourdough by Robin Sloan (2017). (Note: this essay contains spoilers for both of these novels.)
Todd Keane is a computer whiz among computer whizzes at the very dawn of the Computer Age. He single-handedly invents a revolutionary social media platform called Playground, combining his own obsessive tinkering with a unique insight into human nature provided by his best friend Rafi, a kid from Chicago’s West Side with little experience with or trust for computers. As both Todd’s invention and the Internet begin to gain traction, Todd—still in his mid-twenties—is faced with the choice between two staggering investment offers. One option would give him enough start-up cash to hire several programmers under him but leave him in charge of the operation. The other option, an order of magnitude larger, would buy the platform from him directly while allowing him to stay on as a lead programmer. Todd’s mentor poses the crucial question for deciding which option he will take: “What makes you happy? … How do you define a day well spent?” A devotee of games of all sorts, Todd immediately recognizes that for him, programming is an infinite game, and confidently declares, “No one is going to run my company but me.” Without further hesitation, he takes the start-up offer, keeping the reins in his own hands.
Lois Clary is several months into an intense Silicon Valley job helping to program robotic arms in “a quest to end work” and beginning to subsist on a meal-replacement drink called Slurry. On a whim, she orders out from the nearby Clement Street Soup and Sourdough. She quickly becomes enthralled with the bread’s near-magic effects on both body and mind, and she forms a sort-of friendship with Beoreg, the bread’s baker. But when Beoreg must leave the country suddenly and mysteriously, he presents Lois with the sourdough’s starter so that she can continue baking the unique bread for herself. Faced with this unlooked-for gift, Lois sets out to teach herself how to feed and bake sourdough. Her newfound talent quickly comes to the attention of her company’s in-house chef, who offers to buy from her the company’s daily order of eight loaves. After taking Chef Kate her first invoice for forty dollars, Lois realizes, “I made more than that in fifteen minutes of programming, but this money felt special.” She goes on to reflect on the difference between programming and baking:
At General Dexterity, I was contributing to an effort to make repetitive labor obsolete. After a trainer in the Task Acquisition Center taught an arm how to do something, all the arms did it perfectly, forever.
In other words, you solved a problem once, and then you moved on to more interesting things.
Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested.
Thus, the problem was ongoing.
Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.
Lois bakes exactly eight loaves every day that week, watches her coworkers and her CEO eat grilled cheese sandwiches made from her bread, and brings a loaf to the local Lois Club (a meeting of people named Lois), where she receives the moniker Lois the Baker.
Both Todd the Programmer and Lois the Baker have discovered something that is, for them, an infinite game: something that is played for the purpose of continuing to play. In other words, something worth doing for its own sake rather than for the sake of some other end. Such inherently worthwhile practices are traditionally referred to as leisure. Jeff Reimer has recently written about the challenge and value of pursuing a leisurely way of life in the contemporary world:
Overall what I’ve been describing is the life of leisure. This may sound odd, but the word “leisure” in the classical sense is not about lounging and recreation but about contemplating the world for its own sake…. The philosopher Zena Hitz writes, “When we are at leisure, we stop counting the minutes toward the goal, because the goal is precisely what we are doing.” How many things do you do in a day that would fit that description, where the goal is what you are doing? If our noisy, busy, hurried, efficient, results-oriented culture had its way, the number would be close to zero.
But leisure is more than simply any activity that obscures the passage of time. Rather, Reimer explains, leisure is “to receive the gift of the world that God is giving to us, every moment. It is to love the world because God has loved it by becoming part of it, by blessing it with his human presence in Christ. It is to lose yourself in the world and find that you have been swept up into the presence of God.” Kevin Gary similarly describes leisure as a state of receptivity more than a rarified set of activities: “More than simply time apart, then, leisure is a state of inner tranquility that enables the soul to greet the world receptively, in awareness of its mystery, rather than as something to be mastered.“ Gary goes on to explore how we can inhabit such a posture of receptivity in tasks as mundane as peeling potatoes and washing dishes. “[T]he experience of leisure,” he concludes, “[is] a gift that we do not possess or control … a posture of openness, characterized by calm attentiveness.”
