Issuu

The Score

How to Stop Playing Someone

Game

C. Thi Nguyen

The Score

C. Thi Nguyen

The Score

How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game

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For Mel

PART 1 OPENING MOVES

Is This the Game You Really Want to Be Playing?

Rock climbing saved me.

I was in a miserable season of my life—staying up late every night, trying to dredge more work out of myself. I was anxious, consumed with self-loathing. I needed something to change.

A friend suggested that I try rock climbing, that it was a “technical balance sport” for people who loved solving puzzles. This seemed utterly ridiculous to me. Rock climbing was for thrill-seeking adventure bros. Rock climbing was muscling your way up a wall while you rage-screamed. And I was a clumsy nerd.

It took me about half an hour in my university’s ratty little climbing gym to see that I’d been completely wrong.

I’d been failing, over and over again, on one speciﬁc move. I was supposed to reach over to a hold way up le ; every time I’d go for it, I’d lose my balance and fall. I was ready to give up; I was just too weak. But then another climber explained the proper technique: I could kick out my leg all the way to the right, as a counterbalance, and then the rest of my body would just ﬂoat up to the le , to the

next hold. It felt amazing; my whole body was suddenly a ﬂuid, coordinated thing. I felt, maybe for the first time in my life, like I was moving elegantly.

My friend was right, it turns out. Climbing isn’t just about adrenaline and brawn. It’s problem-solving. It’s staring down a set of impossibly tiny holds and inventing intricate sequences of careful movements to make it through. Climbing is solving physics puzzles with your body, in the alphabet of yoga.

I’ve played games my whole life. Games o er me the joy of complete absorption in performing one clear task in a precise, welldeﬁ ned world. They banish the nauseating complexity of ordinary life. They give me the refuge of clear rules and clear goals. In their restrictions, there is freedom.

Up until that point, I’d only played mental games: chess, poker, computer strategy games. I hated my body, which was a sludgy and uncooperative thing. But climbing asked me to devote the whole of my attention to the precise relationship between my body and the rock. Sometimes a climb would demand that I carefully balance myself on my tippy-toes on a tiny dime’s edge of rock, and then carefully ease my center of gravity over. Sometimes a climb asked me to drive myself up with an explosive twist of my hips. Climbing demanded a deep understanding of how the parts of my body connected, of how a movement ﬂowed through me.

I met Sherwood at that ratty university climbing gym. He was a beautifully perverse climber. He loved nothing more than to get stuck in some awful, contorted position on the rock—one leg over his shoulder, the other leg trapped under an elbow. He’d groan and curse, rocking back and forth in a tangle—and then suddenly ﬁ nd a way through in an ecstatic burst of motion. He had cultivated a climbing style that gave him precisely his desired ratio of joy to masochism.

We were climbing in Joshua Tree National Park one weekend—

climbing real rock, working on tricky, delicate problems. I’d been climbing for a couple of years by then, and I was trying to break through to the next level.

Every established rock climb has a di culty grade attached—a rating derived from community consensus. For the dominant rockclimbing culture, this di culty rating basically serves as a scoring system. Your primary score is the di culty rating of the hardest climbs you can do. The climb I was trying was the next level up of difﬁculty from anything I’d climbed before. I wanted that next number so badly; I wanted that level-up. And the more desperately I wanted it, the grosser my climbing got. Sherwood saw my desperate ﬂailing, shook his head, and said, “Man, you gotta just savor the movement.”

We were climbing for di erent reasons. I wanted to get to the top any way I could—anything that would count as a victory, that would give me that next number. Sherwood would climb a route, get to the top, frown, and mutter, “Well, OK, but that was pretty ugly,” and then keep climbing it over and over again until the movement felt beautiful to him. His comment—that I had to savor the movement—got stuck in my head over the next few months. It changed my whole relationship to climbing. I started to pay more attention to the sweet joy of the movement—to lavish loving attention on the microscopic adjustments, the explosive hip twists. At night, I would dream about how it felt.

A lot of the time, we don’t know the real reason we’re doing something. I had been telling myself that climbing was making me fitter, and that I was learning some skills. But in retrospect, what I actually loved was how it felt to be climbing. It was an experience of my own grace, a rare taste of loveliness flowing through my bones and fi ngers. And it was the fact that my life suddenly had rowdy road trips and drunk bonfires in it. I came back from climbing weekends cheerful, refreshed. Climbing made me feel complete.

