#169 - Finite Versus Infinite Games
enjoy listening to YouTube videos while drawing, and sometimes YouTube throws some arbitrary genre at me, like cute animal videos or boxing videos. It presented me with this one: 
It didn’t appeal to me much, but I watched it anyway, and it was a revelation! In it, he argues that it’s better to practice (boxing) through play than to spar and beat each other senseless. He shows lion and bear cubs playing and, in effect, practicing hunting. But done playfully without anyone getting hurt.
He mentions the book “ Finite and Infinite Games ” by Jamee P. Carse.
The idea is that with a finite game, there is a goal, and there are rules. With infinite games, you may change the rules, and the goal is to keep playing. I haven’t bought the book (yet), but I instinctively understood the premise.
Infinite play is how I learned to program and how I became good at it. Indeed, the trick was to keep the game going. As soon as something got boring, I tried something else and changed the rules.
My programming as a teenager felt like these lion and bear cubs playing without knowing they were practicing hunting.
It helped me reframe my drawing practice: It needs to be an infinite game, like play. I can change the rules if I want to.
As I write this, I am in a period where I choose something to draw from memory, draw it from observation, and then memory lots of times, figuring out what works and why, repeatedly going at it like a lion cub attacking its daddy’s tail, over and over and over. Then, I have a go at drawing something from my imagination. I need to start seeing that as “infinite play,” too, and maybe have a go at the same thing repeatedly. Again, like a lion or bear cub.
There are differences. While play instead of sparring prevents boxers from getting their brains “unnecessarily” beaten to a pulp, for us artists, it can be a change of mindset that makes drawing enjoyable again.
Draw like a lion or bear cub plays! Or perhaps, like your new kitten plays.
We can learn from anyone and everyone.
Drawing is a craft, and we can learn by watching how people get better at other crafts, in this case, the unlikely craft of boxing.