The Score

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. 

Professor C. Thi Nguyen teaches philosophy at the University of Utah. And he says the reason he got into this field is because he is drawn to life’s big questions. 

THI NGUYEN: These weird, romantic, bizarre questions about the meaning of life and what is art for. Like, are we just wasting our time doing our dumb hobbies, or is it the best part of life? Those were the questions I cared about. 

ROMAN MARS: But when he started teaching philosophy, Thi learned that what makes a good philosopher at a prestigious school had less to do with pursuing curiosity and had more to do with metrics. Your value as a philosopher seemed based on whether your papers were getting published in highly ranked philosophy journals. 

THI NGUYEN: There’s no moment where anyone told me to care about it, but everybody just talks in that language. And suddenly you just find yourself kind of automatically thinking that your goal is to publish in the top-ranked journals, and that that’s what success means in philosophy. 

ROMAN MARS: Suddenly all the joy was sucked out of this thing that he loved so much. 

THI NGUYEN: I was so bored with what I was writing because I was trying to go up this list and so miserable that I was gonna quit the profession after, like, having burned 10 years in it. 

ROMAN MARS: Instead of giving up, Thi decided to do something that seemed like career suicide. He threw out those metrics of success and went after something harder to measure: his own curiosity. This is the story C. Thi Nguyen uses to open his latest book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. In it, Thi expands the definition of games to encompass all the ways metrics and scoring systems play out in our lives for good and for ill. From those dreaded philosophy journal rankings, to Duolingo, step counting, and beyond. 

I love this book and I was so excited to talk to Thi about it. We had a delightfully meandering conversation about the philosophy of games, the trap of metrics, and how to make sure we’re playing the game we want to be playing. 

Our chat started with me asking Thi to define a concept he coined called “value capture.”

THI NGUYEN: Value capture is what happens when your own values are rich or subtle or developing in that direction, and then you get put in a social setting–an institution or with a technology–that feeds you simplified, typically quantified versions of your values. And then the simplified versions take over. 

ROMAN MARS: You have been here. You have been value captured. It happens all the time. Maybe you start going to school because you want to learn or you start walking more for your health. But then you get focused on a metric, like getting all A’s or counting steps. And suddenly you’re very far from the values that drove you to do those things in the first place. This kind of dynamic is everywhere. 

THI NGUYEN: One of my favorite examples… A lot of these things are so insidious that I hadn’t realized the degree to which I internalized this. And I’ve been working on this stuff for, like, five years. And I was sitting there watching my kid, being like, “You know, I should reduce his screen time.” So screen time is a massive metric for a lot of us. But then if you think about it, it’s a crap metric. One week, my screen time skyrocketed. The reason my screen time skyrocketed was I was reading two different translations of Kant on my iPad, right? That is not a bad thing for me to do. But I was watching my kid. I’m like, “Oh, I’m supposed to reduce his screen time.” And one of the things I noticed is that sometimes, when he’s on his screen, he’s watching the dumbest possible ASMR videos. Sometimes he is literally learning geopolitics. He’s obsessed with videos that explain the history of the rise of World War I and World War II. He’s nine. Sometimes he’s playing dumb clicker games. Sometimes he’s building architectural masterpieces in Minecraft with, like, coded logic gates. These are not the same thing, right? There’s no way in which these are valuable in anything like the same amount, but it’s very easy for a device to capture screen time. 

And I think part of my core worry here is that we’re outsourcing our values through an external product or institution. And sometimes that’s a classical story of evil. Some Machiavellian tells us what to value. But a lot of the time, like a lot of outsourcing, what we’re outsourcing to is a process that’s convenient at scale. What’s determining how a lot of us parent is just that screen time happens to be an easy thing for our devices to measure automatically without any particular input from us. 

ROMAN MARS: Thi says that forcing the things we value into the sausage grinder of metrics can often flatten nuance and meaning in favor of generating a value that’s more simple and measurable. It is and often feels awful and reductive, and yet we can’t help being seduced by it. 

ROMAN MARS: Why do you think it is that you and others actually find this kind of value capture framework so tempting and rewarding enough that it pulls you into this type of engagement? 