And here’s the strangest thing: What I truly loved was a feeling, a loving involvement with the di culty of the physical world, that went far beyond the simple goals of climbing. But I also couldn’t have found that feeling without that scoring system. The game of climbing has a very specific defi nition of success: You have succeeded if you get to the top. And the scoring system also tells you, over the course of a climbing life, that you should be trying to climb evermore di cult climbs. This gave me a focus. It shaped a very specific kind of activity; without that goal, I would never have paid enough attention to my body, never would have refined my movement enough, to discover a pure joy in movement.

Given just a rock wall, there’s no particular reason for a modern, tool-using human to try to move up a particular line of tiny holds using nothing but their hands and feet. But climbing is a game that tells you what to do; it forces you to take one hard pathway up the rock, and it tells you that it will count as a success only if you follow the rules—if you climb the rock using only your hands and feet on the rock itself. And it tells you to keep trying harder and harder climbs. This structure forced me to tune in to how I was moving. It keyed me into a new form of beauty. It gave me a richer form of freedom than I had anywhere else in my life. It showed me the way to a new kind of agency.

I’M A PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR NOW. THERE IS, IN MY PROFESsion, a single list of all the major philosophy departments, ranked by prestige. There is another list of all the philosophy journals you could publish in, also ranked by prestige. These are the scoring systems of philosophy.

Nobody is forcing people to use these systems. They’re just a pair of websites, each compiled by a small group of professionals, based

on some annual surveys. In the end, they’re just a summary of a few people’s subjective impressions of status. We could have just as well decided to ignore them; they have no o cial authority. But that’s not what happened. Most professional philosophers pay intense, close, and regular attention to these lists. Most of us know exactly how we’re doing on the rankings.

I didn’t care about those rankings when I ﬁ rst fell in love with philosophy. I didn’t even know about them. I got into the ﬁeld because I was obsessed with some big, weird old questions. I wanted to understand the meaning of life, and where it came from. I wanted to know if there was any kind of objective morality. I wanted to know if beauty was real, if art actually mattered, or if it was all just a con. And I wanted to know why we trusted ourselves—our ability to reason, our moral instincts.

I loved the conversations I was having with other people, trying to ﬁgure these things out: late nights out with other philosophy majors, gleefully shouting at each other and scribbling logic diagrams on napkins. My parents wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer or a programmer, something real. But I couldn’t give up on these huge questions. My parents thought I was throwing away my chance at a safe and productive career.

I went to graduate school in philosophy precisely because I loved those wild, unmanageable questions. Then the stupidest thing happened. I met those rankings and they got under my skin. But the questions I loved weren’t what got you into those highly ranked journals and departments. If you wanted to do well on the rankings, you had to write small, precise articles on fairly arcane technical questions. So, over the years, I stopped chasing the questions I cared about. I spent all my energy trying to climb those rankings. And all my joy in philosophy started draining away.

I don’t think I would have cared nearly so much about status with-

out the brutal clarity of the rankings. Before the rankings, I certainly wanted some respect, but only from very specific people: the particular philosophers I thought were cool. Before the rankings, my desires were grounded in my own sense of what mattered. But that wasn’t what was in the rankings. The rankings represent the summarized views of other people—people who had been designated as supposed authorities by some other supposed authorities. I didn’t actually trust anybody involved with the ranking process. But the fact that all their opinions had been aggregated into a single, clear ranking—a ranking that everybody knew about—made them powerful. The rankings compressed a mess of human opinions into a single neat score. That clarity sucked me into caring about something I’d never cared about before: the average respect of the whole profession. The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought what ultimately mattered in politics was power. The rightful ruler is whoever has the power to control other people’s actions. But for Hobbes, the true source of power wasn’t strength or military might. He believed that ultimate power comes from the ability to control language and define terms—especially the terms of success. The power over defi nitions is stronger than military or economic power. Because if you can defi ne what good and evil mean for people, if you can control what success and failure mean for them, then you can control them from the inside.

GAMES WAKE US UP TO A LIFE OF PLAY; METRICS DRIVE US DOWN into grueling optimization. And sometimes, we let some external, institutional systems—rankings, metrics, and measures—set our desires and goals. Let’s give this phenomenon a name. Call it value capture. Value capture happens when:

1. Your values are rich and subtle—or developing that way.

2. You enter some social (typically institutional) setting that o ers you simpliﬁed, o en quantiﬁed renditions of your values.

