When winning becomes the end, a culture that was an infinite game gets swallowed by a finite one.
1. The kingdom's pride and tradition
A storied Spanish club is a kingdom.
A stadium that swallows tens of thousands. The crest. The history. Legends passed down. Everyone longs for it, dreams of being chosen. There is, certainly, pride and tradition there.
But — what is that pride made of? And where does it lose its essence? This time I return to two books already seen: Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (#2) and James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games (#3).
2. Imagined Communities: a kingdom is made of story
Anderson's Imagined Communities, seen in #2, grasped the nation as "a community that holds together on shared story." People who don't even know each other's faces become one "we" by believing the same story.
A storied club is exactly the same. The crest, the club colors, the founding myth, the legendary players, the memories supporters pass down. These build the imagined community of "I'm a member of this kingdom." The source of pride is neither blood nor soil, but a shared story.
The stronger the story, the stronger the pull. Talent from all over the world gathers, drawn by that story. So far, it's beautiful. The problem is what that strong story starts spinning for.
3. Finite and Infinite Games: the game to win, the game to keep playing
Carse, seen in #3, split human activity into two kinds. The finite game, to win, and the infinite game, to keep playing.
A club's culture is, by nature, an infinite game. Win or lose, you kick the ball again tomorrow. A playground that goes on even as the generations turn over.
"It's a magical place. Enjoy it fully while you can still stand." There's something here outside winning and losing. The magic circle of Homo Ludens seen in #3 — another world where you can seriously play. The kingdom's essence was, probably, here at first. Not a place to win, but a magic place to keep playing.
4. Soccer for the sake of appeal
But the kingdom, before you notice, begins to tilt.
"Is there any purpose other than to appeal?" Soccer becomes a means of selling yourself to the top team. Play for the sake of being chosen, of winning a contract. What was play becomes an audition.
This is the entrance to finite-game-ification. The place to keep playing is quietly swapped for the place to win through. The moment the purpose of play shifts from "enjoy, continue" to "be chosen, win," the magic of the magic circle thins, little by little.
5. The merciless sieve
A kingdom dyed in the finite game takes this shape.
Gathering children from all over Spain, making them play a musical-chairs with their lives staked, and sieving them mercilessly. A handful remain. The rest are shaken off.
The efficiency of winning swallows the essence of cultivating. The "heat to cultivate" from #6 and the "ground that grows players" from #7 turn, here, into tools of selection. The kingdom becomes a machine that produces victory. The story stays beautiful. But the inside is no longer a playground to keep playing.
6. No malice is the scariest
And here is the scariest part. What turns the kingdom into a finite game isn't villains.
Everyone means well. They want them to win. To grow. They're thinking of the club. No one is trying to break the essence. And yet, at the far end of each person's good intentions, the place to keep playing has been swapped for a machine to win through.
If there were malice, you could still fight it. You could name someone the villain and stop them. But a malice-free decay has no enemy. That's exactly why it's hard to stop. This is the same structure as the Berserk-ification of #1 and the culting of #2. Strong story and heat turn people, before anyone notices, into "resources" or "pieces." And yet, there, there is no villain.
7. And still, a pure, equal world
But there's hope too. On that same pitch of the kingdom swallowed by the finite game, a saving grace remains.
"How pure, how equal a world." There may be no room for play here. What there is, is harsh competition. But that competition is — at least on the pitch — equal all the way through. Even a child is evaluated by the same values as an adult. Birth, title, connections — none of it matters. Before the ball, everyone is judged equally.
This is a little different from the core of play (the infinite game) seen in #3. It's rather the most beautiful part of the harsh finite game — the strict equality that a contest is decided purely by ability.
If so, the kingdom's true fall lies further out than the moment winning becomes the end. It's when it loses even this pure equality — when connections, politics, and deference begin to decide the outcome off the pitch. Pride is, probably, not winning forever. It's never letting go, to the very end, of that one point: "before the ball, everyone is equal."
And one more thing. A kingdom that aims only at winning — even if its competition is fair — may someday be outcompeted by another civilization. One that keeps play, and keeps trying new things. The room for evolution is always opened inside play. Not the one who perfects the form and guards it, but the one who can still break the form and play, opens the next era. If so, never letting go of pure equality and never letting go of play turn out, in the end, to be one and the same.
8. Observation, and the kingdom
Finally, to OrbitLens.
An organization, too, is an imagined community (#2). Mission, values, the founding story — a shared story builds the "we." That itself is a source of strength.
The danger is when observation becomes an "apparatus to rank for winning" (#3). Selecting people by score, sieving them, keeping only those who can win. That way, a community for keeping going is swapped for an arena for winning through. And — with no malice. Everyone, meaning well, spins the KPIs. The Berserk of #1, the shared illusion of #2, the finite game of #3. In the end, it returns to the same conditions.
That EIS could become a leaderboard is what I fear most, here. Observation can be a tool of ranking, and an apparatus that guards the essence. Not to fix a ranking, but to see whether that playground is still going, whether the pure, equal core is kept — and to light up the malice-free decay before anyone has to become the villain — that's what observation is for.
A kingdom is made of story. The moment that story becomes "an apparatus for winning," the kingdom loses its essence.
Pride is, perhaps, not winning forever, but never letting go of the essence.
And I'll write about myself. I want to hold a pride that never abandons play. I'll keep the strength to win, properly. But I want to spend that strength not on guarding the form, but on still breaking it to play. To hold both the pure, equal arena and the room to seriously play — that, I want to make my own pride. Even where it makes winning harder in some moment.
Books
Next
In #9, the Aoashi run reaches its finale. The theme: pride, and the awe you don't put into words. The forward's pride, the conviction to finish, the awe that comes from accumulated time — and why the master deliberately doesn't verbalize. Read alongside Michael Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.
This is a personal reading of Aoashi (Yugo Kobayashi), Finite and Infinite Games (James P. Carse), and Imagined Communities (Benedict Anderson).
The Japanese version lives on OrbitLens Library.
OrbitLens / machuz
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