For all his understanding of infinite games, Todd the Programmer actually knows little of true leisure: he treats programming as an end in itself, but also as a site for his own striving to be the best and have the most, with no regard for those he must climb over in his quest for achievement.
So leisure is anything that is a goal in itself, not simply because it has consumed our attention but because we have entered into it with a posture of humility, receptivity, and wonder. In this sense, for all his understanding of infinite games, Todd the Programmer actually knows little of true leisure: he treats programming as an end in itself, but also as a site for his own striving to be the best and have the most, with no regard for those he must climb over in his quest for achievement. As a teenager, Todd makes use of others’ freely given code and gives his own away until his father calls him a fool and helps him monetize a basic chess-practice program. “Soon enough,” Todd recalls, “I was making two hundred dollars a week.” He continues, “It occurs to me only now, more than forty years later, that I was selling software that contained large pieces of other people’s donated code.” Todd’s penchant for thanklessly cashing in on other people’s genius ultimately costs him the greatest friend he ever had. By the time he is a multimillionaire CEO, he has completely forgotten that the idea that made the Playground platform really take off was not his own but that of his best friend Rafi. “He earned nothing from that invention,” Todd reflects, “and I had built a mansion on a ridge in San Jose.” Even when his former friend reminds him of the debt—to the tune of three-quarters of a million dollars—Todd repeatedly minimizes that indebtedness, feeling that he has been wronged by his friend rather than the other way around.
Lois, too, finds herself at the intersection of gift economy and personal striving. Although she is clearly a highly skilled programmer, her life story gives little evidence of personal ambition. Explaining her career’s beginning, she reflects, “programming was taking on a sheen of dynamism and computer science departments were wooing young women aggressively. It’s nice to be wooed.” The gift that really drives the novel’s plot, though, is the sourdough starter itself. Out of his own generosity, Beoreg gives Lois his precious starter, along with all the instructions, ingredients, and tools (including a customized music CD) needed to keep it alive. Lois reluctantly agrees to keep the starter alive by feeding it every day. (“This was seeming like more and more of a commitment,” she muses dryly.) As she teaches herself how to bake bread, she begins to reflect for the first time in her life on how food comes into being. Her newfound wonder and agency also put her in a position to be generous in turn: “How many humans have baked how many loaves of bread, across how many centuries? … But that didn’t matter. For me, the novice, the miracle was intact, and I felt compelled by some force—new to me, thrillingly implacable—to share.” She offers a loaf first to her upstairs neighbor, then to a stranger down the street (who skeptically refuses), and finally to her coworkers. One of those coworkers likewise marvels at the complexity of a simple loaf of bread: “Garrett’s eyes were wide with disbelief. ‘It was … alive,’ he said softly. Wonderingly. He, like me, had never before considered where bread came from, or why it looked the way it did.” Another coworker invites the company chef to check out Lois’s sourdough creation, and her journey to commercial success is on—launched by simple acts of generosity and wonder.
But is such humility and openness really essential to leisure? Gary notes that leisure itself, given its connections with the pursuit of excellence, can all too easily devolve from joyful receptivity to striving for personal achievement. And all the games that Todd the Programmer loves best are not only intensely strategic but also highly competitive (chess, Go). But thinking more carefully about the idea of an infinite game reveals, albeit circuitously, that a spirit of receptivity really is indispensable to leisure. By definition, an infinite game means one in which there will never be a state in which the game is either won or lost, and therefore ended; for this reason, an infinite game is played only in order to play the game. This means that an infinite game must be not only intrinsically worthwhile but also sustainable, and that indefinitely.