3. The simpliﬁed versions take over.

If you want a portable version, try this: Value capture occurs when you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them.

Value capture happens when a restaurant stops caring about making good food and starts caring about maximizing its Yelp ratings. It happens when students stop caring about education and start caring about their GPA. It happens when scientists stop caring about ﬁ nding truth and start caring about getting the biggest grants. It even happens in religion. A pastor recently told me that his church had become completely obsessed with baptism rates. The higher-ups had established an internal leaderboard in which the pastors competed on monthly baptism rates, and it was starting to dominate everybody’s attention. He’d found himself caring less about the long-term spiritual development of his ﬂock and focusing more on trying to deliver popular sermons that would up his baptism rates and move him up that leaderboard.

In value capture, you’re outsourcing your values to an institution. Instead of setting your values in the light of your own particular experiences, instead of adjusting them to your particular personality, you’re letting distant bureaucratic forces set them for you.

Maybe this wouldn’t matter if the institutional metrics got it exactly right—if they truly captured what is valuable in the world. But that almost never happens. Metrics are shaped by institutional forces. They are subject to demands for fast, e cient data collection

at scale, to demands of ﬁtting into spreadsheets and action reports. Institutional metrics are part of a system that abstracts away from personal di erence and local detail and identiﬁes some thin, measurable detail. And what’s easily measurable is rarely the same as what’s really valuable.

AFTER A FEW YEARS OF SOUL- SEARCHING, I FINALLY MANAGED to shake o the grip of the philosophy rankings and remember my love for those weird old questions. But a couple of years later, it happened to me all over again. I went on Twitter.

I got on originally to talk to people, and to learn from them. There was a brief moment, years ago, when Twitter seemed genuinely magical. You could make friends you would never have found in any other place, ﬁ nd ideas and conversations that would have been impossible otherwise. Twitter was, for a little while, a bonanza of surprising but meaningful connection.

But then I went minorly viral a few times and caught that delicious, feverish high of seeing my numbers soar. And every time, I’d be gripped with the need for more. I started ransacking my thoughts, imagining how each one would look on Twitter. It started to matter less for me whether the thing was true or deep or wise. I just wanted thoughts that were peppy and sharp and quick enough to blow up.

It’s particularly easy, with Twitter, to see the exact contours of the value shi . The platform’s scoring system—its Likes and Retweets and Follows—doesn’t register empathy, or understanding, or ﬁ nding out something that really transforms you down the line. It measures quick-ﬁ re popularity. Twitter’s metrics don’t capture the di erence between somebody who chuckled for a second at your tweet and

somebody who was shaken to their core. If they both just click Like, then Twitter counts them the same.

Twitter captures a binary information state. It does not record the di erence between loving something, being mildly amused by it, or having it change your life. It flattens complex information into a single binary bit of data. And it captures that data at one narrow moment: the moment of fi rst reading. You encounter a deep tweet. At fi rst you don’t like it; you disagree with it. But it sticks in your craw; it gnaws at you. Slowly, it changes your mind—but that takes a week. The value of that tweet comes in a slow burn. But it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll go back and fi nd that tweet to Like it. The interface of social media tends to capture positive reactions in the fi rst moment of exposure. One of the central reasons we communicate with each other is to learn, to be challenged, to have our understanding transformed, which takes time. But that kind of communication isn’t valued by Twitter’s scoring system.

Call this the Gap. The Gap is the distance between what’s being measured and what actually matters.

REINER KNIZIA IS SOMETIMES CALLED THE MOZART OF GERMAN game design—the bizarre prodigy who e ortlessly churns out these elegant, profoundly original game designs. As the German and larger European board-game scene was heating up in the 1980s and ’90s, Knizia was sitting on top of it all, spewing forth hundreds of new games.

In a lecture on his game design process, Knizia said that the most important tool in his game design toolbox was the scoring system, because it sets the player’s motivations in the game. Scores tell the players what they’ll want during the game. And this is the heart of how

game designers shape our actions—and how those actions will feel— in the game. A scoring system speciﬁes motivations for the player to adopt.