THI NGUYEN: I mean, life is full of these complicated existential value clashes where you have to make these nauseating decisions. I mean, I think every day I’m faced with the decision of whether to spend more time playing with my kids or more time doing hobbies I enjoy or more time staying up late doing extra email. That’s a terrifying decision that asks me to weigh these very different values. But if you automate it–if you decide there’s only one thing that’s important and that everything feeds into that thing in a mechanically measurable way–suddenly you’re sheltered from the existential storm. You’re safe. So that’s one answer. The second answer is the seductiveness is making yourself comprehensible and communicable to other people. This is something I have done and I’m very embarrassed about. So, while I was researching this book and looking at scoring systems, I started reading about yo-yo and I got really into yo-yoying. Yo-yoing is super interesting–modern yo-yoing–there’s been technology revolutions, it’s gotten super complicated, it blew up with skateboarding… Really interesting and intricate topological structures you build… But I just want you to imagine me, being an apparently adult philosophy professor at a dinner party, having to tell other people that I’ve been goddamn yo-yoing in my free time. People look at me like I’ve gone nuts. And they look at me like I’m making a joke because trying to explain… I think in any weird obsession you have, when you actually get to the reason that’s important–the reason it really moves you–it’s not going to be very accessible to people that aren’t deeply in that thing. 

ROMAN MARS: Thi argues that one of the reasons yo-yoing seems like a goof is because it doesn’t really have understandable metrics. We excuse adults doing childish things if there’s a record to beat or a score to measure. Those things would make yo-yoing comprehensible and therefore would make you understood as a human. 

THI NGUYEN: And understood instantly. I think there are a lot of weird things that I love. If someone trusts me and we spend some time together, I can transmit that. But metrics make you comprehensible instantly at scale. 

ROMAN MARS: Hearing all this, it’s easy to get the impression that scoring systems and metrics are more or less evil–that although they’re alluring in their simplicity, which can help us feel understood, they end up draining the life out of everything we hold dear. But actually, Thi would disagree. He argues that, in the right context, scoring systems can also be a way to unlock connection, creativity, and even great joy. And the place that this is most readily visible is in gameplay. 

THI NGUYEN: This is the paradox I got obsessed with, right? In games, scoring systems are beautiful. And then in metrics, scoring systems often seem like they’re responsible for the worst part of our lives, for the destruction of education, for the disruption of the arts, for the destruction of the entire environment, ecosystem, and everything that we care about and is good… And the thing I was trying to figure out is why scoring systems gave us such delightful play in games and gave us such soul-draining awfulness in metrics. 

ROMAN MARS: Thi and I both love games and the design of games. And so we got really into talking about the magic of games and why exactly the scoring systems that hurt us in life can make games so rewarding. 

THI NGUYEN: The funny thing about scoring systems is they are kind of little dictators. They tell you what you’re supposed to want and value. And that’s the weird thing. Scoring systems are little definitions of success and failure. I think one of the biggest differences is that, in games, those definitions are temporary and playful and under your control. And if you don’t like it, you can throw it away and you never have to play again. And in institutions, they’re authoritarian. 

ROMAN MARS: Like a true philosopher, Thi considers all kinds of things games: board games, rock climbing, even fly fishing. And something that kept coming up for him in writing this book is the way that, in games, scoring systems are an integral part of the fun.

THI NGUYEN: One of the things that got me writing this book was that I had spent a bunch of years trying to explain what games were and ended up saying that they were these beautiful structures that use scoring systems to give us alternate selves–that they give us alternate desires. A game just told you, “Make baskets. Collect sheep. Get to the top of the rock.” And suddenly this thing you might never have cared about before, like getting to the top of some weird boulder, you’re like, “I need to do it!” And then suddenly this whole new activity unlocks. 

ROMAN MARS: Now, I love playing games with my kids. And since my kids are all over the country now, we plan game nights, like, months in advance. And I am just competitive enough inside of a game to make it fun. I am not trying to lose. I am definitely trying to win. But I have to say, at the end of the night, or even at the of any round of game, I cannot tell you who won that game. I cannot imagine caring about a game’s outcome. I’ve never been able to describe this to people. But Thi explained to me that there are two types of play, striving play and achievement play.

THI NGUYEN: Achievement play is caring about winning, right? Achievement play is playing because you actually want to win. Striving play is when you temporarily get yourself to want to in order to experience the struggle. So the difference between the two is not about how intense you are about trying to win. You can be a striving player and be trying really intensely. The difference is the striving play values the experience not if they win, but if the struggle was interesting. 

ROMAN MARS: I am 100% a striver. But I still get wrapped up in the goal and drama of the game when I’m inside that game. So my family plays this game called Wingspan. And it’s a beautiful little game that is more intuitive than all the little pieces and dense rules would have you to believe. But my stepdaughter hates this game. She hates Wingspan because I swear a lot when I play this game. There are often these scenarios when I need a certain card pull or a roll of the dice to make a very long plan strategy pay off. And I often don’t get that card that I want, and hence the swearing. Since I am a very calm, non-volatile presence in her life, she hates hearing me swear. And this game just brings it out of me more than most. I don’t know why. But it turns out this freedom to swear–to connive and compete–is actually part of the magic of games. They give us this healthy arena for feelings that aren’t so healthy in the real world. 

