Today, we had a final debrief of all the GERP groups. Designing the GERP made Carse’s ‘finite vs. infinite’ split feel real: when I framed clear rules and a win state, people optimized and the play collapsed fast; when I loosened boundaries and treated rules as invitations, the experience kept unfolding and participants started authoring it. My relationship with the text shifted from theory to practice—I saw that ‘infinite play’ is a design stance. I also learned you can design for pain without violence by using constraint, ambiguity, and time pressure to create productive discomfort that reveals stakes, but never harms.