You can make a game out of the simplest things: a few rules and a goal. One of the more elegant modern game designs is The Mind . The game is comically simple. There’s a deck with a hundred cards in it, numbered from 1 to 100. For level one, you shu e the deck and deal each player one random card. The goal is for all players to work together as a team to play the cards in order, from lowest to highest. But there is one single, glorious catch: You’re not allowed to communicate. You can’t talk, signal, grunt, or gesture to each other. You have to coordinate wordlessly to play those cards in order. If you can do it for level one, you go up to level two: Reshu e the deck, and deal two random cards to each person. For a four-player game, you win the game if you can beat level eight—that’s eight random cards dealt to each person, to be played out in perfect order, in total silence.

The game asks you to do the seemingly impossible: to be telepathic. And then it teaches you how that’s actually possible. You play the game by developing a shared sense of timing for how long you should wait to play a given card. And you can get very good at it together. Your group can play these wild, precise sequences in lockstep tempo. It will start to feel like you can touch the inside of each other’s brains and hear a collective clock ticking.

How does The Mind accomplish this little miracle? What’s it made out of? There are two basic parts to the game. First it gives you restrictions: The game strips away all your normal avenues for communication. Then it gives you a goal. It tells you to play these cards in sequential order. Out of these simplest of pieces, the game shapes a very speciﬁc set of actions and challenges—and through those, it shapes a mental state.

This is the peculiarity at the heart of games: They tell you what to desire. And we players are ﬂuid enough that we can let those scoring systems shape our desires. We can slip into alternate motivational states like a new set of clothes. We have the ability to start a game, ﬁ nd out what will get us points, and then—for a period of time—care intensely, exactly as we’re told to.

It’s not just that a game tells you what counts as winning for this game. It sets the deeper meaning of winning. A game can tell you whether you’re selfi sh or part of a larger collective. Start up The Mind. The game tells you you’re all on a team together, and you win or lose as one. Now your desires are unified; you are a perfect coordinated unit. Start up another game, like the classic fi rst-person shooter Quake III Arena. This video game throws you into an online arena, where you score points by killing other players. Now you are an unapologetic psychopath, a being of pure selfi shness, dodging, whirling, bouncing grenades down the hall, head-shotting people as they come down the corner.

Start up another game: Go outside and play a game of pickup basketball. Now you’re divided into teams, and the basic shape of your cares shi s to match. It doesn’t matter that Tessa is your best friend; she’s on the opposite team now, and your job is to steal her passes and block her shots. It doesn’t matter that in ordinary life you hate Sam. He’s on your team now, and if he’s open, you pass him the damn ball. Because for a period, your goals and Sam’s goals are aligned.

Games play around with who you are, what you care about, and the basic shape of your relationships to other people. Games reach into you and give you a new form of agency, and you can, for a while, become completely absorbed in that new agency. And what enables that, in crucial part, is the clarity, the simplicity, and the unambiguity of the scoring system. Games let somebody else design a new self for you, for you to slip into.

PERHAPS THIS SEEMS UNNERVING, LETTING ANOTHER HUMAN being inside our heads to tinker with our goals. But this goal manipulation can be relatively safe in games. Because o en in games, the goal isn’t what really matters. We adopt the goal in order to experience the process. The beauty is in the struggle.

This is a very speciﬁc kind of orientation. Let’s give it a name: striving play. In striving play, you try to win not because winning is important, but because the act of trying to win gives you a delicious struggle. In striving play, you don’t really care about winning in a lasting way. You temporarily induce in yourself a desire to win, so you can e oy the process of trying.

Striving play involves a motivational inversion of ordinary, practical life. In normal life, we struggle in order to attain some goal that we really want. In striving play, we adopt a goal in order to have the struggle that we really want.

This may seem bizarre, but striving play is perfectly ordinary. Your friends come over, and you decide to play a silly party game, like charades. There is a paradox at the heart of charades. Most people play the game, not to win, but to break the ice and get goofy. But when you play charades, you have to actually try to win to have fun. A game like charades is fun only when you’re moderately invested—when you’re genuinely trying to communicate some silly little phrase through gestures, when you’re truly frustrated that people aren’t getting it. Getting emotionally invested in winning charges the whole experience, and gives it spice.

But most of us don’t actually care about winning charades. If you lost but everybody had lots of fun, you probably wouldn’t feel disappointed. Because deep in your heart, you already know that winning isn’t the point. Having fun is.

