Infinitely ludic categories

Abstract: Pursuing a new approach to the study of infinite games in combinatorics, we introduce the categories $\mathbf{Game}{{A}}$ and $\mathbf{Game}{{B}}$ and provide novel proofs of some classical results concerning topological games related to the duality between covering properties of $X$ and convergence properties of $\mathrm{C}_{\mathrm {p}}(X)$ that are based on the existence of natural transformations. We then describe these ludic categories in various equivalent forms, viewing their objects as certain structured trees, presheaves, or metric spaces, and we thereby obtain their arboreal, functorial and metrical appearances. We use their metrical disguise to demonstrate a universality property of the Banach-Mazur game. The various equivalent descriptions come with underlying functors to more familiar categories which help establishing some important properties of the game categories: they are complete, cocomplete, extensive, cartesian closed, and coregular, but neither regular nor locally cartesian closed. We prove that their classes of strong epimorphisms, of regular epimorphisms, and of descent morphisms, are all distinct, and we show that these categories have weak classifiers for strong partial maps. Some of the categorical constructions have interesting game-theoretic interpretations.