loading . . . The Score C. Thi Nguyen teaches philosophy at the University of Utah, and he got into the field because he’s drawn to life’s big questions. Weird, romantic, bizarre questions. What is art for? Are we just wasting our time on our dumb hobbies, or are they the best part of life? Then he started teaching, and learned that what makes a “good” philosopher at a prestigious school had less to do with curiosity and more to do with metrics: your value was whether your papers were getting published in highly ranked journals. Nobody ever told him to care about the rankings. Everybody just talked in that language, and soon he found himself automatically assuming that climbing the list was what success in philosophy meant. All the joy got sucked out of the thing he loved. He was so bored with what he was writing that he nearly quit the profession after burning ten years in it. Instead he did something that looked like career suicide: he threw out the metrics and went after something harder to measure. His own curiosity.
That story opens his latest book, _The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game_ , which expands the definition of games to cover all the ways metrics and scoring systems play out in our lives: journal rankings, Duolingo, step counting, and beyond. At its center is a concept Nguyen calls value capture. Your values start out rich, subtle, and still developing. Then some institution or technology feeds you simplified, typically quantified versions of them, and the simplified versions take over. You have been here. Maybe you started going to school because you wanted to learn, or started walking more for your health, and then a metric took over (straight As, ten thousand steps) and suddenly you were very far from whatever drove you to the thing in the first place.
Even Nguyen gets captured, and he’s been working on this stuff for five years. Watching his kid, he catches himself thinking: I should reduce his screen time. But if you think about it, screen time is a crap metric. One week Nguyen’s own numbers skyrocketed. The reason? He was reading two different translations of Kant on his iPad. Not exactly a vice. Meanwhile his nine-year-old’s screen hours might be the dumbest possible ASMR videos, or videos explaining the rise of the two world wars, or dumb clicker games, or architectural masterpieces in Minecraft with coded logic gates. There’s no way these are valuable in anything like the same amount. But a device can’t tell the difference. It can capture minutes, and that’s it. Which is Nguyen’s core worry: we’re outsourcing our values, and usually not to some Machiavellian telling us what to want. Just to whatever process happens to be convenient at scale.
So why do we keep falling for it? Partly because life is full of nauseating existential tradeoffs (more time with the kids, or on hobbies, or answering email), and deciding that one measurable thing matters shelters you from the storm. And partly because metrics make you instantly comprehensible to other people. While researching scoring systems, Nguyen got deep into yo-yoing, and telling fellow adults at a dinner party that a philosophy professor spends his free time yo-yoing gets him looks. The real reasons a weird obsession moves you don’t transmit over appetizers. A record to beat would make the whole thing legible in seconds.
Here is the paradox that drives the book: the same scoring systems that drain the soul out of work and education are the beautiful, animating heart of games. The difference is who’s in charge. Scoring systems are little dictators, little definitions of success and failure, but in games those definitions are temporary, playful, and under your control; if you don’t like one, you can throw it away and never play again. In institutions, they’re authoritarian. Games use scores to hand us alternate selves and alternate desires. Make baskets, collect sheep, get to the top of the rock, and suddenly an activity you never cared about unlocks. Nguyen distinguishes achievement play, where you actually want to win, from striving play, where you temporarily adopt the desire to win in order to experience the struggle, and what matters is whether the struggle was interesting.
Games also work because they happen inside what the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga called a magic circle, where the meanings of your actions are screened off from ordinary life. The points are, galactically speaking, valueless, which is exactly what releases players to lie, scheme, and hunt for each other’s weaknesses across the table without anyone taking it personally. And a game’s rules can act as a support structure for states of mind that are hard to reach directly. Fly fishing, one of Nguyen’s obsessions, forces a kind of hyper-focus: reading the water for rising trout, tracking insect hatches that can change every twenty minutes. Left alone at a river, he’s bored in a minute. Given the game, he can focus for hours, until he arrives at altered mental states that seated meditation has never gotten him to.
None of this means metrics are simply evil. Nguyen points to the quantification of New York policing, a story he cheerfully admits he learned from The Wire. In the early days nobody could tell which precincts were doing well, so the city put in clear numbers everyone could understand: arrests made, cases closed. At first it worked great. The brute clarity exposed corruption and bias and forced them out of the system. Then people learned to game the numbers. Want a better case-closure rate? Discourage people from reporting crimes. Or write speeding tickets, which open and close a case in the same stroke. Still, some targets really are stable at scale. Everyone counts lifespan and deaths the same way; nobody counts mental health the same way. That’s what makes metrics so good at coordinating vast efforts like cutting emissions or raising vaccination rates, and it’s also the price. We over-attend to the things everyone can count, and under-attend to the ones nobody can.
So what do we do with all this? Nguyen won’t give the peppy answer, because quitting isn’t symmetrical. Quit a game and nothing happens. Quit your KPIs and you get fired, and then you starve. But you can keep some ironic distance: there’s a difference between wanting the most subscribers and wanting to communicate, needing subscribers to do it, and being willing to trade them off. And where you can, design the game you actually want to be playing. Nguyen realized that for all his complaining about the tyranny of metrics, he was in charge of a huge one: his students’ grades. He was being an unthinking authoritarian. So now, in his tech and design ethics class, students democratically design their own grading system and assignments. How did it go? Amazing. Unbelievable. The system they built was actually quite good, but Nguyen kind of doesn’t care, because arguing seriously about what an education is for, what grades are for, what AI in the classroom is for, got him what he wanted from the class in the first place. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/673-the-score/
