I stumbled on a video I made a few years ago, five minutes before I sat down to watch the United States play Iran in the World Cup. I wasn’t looking for it. But with the World Cup final happening this Sunday, and the U.S. and Iran now actually at war, I couldn’t get over how well it still fits. So I’m sharing it again, with a little context.
The idea in the video is simple, and it comes from James Carse: there are finite games and infinite games. A finite game has a clear ending, and the point is to win. A soccer match is finite. Someone wins, someone loses, sometimes they tie. Here’s the important part: nobody walks away thinking they’ve won soccer. They just won this game. Next week there’s another one.
An infinite game is different. The point isn’t to win; the point is to keep playing. Nuclear weapons, human rights, two nations sharing a planet, those we want to be infinite games. There’s no final whistle. There’s no scoreline that settles it forever.
Here’s what got me. In 2022, the US and Iran met on a soccer field, played their ninety minutes, and moved on. This year they’re not on a field. And we keep treating the conflict like there’s a final whistle coming, like if we just strike hard enough, or sign the right ceasefire, we’ll win and be done. A ceasefire got signed. Twenty-five days later it was in pieces.
That’s finite-game logic applied to an infinite game, and it fails every time, not because anyone is uniquely evil, but because you cannot end a game that has no end.
I wrote about this a while back in a piece called Finality is a Myth. One of the truths of conflict I keep coming back to is that there will never be a final outcome. The way we play becomes the thing we get. If the process is “win and humiliate,” the outcome is more of the same, just on a delay. Ursula K. Le Guin said it better than I can, in The Lathe of Heaven:
“The ends justify the means? But what if there never is an end, and all we have is means?”
That’s the whole thing. All we have is means. So the real question was never “how do we win against Iran.” It’s “how do we want to keep playing,” because we are going to keep sharing this planet whether we like it or not. The work isn’t to end the game. It’s to raise the quality of how we play it.
The World Cup, ironically, is the good example. Someone lifts the trophy on Sunday. Nobody thinks soccer is finished. We start again in four years. That’s an infinite game, played well.
Anyway, here’s the video, from a calmer moment, before all of this. I wish we were at war defending women’s rights.
Go Team USA. And maybe, also, go everybody.
