Written by James P. Carse, subtitled "A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility," I found this 1986 book strange, beguiling and somewhat befuddling. Judge for yourself - here're excerpts:

There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask. Self-veiling is a contradictory act - a free suspension of our freedom. Credibility will never suffice to undo the contradictoriness of self-veiling. As Sartre wrote, "To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe."

Seriousness is always related to roles, or abstractions. Seriousness always has to do with an established script, an ordering of affairs completed somewhere outside the range of our influence. We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out.

Finite players must appear to be something other than what they are. Everything about their appearance must be concealing.

To be prepared against surprised is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to educated.

It is a principal function of society to validate titles and to assure their perpetual recognition.

Power is never one's own, and in that respect it shows the contradiction inherent in all finite play. Power is concerned with what has already happened; strength with what has yet to happen.

Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion.

Ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons.

Museums are not designed to protect the art from people, but to protect the people from art.

As Otto Rank said, "Artists do not create objects, but create by way of objects."

We look on childhood and youth as those times of life rich with possibility only because there still seem to remain many paths open to a successful outcome. Each year that passes, however, increases the competitive value of making strategically correct decisions. The errors of childhood can be more easily amended than those of adulthood.

Work is not an infinite player's way of passing time, but of engendering possibility.

Explanation can tolerate a degree of chance, but it cannot comprehend freedom at all. We explain nothing when we say that persons do whatever they do because they choose to do it.

The demand for obedience is inherently evil.