Writing about the need for city governments to turn a profit so that they can last for generations to come, Chuck Marohn imagines a baseball game with no end. In such a game, risk of failure comes to matter as much as or more than a chance to score points: “An infinite game wouldn’t be played to win, but to survive.” (Note the subtle but important shift from Todd’s characterization of an infinite game!) Given this prioritization of risk over scoring, the players in an unending game would form a sort of culture of receptivity, both within and across teams: “Instead of players focusing on competition with a rival, the focus would shift to supporting the players on one’s own team. Without any chance of final victory, new forms of cooperation with the other team—sometimes called the ‘unwritten rules of the game’—would also emerge.” Marohn argues that cities are more like infinite baseball games than either real baseball or private sector businesses: “As uninspiring as it may be, the primary goal of a city must be to endure.”
Intrinsic worth, receptivity, sustainability: these characteristics are each indispensable to an infinite game, and each mutually reinforces the others. Gary’s final argument for the pursuit of leisure calls back to Lois’s reflections on whether work is made meaningful by ending repetition or leaning into it. Gary offers Nietzsche’s thought experiment of “eternal recurrence,” in which we are doomed (or blessed) to live the life we have lived over again an infinite number of times. Gary explains, “[Nietzsche’s] conjecture is intended to provoke reflection and action, daring us to live the kind of life that we would be content to live for an eternity.” But Gary interprets eternal recurrence not as “a call to live out a bucket list,” but rather as an encouragement to rest in love—for oneself and for others and, ultimately, the freely given love of God. From such a posture of leisure, the character of repetition is utterly changed: “For the bored self, repetition causes despair; for the leisurely self, repetition renews.”
Both Lois the Baker’s and Todd the Programmer’s stories end with an ironic twist, in which they discover that personal ambition can never be as worthwhile or as sustainable as generosity, receptivity, and friendship. Lois’s sourdough starter begins by embodying a leisurely spirit of receptivity: as a free gift begetting further acts of generosity (the loaves she gives away and sells for almost nothing). But as successes (and loaves) pile up one after another, the starter grows more and more ambitious until it quite literally tries to take over the warehouse where Lois’s farmers’ market is housed. (I am not anthropomorphizing for dramatic effect; in keeping with Sloan’s magical realism, Lois’s starter expresses itself with eerie lights and sounds, and the loaves Lois bakes display faces in their crusts that reveal the starter’s shifting moods.) By the end of the novel, Lois decides to abandon the all-consuming starter, turning down a partnership offer that had the potential to not only to make her millions but to rewrite “the whole future of food.” Instead, with a prod from the oldest member of the local Lois Club, she departs to reunite with Beoreg. Together, the novel’s conclusion hints, they will build a company and a life that may change the world in its own way.
Unlike Lois the Baker, Todd the Programmer does not recognize either gifts or givers until it is (nearly) too late. Throughout his life, his continual drive to be the very best (smartest, richest) blinds him to the true gifts of friendship and wonder. Yet he too experiences an ironic reversal near the novel’s end. Diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, he faces both the rapid deterioration of his own mind and the dawning realization that he can’t bring himself to leave his vast fortune to a seasteading nonprofit he helped to found. Desperate to process these life-altering changes and with no one else to turn to, he begins to recount his life story to a next-next-generation Artificial Intelligence trained on both his beloved games and the entire Playground corpus. He then asks that same AI to tell him a bedtime story, using every scrap of data it has about his past relationships. (The entire novel, we realize, consists of the intertwining of these two narratives.) The AI weaves a too-good-to-be-true fairy tale in which Rafi does not die of “what black people die of so often in America: a heart attack,” but instead reunites with his lover, adopts two children, and makes a home for himself on the very Polynesian island that Todd’s seasteading project would likely destroy. The AI’s story reawakens Todd’s childhood love for the ocean and reveals a possible path to redemption: rather than leave his wealth to the seasteading venture, he can instead turn the island into a marine park, a piece of ocean that will endure long enough for coming generations to learn to love it, too. This superhuman intelligence, born of Rafi’s creativity and Todd’s ambition, gives Todd one last gift: the imagination to let his ambition go. Confronted with the undeniable fact that his own life will come to an end, Todd at last understands what even the ocean creatures know: that a life well lived consists not in winning but in playing.
Image via Picryl.