THE STANDARD SCORING SYSTEM OF CLIMBING WAS GOOD FOR me, for the first few years. It made me stronger and more graceful than I’d ever been. But over time, it stopped working. I’m not naturally very athletic, and I didn’t have the time to train hard. The standard scoring system said there was one goal: Climb more di cult climbs. A er a while, I got stuck. The di culty game just had me throwing myself against gruelingly di cult climbs, and mostly failing. The whole thing turned tedious. It took me a while to remember that I had never really cared about being a great rock climber. I loved rock climbing because it showed me the beauty in my own moving body. I loved it when it changed my experience of the natural world—when it sensitized me to microscopic details in the rock and the landscape. I eventually found a way to love rock climbing again by tweaking the goals. I stopped being laser-focused on pure di culty. I looked for middlingly hard but interesting climbs, which pushed me into new kinds of movement. And I didn’t declare myself finished with a particular climb a er the fi rst time I climbed it. I took the Sherwood path. I aimed for smoothness, flow, and total mastery of the climb. What I most wanted was the feeling of complete organized attunement— and I got that from seeking elegant mastery over moderate climbs, and not from the perpetual quest for more di cult climbs.

In other words, I was turning into a game designer, by creating my own personal version of the game. I was starting to play around with what counted as winning. I was starting to tune the game to my own purposes, to give me that speciﬁc mental state of ecstatic organization and ﬂow.

Games tell you what to desire, through the scoring system. But you can also take charge of which games you play, and choose which scoring systems you adopt. You can tweak your games, shi to new

ones, jump from ordinary Super Mario Odyssey to speedrunning it. Or you can quit Mario entirely and learn archery, or start a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

You can use games to explore di erent ways of thinking and caring. You can become a planning, optimizing, resource-maximizing being. You can become a goofy gesticulating charades being. You can become a twitchy being of reﬂexes, dodging and whirling and sniping with angelic grace. You can merge yourself into a telepathic group mind.

In a game, you can plunge into an alternate self. And scoring systems are at the center. They make it easier for us to change what we target and what we care about. Scoring systems are an instruction manual for new values.

ONCE, A FEW YEARS BEFORE THE RISE OF CHATGPT, I WAS IN A room with a bunch of computer scientists who were working on building a creative artiﬁcial intelligence—an AI that could make good art. I asked, “So what target data are you using? What counts as success when training the AI?”

One team explained that they were using the Netﬂ ix database about engagement hours. Their AI was “successful” when its output most resembled the Netﬂ ix shows that got viewers to watch the most hours of TV. The problem is that engagement hours are not the same as good art. Art can be good in so many ways. It can move us; it can make us more sensitive and empathic; it can enrich our understanding of one another. But none of those qualities are necessarily measured by engagement hours.

I said all this. I said that they were training their AI not to make good art, but to make addictive shows. They were optimizing for total engagement hours, and not for the quality of those hours. The

AI wranglers responded, “Well, that’s the dataset we have. Show us a better dataset for good art and we’ll optimize for that instead.”

And that’s the core problem: We don’t have a massive dataset for good art, but we do have a massive dataset for engagement hours. And this is no accident. Some kinds of things are systematically harder to measure because they are more variable, more personal, or more delicate. This is what a lot of this book will be about: why so many of the important things in life seem to consistently defy measurement. They vanish from sight when we insist on using the measurement tools of large-scale institutions and bureaucracy. What’s meaningful is intimate and unpredictable; it eludes easy classiﬁcation. If we let institutional metrics set our values and drive our lives, we end up chasing what’s easy to count, and not what’s really important.

When we play games—when we are in charge of them—we are touring a whole ecosystem of deeply di erent rules and scoring systems, choosing and tweaking them to ﬁt our own purposes. But our relationship to metrics is di erent. Our institutional lives are usually ruled by very small number of pervasive metrics. We have very little power over which ones dominate our lives, and what they measure. And these metrics have been engineered not to give us a meaningful life but for the convenience of vast bureaucratic information systems.

WHY ARE WE SO DRAWN TO SIMPLE SCORING SYSTEMS? SCORing systems o er us relief from the painful complexity of life. When we leave ourselves fully exposed to the value density of real life, it’s hard to know what to do. My own life is full of a hundred conﬂ icting claims and hopes. I want to be a loving parent, a good teacher, and a thoughtful scholar. I want to write beautiful things, to help advance

the dream of a kinder and more just world. I want to be a good partner to my spouse. I want to keep my body healthy, and to get better at climbing. I want to keep in touch with the world of new music and new comics. And I want to indulge my weird obsessions, like my current overwhelming desire to perfect my chile verde. All of those things clamor for my attention.

