Playing Somebody Else's Game

REVIEW: 'The Score' by C. Thi Nguyen

On February 28, I’m taking part in a live event in Austin, TX: KILL THE INTERNET. It’s a night of philosophical discussion — in person, not through a screen.

I’ll be giving a talk called ‘The Dignity of Darkness,’ on the role of privacy in human flourishing.

You can purchase tickets here.

You spend a large portion of your life – probably much larger than you realize – playing games.

As a father of two small children, I play many simple games throughout my day: chasing my son around, playing peek-a-boo, singing songs faster and faster until the words start to run together and we all descend into laughter. I play the occasional video game, too; my go-to stress reliever is Stardew Valley. At one point, I was a rock climber, going bouldering several times a week. And I’ve been known to be absolutely ruthless in a game like Settlers of Catan.

These are the easy cases. We all know these are games, and we have some sense of why we want to play them. They are fun. They take our mind off the drudgery of day-to-day life. They let us set aside our ordinary cares for a brief period of time. Most of all, they bring us pleasure — ideally, a harmless pleasure, one that is a net-positive in our lives.

Reading C. Thi Nguyen’s book The Score made me realize that we are playing a lot of other games, too, and some of these games are games we might not want to be playing.

Nguyen is an academic philosopher, and he’s published in journals such as the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, Synthese, and Oxford Studies in Epistemology. Much of his work sits at the intersection of epistemology and ethics, and he’s given special attention to some of the perils of the internet. You can get a sense of his approach to philosophy and his overall style in this lecture he delivered at the Royal Institute of Philosophy:

But Nguyen is, above all, a philosopher of games. The Score takes his approach to games – which he developed in an earlier monograph, Games: Agency as Art – and uses it to answer a central question:

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?

To understand this question, we need a little bit of background in how to think about games.

Consider a game like Settlers of Catan. Catan gives players an objective: win the game by being the first to reach 10 Victory Points. This objective decomposes into some sub-objectives: build settlements and cities, have the largest army, prevent your opponent from succeeding, and so on. The game gives you something to care about – a goal – along with the basic means to reach that goal. The joy of Catan is in finding creative strategies to reach that goal and, at least for players like myself, in finding ways to frustrate your fellow players’ attempts to reach that goal.

Games are so enjoyable, Nguyen says, because of the clarity they provide:

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 afterward, we know exactly how well we have done. Theere 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 explicist, immaculate, unquestionable detail. Games offer us value clairty. They are an existential balm for the confusion of ordinary life.

This value clarity can be given to us in many different ways. And when the values are made clear, they even offer us a chance to try on a new self for a while. Some board games, like Catan, are adversarial. It’s you versus everyone at the table. When I play Catan, I have no problem being tactical, even ruthless. I want to win. That’s the point of the game.

If I play a game like Pandemic, I behave differently. That is because Pandemic is a cooperative game. You and your fellow players are playing against the game itself, trying to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic that could destroy the world. I have no problem being cooperative, in helping my teammates do the cool things they want to do, because that’s what the game is about. I want to win, yes, but I want to win together.

It’s a different game, requiring a different strategy, and even a different self.¹

Games are also enjoyable because they offer us an opportunity for striving play. Striving play is a form of play that takes pleasure in the struggle. While winning is good – and to properly strive, you may have to want to win – striving players can have fun even if they lose. In games, we set up challenges for ourselves, and there is a joy in attempting those challenges.

So, games are fun and meaningful because of the value clarity that they provide, along with the joy of struggle. The metrics that the games use – like resources, victory points, and so on – provide that clarity and provide us with a way of measuring our struggle. In brief, that is why metrics in games contribute to the meaningfulness of playing games.

Something very different happens when you leave the realm of games, however.

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The world we live in is a world of metrics. As soon as this article is published, I will have access to all sorts of metrics:

• Click-through rate

• Total views

• Likes

• Comments

• Restacks

Substack, as a platform, gives me a way of measuring my article’s success. Every platform you use does something similar: YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and the like. All of them use metrics – displayed to the user – to determine how good a post is.

