Therefore, all the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

If the subjects were unresisting puppets or automatons, no threat would be necessary, and no price would be paid—thus the satire of the putative ideal of oppressors in Huxley’s Gammas, Orwell’s Proles, and Rossum’s Universal Robots (Capek).

—It may appear that the prizes for winning are indispensable, that without them life is meaningless, perhaps even impossible. There are, to be sure, games in which the stakes seem to be life and death. In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid for with terrible suffering or death.

Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.

The rule-making capacity of infinite players is often challenged by the impingement of powerful boundaries against their play—such as physical exhaustion, or the loss of material resources, or the hostility of nonplayers, or death.

If the rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won, the rules of an infinite game are the contractual terms by which the players agree to continue playing.

The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game and to bring as many persons as possible into the play.

rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play. The rules are changed when the players of an infinite game agree that the play is imperiled by a finite outcome—that is, by the victory of some players and the defeat of others.

If finite games must be externally bounded by time, space, and number, they must also have internal limitations on what the players can do to and with each other. To agree on internal limitations is to establish rules of play.