Suppose we focus down on just one part of life—say, my desire to be a good parent. Even then, it’s still hard to know how well you’re doing. It’s late; my kid has been sad all day because he’s frustrated about learning math, but ﬁ nally he’s happy because we found a great new anime to watch together. Now it’s two hours past his bedtime; he’s bouncing o the walls, shouting about what special powers he wants. He’s inventing his own spin- o versions of the story, throwing around his stu ed animals into a massive mess on the ﬂoor, and pretending to be Lu y the rubber pirate hero. Am I being a good parent? An indulgent parent? A parent fostering creativity? How the hell am I supposed to know?

Our actual values are o en unclear; it isn’t obvious how each value applies to a particular situation. On top of that, real life is full of a nauseating tangle of di erent unclear values, which I constantly have to weigh and decide between. How do I compare the value of spending an hour reading to my toddler with the value of spending an hour li ing weights? How do I calculate the relative value of spending this Saturday morning reading an exciting new sci-ﬁ novel versus hacking away at my email pile? Life is a jumble of di erent values, all shouting at each other, with no clear centralized method for making sense of it all.

But games are di erent.

Games grant us a precious experience of clarity. It is a clarity of purpose—a clarity of value. In a game, for once in our lives, we know exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, and a erward, we know ex-

actly how well we have done. There are no larger questions about the meaning of our lives, no existential angst about our goals, no ambiguity. We know what we are pursuing in explicit, immaculate, unquestionable detail. Games o er value clarity. They are an existential balm for the confusion of ordinary life.

And games also tell us exactly what everybody else wants. They coordinate our values and make it easy for us to make sense to each other. They create a quick, artiﬁcial community.

I spend half my life hiding what I really I love. I am a goddamn weirdo who has spent vats of time chasing bizarre obsessions, all mostly incomprehensible to the larger world. Our cares are so di erent; they speak in di erent languages of meaning. Climbing speaks to me in the language of getting stronger, mastering movement, ﬁ nding solutions. Jazz speaks to me in the language of thrilling improvisation, of group creativity at speed, of the beauty of mathematics made sonic. Philosophy speaks to me in the language of curiosity, connection, and gorgeous ideas. To many other people, these languages of meaning are completely opaque. And other people care about di erent things, with di erent languages of meaning, which are unfamiliar and uninterpretable to me.

But games deﬁ ne all that di erence away. In most games, there are no di cult questions about other people’s motives. There are no vast gulfs between our very di erent loves. The rules set precisely the same goals for all of us. They create a shared language of success. Explaining ourselves becomes e ortless. Scoring systems make us entirely comprehensible to one another. There are now only the simple, practical questions: What are the most e cient means to achieve that shared, clear goal?

Games o er us social value clarity.

In most games, that clarity is happily artiﬁcial. The points are made up. In most games, the goals are things we invented for the

sake of fun or satisfaction—to shape some delicious form of action. Game goals can be adopted and then thrown away again. Game cares are temporary and disposable.

But metrics o er us a di erent bargain. They promise the same delicious clarity: that if we adopt some simple scoring system, our values will become clear and easy to communicate. University rankings, social media follower counts, page views—each of these promises to simplify the meaning of success in the world. But the cost is di erent. Because metrics are designed to measure something in the world, something real. Maybe it’s health, education, or well-being.

Maybe it’s popularity or status. It’s when mechanical scoring systems try to capture some real truths that we have to start worrying about the possibility of error—about the possibility of a mismatch between the clarity of the score and the density of the real world. That’s when we are in danger of being seduced away from what’s really important, by an artiﬁcially clariﬁed rendition of value.

I SPENT YEARS CHASING THE PHILOSOPHY RANKINGS, UNTIL IT almost destroyed my soul. I became a miserable, clenched person— hating what I was reading, hating what I was writing. And everybody else hated it, too. But in my quiet hours, I’d started a tiny little side project, on a question that almost nobody in my profession took seriously: Why do we play games? The question fascinated me. But it didn’t count as a real question in the world of o cial academic philosophy, so I mostly hid it from serious company, and worked on it in stolen moments.

A few years later, the rankings quest had gotten me to such a point of misery that I was starting to consider quitting philosophy, giving up my professor gig, and ﬁ nding something else to do with my life. Instead, I took one last shot. I let myself indulge in what seemed,

from the standards of my profession, like the most ludicrous possible quest: to ﬁgure out the value of games. I ended up spending years obsessed with it—trying to articulate the peculiar beauty of games, the value of play, and how game designers are a unique kind of artist who use scoring systems to shape our desires and our actions into something beautiful.

