Cooperative Game Within Infinite Games

The CooperativeGamePrinciple starts: "Software development is a ...cooperative game of invention and communication... The endpoint of the game is an operating software system..."

"Hazards to completing the game

...The other hazard is the interference of the infinite games that are in process at the same time: each individual managing his or her career, each organization managing its survival. Thus we occasionally see people on a project whose activities are not helping the project, because they are working on moves that will forward their careers. The cooperative game concept does not remove these situations, but it helps us give words to describe moves that make a meaningful part of someone's personal, infinite game rather than the team's finite game.

Organizations are also running infinite games. Government and military contract projects are notoriously competitive and seem disfunctional, at least superficially. This apparent disfunction vanishes if we consider that what is present is a set of competing infinite games between the contractors, rather than a single, cooperative, finite game. Thus, much energy is quite appropriately spent on turf wars, positioning, and blame, instead of producing software efficiently."

[from SoftwareDevelopmentAsaCooperativeGame -- AlistairCockburn]

I introduce this into the discussion of CthreeProjectTerminated, in the discussion of the managerial frog-boiling. I am missing key information about the politics that I expect never to learn, but from the words around here it seems there were some other games going on that superseded the C3-completion game. -- Alistair