But wait — something is wrong. Someone could write an excellent article on Substack and get almost no views and likes, right? It’s not even something you need to imagine: it happens every day. And the articles that get the most views and likes are not necessarily the best. In fact, you might think the most popular articles are certainly not the best, as they’ve had to be dumbed down to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Sometimes a truly great article might break out, but there is no inviolable law that says there is a necessary connection between article quality and popularity.

This is an example of value capture, another core concept from Nguyen’s book. Value capture is a three-step process:

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

2. You enter some social setting that offers you a simplified, often quantified rendition of your values.

3. The simplified version takes over.

When you start to write on Substack – or, in my case, make videos on YouTube – you start off with a goal: Write good articles (or Make good videos). This goal is qualitative, a bit ambiguous, but it also allows for flexibility. You can express it differently in different contexts. Importantly, you get to determine what ‘good’ means here. You have ownership of your values. Perhaps you think that the complexity of language is the primary value; you can now strive for that. Perhaps you think a conversational tone and a broad style are primary values; you can now strive for those. You can strive for any number of values: humor, accessibility, depth of analysis, relatability, earnestness, and so on.

Those values are unclear. They are values you had to choose, and they are difficult to define. The platforms you use offer you a clarified version of those values: metrics of engagement. That is when you have entered step 2 of value capture. These metrics are simplified and quantified. They are easy to strive for — you know exactly what to aim for. And so, all too easily, those simplified versions take over. You strive for clicks, likes, and engagement. You’ve been value-captured. You’re now playing somebody else’s game.

Why do those simplified values take over? It’s because they offer clarity. Clarity is thus both boon and bane: Metrics present ‘a seductively clear picture of what’s important,’ and he continues:

They present a precise judgment of success – a neat arrangement of the values of the world, made simple and orderly. Simultaneously, the mask of clarity also hits us in the pleasure center, showering us with the pleasure of getting it, of understanding.

Clarity is a feeling of things falling into place.²

This is why clarity is so seductive. But we must be vigilant about the possibility of false clarity. We achieve this false clarity by narrowing our values. In other words, we are leaving something out. In our pursuit of clarity of values, our values shift and transform — by the end of the process, they may be unrecognizable.

It would be a mistake to blame this exclusively on online platforms. Nguyen’s book discusses many sorts of metrics and the way they alter the game (broadly understood) being played. BMI reduces our sense of bodily health to a single number; university rankings enforce homogeneous values across institutions; skateboard competitions have to ignore a sense of flow and playfulness when grading the difficulty of tricks; your smart watch makes you obsessess over the number of steps (or, if you have an Apple Watch, ‘closing your rings’) rather than focusing on improving your endurance or cardiovascular system. All of these, Nguyen would say (and I agree), can easily lead to value-capture.

Before you know it, you are playing somebody else’s game — actually, you’re playing a lot of games, and none of them are the games you chose for yourself.

Remember Nguyen’s question:

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?

We answered that first question by drawing on his theory of games. And now we have an answer to the second. Metrics drain the life out of everything, we can say, because they offer false clarity, leading to value capture. We do not find these activities meaningful because they are no longer aimed at the goods and goals we have chosen for ourselves, but rather at a set of values that have been outsourced.

In other words, we lose our sense of meaning when we are playing somebody else’s game.

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This should give you a sense of The Score. I found it provocative, insightful, and surprisingly heartfelt. There is only so much ground a 2,000-word book review can cover, so I had to leave out a good deal.

I highly encourage you to read it for yourself.

After reading this book, I told my wife, ‘This is a book I wish I had written.’ I had at one point outlined a book that tackled similar issues, and it is very easy to fall into a line of thinking as if you’ve been ‘scooped’ by a fellow philosopher. But that’s all nonsense. I am glad I didn’t write this book, because it would have been considerably worse than Nguyen's. Only someone who had thought so deeply about games could explain the ills of our gamified world.

1. ‘Self’ is ambiguous. I don’t mean it is an entirely different Jared playing each game, and I don’t think that’s what Nguyen means either. (I believe there’s a relatively stable entity that persists across time that I can call ‘me’ — some philosophers disagree!) We have to mean it a bit more broadly, something like ‘A person and a bundle of values.’ The values get swapped out in each game, so there’s a new ‘self’ in this broader sense.

2. Emphasis added.