The Infinite Game

I was an avid reader as a kid, and one of my absolute favorite books was Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and his follow on Speaker for the Dead trilogy.

One of the major subplot points in the first book is the Giant’s Drink. The main character, Ender, is attending a space based military officer training academy and the cadets (children) have access to a game room in their downtime. Ender quiclly becomes bored of every game apart from the Giant’s Drink.

In actuality the game is called the Mind Game; the Giant’s Drink is merely being the “final” stage of the game. This final stage is important to the plot for various reasons I won’t go into right now. The important thing is that the Mind Game is an adaptive, procedurally generated game which adapts to the mind and actions of the player. The Mind Game is an infinite game.

I’ve been fascinated by the notion of the infinite game ever since.

I bring this up because, of course, generative AI suggests the opportunity for the procedurally generated gaming experience. Which opens the door to both the fully individualized gaming experience as well as the infinite game. For the purpose of this conversation let’s abbrviate the collection of both to the infinite game following my assertion that the notion of an infinite game presupposes the individually adaptive experience.

The infinite game has held the place of a romantic ideal in my mind ever since those teenage years. A fully adaptive alternate reality, a world all our own, made effortlessly as a result of the decisions made along the way. An effortless reflection of our souls in a sandboxed environment.

I thought the infinite game was obviously the future but I’ve been convinced otherwise. This has been a result of reflection as well as thought partnership with the very brilliant @lukalotl.

The reasons to think the infinite game will not work:

(1) Humans need the notion of an achievement or final goal in order to stay engaged. They get lost and don’t know what to do without a final objective.

[I forget what the rest of the reasons why an infinite game won’t work are and I need to catch my flight. I will have to rewrite this post completely in another daily]