I cared about it because I cared about games. I’ve spent my entire life playing games of every kind. I played my ﬁ rst computer game at about the age of ten. My dad went from being a Vietnamese refugee to being a programmer at Intel in the 1980s. He’d bought us a casto Intel computer at a sale for employees. It was a primitive thing, the size of a refrigerator. The only place for it was in our garage. I used it to play one of the earliest computer games: Colossal Cave Adventure, a fully text-based adventure in which the game gave you written descriptions of what was happening, and you had to struggle with its primitive text parser to tell it what you wanted to do. “Go west.” “Get lamp.” “Get water.” “Pour water.”

I grew up as computer games grew up. I played tons of text adventure games, and then the fi rst adventure games with graphics. I played some of the fi rst computer role-playing games, where you wandered through endless dungeons killing monsters and getting experience points. I played other games, too. I learned chess; I learned poker. I fell in love with go—possibly the most beautiful of all games, a game of depth and profundity. I also lost months of my life to the gruelingly addictive strategy computer game Civilization—possibly the only game I truly regret playing. And later on, I’d discover the exploding world of European board games. I played fascinating subtle auction games and resource-management games. I’d stay up late at night playing board games with my friends, and then a erward talk for hours analyzing the experience—trying to figure out what made one game so boringly mechanical and another game so explosively

delicious. I started posting on online forums, reviewing board games, trying to ﬁgure out exactly what made certain games just so vibratingly alive. And then this somehow merged with my academic career, and I ended up writing an entire philosophy book about the peculiar magic of games.

But at the same time, I was dealing with metrics. At my fi rst professor job, I was the “learning outcomes liaison” for my philosophy department. This meant that I had to gather quantitative data about how our department was doing in promoting student success, to show that we weren’t all just bullshitters wasting taxpayer money. And I had to do it in an environment where student success had become defi ned by administrators, in a particularly narrow way. “Student success” had been o cially defi ned as a weighted average of graduation rate and graduation speed.

This deﬁ nition captured almost nothing about what I or my fellow philosophy professors cared about in teaching. But it ruled our lives; it was the language we had to speak in whenever we wanted to justify a new hire or a budgetary line item. So I started writing about the philosophy of that, too: about why metrics are usually formulated in terms that squash whatever is really important to us; about why metrics so o en drain the life out of what really matters.

And I realized at some point that I had an entire theory about games, in which clear and simple scoring systems were the magic ingredient that opened up the door to a whole world of delightful play. And I had an entire theory about metrics, in which clear and simple scoring systems killed what really mattered.

I became obsessed with a new question, which seemed for a while to matter only to me: Why is it that mechanical scoring systems are, in games, the site of so much joy and ﬂuidity and play? And why, in the realm of public measures and institutional metrics, do they drain the life out of everything?

That is the question that led to the book you’re reading now. And the answer is going to come in two stages, roughly divided into the halves of this book.

In the fi rst half, we’re going to discover that we can each approach scoring systems with two very di erent attitudes. We can approach them playfully—bending ourselves in and out of them, dancing between them, changing them, modifying them. Or we can be captured by them—we can let scoring systems dictate our goals and targets to us, even when those goals fit poorly with our lives. So at first, it’s going to look a lot like the di erence is a matter of individual attitude. Maybe, you think, the solution is simple: We should, as individuals, try to have the right attitude, and just be more playful about everything.

But in the second half, we’re going to discover why the solution isn’t so easy. Because the world o en makes it extremely hard to be playful. The basic nature of games and their social environment— their quickness, their disconnection, their disposability—encourages in us the playful attitude and makes it easy to ﬁ nd and sustain. The nature of metrics discourages playfulness. They encourage, instead, value capture: a rigid attachment to an external system of values. We will discover value capture everywhere—in journalism, education, and business, but also in our food, our hobbies, and the way we measure our own health and happiness.

Sometimes, metrics pull on us because they are tied to simple incentives: money, opportunity, status, power. But incentives don’t explain everything. O en, metrics do give us status and power— but only because everybody else has gotten sucked in already. Again, philosophers could have ignored the philosophy rankings; they had no o cial authority. But we gave them power, by believing in them.