THI NGUYEN: One of the interesting things about games is they’re a place where we’re released to do something like that. Johan Huizinga, an anthropologist who studied games in the early 20th century, one of the first great scholars of play, said that what makes games and play distinctive is that they occur in a magic circle where the meanings of what you do are screened off from ordinary life. So what this means is if we’re close friends, and then we’re playing basketball against each other, and you block my pass, I’m not gonna come up after you or afterwards and be like, “How could you do that to me? You wound me, my friend! I thought we were close.” And because the meanings are screened off in that way… I mean, part of the point is the points are valueless, right? And we know that galactically, even if in the game we’re really into it, which makes us release. I try so hard in my life to be a nice person and to be a kind person, but there’s a part of my brain that is a complete Machiavellian asshole. And I have to keep that under wraps most of the time. I don’t get to do that. And in the gaming environment, because it’s so screened off from the rest of life in just this simple way, I can do that. It is part of the contract of gaming that when I play with my family or my friends, we can go all out. We can lie to each other. We can manipulate. We can deceive each other. We can look for each other’s weaknesses and destroy each other because we know that the gaming environment has designed to turn that into an interesting struggle. 

ROMAN MARS: A great example that you give of striving play is fly fishing. I went to a fly fishing class. I haven’t sort of gotten off my ass to do fly fishing. But I just admire everything about it. And the more I learned about it, the more I admired it. Could you talk about the fly fishing in terms of striving play? 

THI NGUYEN: Fly fishing is really interesting to me. So, I am in Utah. And in Utah there are a lot of dudes with this very obsessive interest in fly fishing. So fly fishing… I don’t know. I thought it was just about having fancy gear and about repeatedly casting and casting and casting. And what I found about fly fishing was what’s interesting is that it’s actually a sport about attention. So, what you’re doing if you’re fly fishing–especially in the style I like, which is dry fly fishing, which is where you’re trying to get a fish to swim up and eat a bug off the surface–is walking along in a river and looking for either actually being able to see a trout rising or being able to see the quality of water where a trout is likely to be under the water. And then you have to figure out what kind of bugs it’s feeding, which means you have to be really attentive to what is hatching in the air, which can change every 20 minutes. And so what the game does is it forces you to hyperfocus on small subtle visual details across a huge ecological landscape. And one of the things I found interesting is if I go to a river without the fly fishing game, I look at the river for a minute and then I’m bored and I look away. If you give me the game, then I can zero in on the surface of the water and have focus for hours. And it’s really, like, two or three hours into focusing intensely on a river that I achieve these, like, weird altered mental states of complete zenned-out brain water have flowed together. But I think it’s really funky. The game is a support structure for that kind of attention. It’s very hard to get there on your own. When I try seated meditation, I can’t get there. If someone’s like, “Pay attention to the river until your mind empties and merges to the river,” I’d be like, “I have no idea how to do that. What?” But if someone’s like, “Look for trout and then notice what insects are and then try to cast,” then that’s, like, a little tangible thread that I can crawl my way into this subtle, subtle mental state. 

One of the interesting things about games is you don’t need to understand them for them to act on you, right? What a game is, is it tells you to do something and it gives you some constraints. And you’re like, “I don’t know. What’s that for?” And you just try it. And then suddenly, you have these discoveries. I see this all the time. Like, people playing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time, playing a social communication party game for the first time, trying rock climbing for the 1st time… They don’t know what it’s for. They don’t know the reasons why anyone would do it. Someone talked them to do it. They try it. And the rules kind of force them into an intentional posture of looking at the world, looking for holes in the rock, looking for little bugs in the air. And suddenly they’re doing that. And then something happens to their mind and body. And they find that there’s some weird new radiant kind of beauty that they hadn’t known about and that they couldn’t have chased directly. This is the magic of games!

ROMAN MARS: More with Thi Nguyen after this… 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: We’re back with C. Thi Nguyen. 

ROMAN MARS: I’m really interested in how to use metrics for good because objective measures and transparencies are key components to good government progressive era politics. We’ve talked about Robert Moses a lot on the show. And before he became the villain of The Power Broker, he was championing civil service reform, and that’s all about measuring achievement, taking tests, and making sure people got jobs because they deserve them and not because they were someone’s nephew. So, how do we use scores and scoring systems in an effective way to make the world a better place and have them not dominate our lives in a bad way? 

THI NGUYEN: One of the most famous cases, I think, is the quantification of policing in New York police districts. So in the early days, people have said, “Look, all these police districts say that they’re doing well. We can’t tell if they’re going well. So we’re going to put clear metrics about what we can measure, which is how many cases get closed. How many arrests do we make?” And what happened was, in the first bunch of years, it worked great. It detected all kinds of corruption, detected all kinds of bias, and forced people to rid it and get that out of the system. And then after a little while… I think it’s a story that a lot of people know–that I learned from the TV show, The Wire. 

ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLING] Same. 

THI NGUYEN: People started gaming those metrics. You can game those metrics easily. One way to make your case closure rate look good is to discourage people from reporting crimes. One way to up your case closure rate is speeding tickets because you open the case and you close it at the same time. So, in the beginning, it gets rid of corruption and bias because the metrics are so brute that everyone can understand them. And after a period of time, they seem to drain what’s genuinely valuable from the system because they point people at something that’s very easily and mechanically checkable and measurable. 

ROMAN MARS: So, in Thi’s police example, metrics start out as being helpful and in service of offering transparency to the public, but eventually they end up being counterproductive and sometimes even dangerous. And he told me that a similar dynamic can play out with population-wide statistics where you’re trying to get a sense of trends on a really big scale. 

THI NGUYEN: What makes metrics work well is that they work at scale really fast. So they’re really good for us to coordinate around for vast social efforts. So, if you’re going to coordinate the entire world around reducing CO2 emissions or increasing vaccination rates, that’s a really simple thing. And when we count it in the same way, we can cooperate really easily. The cost is there are only certain kinds of things that we all measure in the way and count in the way that we can coordinate around. So that suggests another answer, which is that some kinds of targets are naturally stable at scale and easy for everyone to count at scale, and it’s easier to get good metrics of that. So I’ll give you an example. It’s much easier to get a good metric for lifespan and mortality rate than it is to get a metric for mental health. Everyone counts lifespan and deaths in the same way. These other things aren’t counted in the same way. So it is appropriate in those cases because the kind of thing that’s being targeted is the kind of thing that’s stable at scale. But the worry–the price–is that we tend to socially over attend to those qualities. We over attend to lifespan and mortality rate instead of mental well-being flourishing, community flourishing, social relationships…

ROMAN MARS: So I guess the point I’m wondering is, like, what do we do with all this? How do we live and thrive in a world where we have no choice but to engage with these metrics in so many areas in our lives? 

THI NGUYEN: Yeah, so I would like to give you a peppy answer of, like, just grit up and play with the institutions in your life! But I think one of the things we know is that if you quit a game, nothing happens. And if you quit your KPIs or your other metrics of your work, you get fired and then you starve and then your family dies. It’s not the same. But I think there are a few things you can do. One thing you can do is at least have some ironic distance. I think there’s a huge difference between someone thinking, “My goal in life is to have the most subscribers,” versus “My goal is to communicate and have all these other things! And I need subscribers to do it, but I’m willing to trade off against it.” That’s one thing. 

ROMAN MARS: The last thing Thi told me about, though, was my favorite approach to living in a world defined by metrics without letting them define you. He talked about finding little places in your life where you can choose to create or define your own metrics, which lets you design the game you actually want to be playing. 

THI NGUYEN: I complained about metrics forever and then I realized I was in charge of a huge one for my students. My grading system for my students is a scoring system that I am an authority in. And I was just being an unthinking authoritarian. And so this might amuse you, but the last two years, as I’ve been thinking about this, I decided that I had not realized the degree to which, as I complained about the tyranny of metrics, I was turning around and imposing it on my students. And so I’ve been trying an experiment. I have been letting my students design their own scoring system. So what I’ve been doing in my tech and design ethics class is walking in and saying, none of us have any clue what to do about ChatGPT in the classroom. And so as an exercise in the class, we will talk about the philosophy of education, AI, and democracy. And then they will democratically design their own grading system and assignments for the class. And that’s something I could have done all along and I didn’t realize it. 

ROMAN MARS: How did that go? 

THI NGUYEN: Amazing! Unbelievable. Let me tell you, first of all, process over outcome. The grading system they designed was actually quite good. But the process of coming up with it was more valuable than any other assignment I’ve ever done. They get so invested. And they end up talking seriously about what an education was for, what a grading system was for, what the use of AI was for, what all of it meant. They took it super seriously. And I think, among other things, it taught them systems thinking. They started having to think about how the design of a grading system changed in education and how you get good and bad design. And I think part of what I was trying to do was get students to see what you’re trying to get people to see, which is that all these quiet design issues in the background totally change how people interact. Like, who cares in some sense? I mean, they did come up with a good grading system. But I kind of don’t care if they did because the process of coming up with it actually got me what I wanted from the class in the first place. 

ROMAN MARS: I had just a great time talking with you. I love the book, The Score. I just had so much fun reading it. And I had too much fun sort of, like, looking at it and using it to decode my life and my choices. I really appreciate it. 

THI NGUYEN: Thank you. Thank you so much. 

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Lasha Madan and edited by Kelly Prime. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real.

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Joe Rosenberg, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California.

You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.