And most fascinating of all is that so many of us get sucked into public metrics even when they don’t give us status—even when it hurts

us. Pursuing weight loss into declining health and sorrow; obsessively chasing more Likes and Follows even when it doesn’t matter for our job. The very clarity and universal comprehensibility of metrics seduce us into value capture, even when it makes us miserable.

Metrics are understandable, interconnected, and perfectly transparent. And in this clarity is a certain kind of trap. We become beholden to what everybody can understand. Games are isolated, disconnected, and unimportant. The joy we take in them is o en private and opaque to others. And that opacity gives us the space to be free.

I’M WRITING THIS BOOK BECAUSE OF AN EMAIL FROM A STUdent. She’d seen one of my lectures, where I’d talked about the mystery of why games and metrics hit so di erently. I had talked about the two main threads at the center of the mystery: striving play and value capture. When I gave the lecture, I didn’t have a good answer yet; I was just fumbling around, chasing a chaos of connections. But the student wrote me, and said the talk had pulled her out of a ﬁveyear depressive spiral.

She turned out to be a lot like me: an Asian American kid, the child of immigrants, pushed by her parents to keep a perfect 4.0 GPA and get into the most highly ranked college. She was also an athlete, a competitive golfer. And, she said, she’d been struggling with anorexia, obsessed with her BMI.

She said my talk had made her realize that she’d been trapped in all kinds of bad games. Life had given her some scoring systems and she’d just been trying to get as high a score as she could, without wondering if she should have accepted them into her heart in the ﬁ rst place. Thinking about these things as games, she said, had helped her get some distance from the rankings and metrics. She

could step back and ask herself if she actually wanted to accept these systems, if they really mattered to her.

She sent me a picture of her phone. She’d changed the default background so it gave her a message, a reminder, every time she looked at it.

Her phone says, “Is this the game you really want to be playing?”

CHAPTER

2 Striving Play

It was the pandemic. I was in Utah, and I was learning to fly-fi sh to keep myself from falling down a despair hole. Fly-fi shing was exactly what I needed in my life at that moment—in my forties, overloaded with parenting and admin. And it was exactly what I needed during lockdown. I was spending most of my days stuck in an improvised home o ce in my basement, trying to Zoom-teach to a screen full of blank boxes. But when you’re out there, standing in a river, staring intently into the details of moving water—it cleans out your brain and soul.

Fly-ﬁ shing is full of dudes who have this intense, addictive relationship to the sport. My own private theory is that what a lot of these guys need is meditation, but they can’t admit it. Fly-ﬁ shing gives them a su ciently masculine cover story, so they can get the spiritual cleansing they really need.

For me, the peak of fly-fishing is dry fly-fishing. This is when you’re fi shing with a tiny imitation insect, which floats, and you’re trying

to get a fi sh to eat your fly o the surface of the water. Fly-fi shing is an act of perpetual attention to the natural world. You’re stalking along the river, looking for signs of fi sh. Maybe you spot a subtly slow patch of water behind an underwater boulder—classic trout holding water. Or maybe, if you’re lucky enough and watchful enough, you’ll actually see a trout daintily feeding on the surface. Your goal now is to sneak up behind it and carefully cast your artificial fly to land, ever so so ly, right in front of that trout. And if you actually manage to pull all this o , then sometimes the trout will swim up, inspect your floating fly, and slurp it down right there in front of you.

You net the fi sh, admire it briefly—and then you let it go. Because most fly-fi shers don’t fi sh for food; they catch and release. Taking fi sh was never the point. In fact, Nicole, one of the people who taught me to fly-fi sh, had even transcended the catching part. She told me that she’d started feeling bad enough about bothering fi sh, especially during the spawning season, that she’d sometimes cut the hook o her fly, and just try to get the trout to eat the fly. Fooling the trout was enough; actually hooking and netting the fi sh had become unnecessary for her version of the game.

For me, the central experience of fly-fi shing is a sensual act of information management. You’re looking at tiny details of the river, watching for the telltale signs of good trout holding water. There’s the slow water that shelters the fi sh; the crisp current edges that bring them food. You’re searching for little shadowy movement in the water—the subtle sway of camouflaged trout. And then you have to show them the right bug. When trout see a lot of fi shing pressure, they get picky. So you have to study the insects, notice their color and size, and change your fly to match. In fly-fi shing, you become a nexus point in this gorgeously overwhelming flow of information. You have to dance through it all, sorting the signal from the noise.

But this isn’t only a superﬁcial cover for meditation. If I just stood