I don't mind being psychoanalyzed! Looking a few chapters ahead, Nguyen possibly put his finger on it on page 240 when he talks about "rules skeptics." "They don't hold any rules sacred" fits. "Won't submerge themselves in a new game" fits. "Unwilling to try something new" doesn't fit -- I do like trying new things. But, in spite of being willing to try things, I'm definitely a skeptical person -- not to the point of reflexively disbelieving everything I'm told, but I question everything. I can't feel like I know anything if I don't examine the assumptions it's based on. Anyway, enough about myself!
In chapters 12-18, I began to understand much better the distinction between games and metrics which I wrote last week that I thought wasn't well supported. I do see the difference now between games -- process-centric, adjustable rules and difficulty, affecting small number of participants -- and bureaucratic metrics -- results-centric, fixed and self-perpetuating rules, affecting large numbers of people. Even if I do feel unduly constrained by the rules when I play games, the difference is clear to me now. I withdraw the criticism.
The most interesting idea to me in this section was when Nguyen talks about the fallacy of value-neutral technology. When I decided to participate in this reading group, one of the questions I hoped to answer was whether digital technology itself is bad or if it's just designed badly. My hope going in was that it's the latter, because in spite of everything I *like* computers. (They aren't my passion, but I'm a programmer and database administrator, and I find working with data interesting and fulfilling.) Unfortunately, Nguyen goes a long way toward convincing me it's actually the former. On page 201-202, he explodes the idea that technology is value-neutral by quoting the infamous "guns don't kill people, people kill people," and goes on to show that the "inherent politics" of data -- and, by extension, of data systems, i.e. computers -- is centralized control and surveillance. Computers will always give an asymmetrical advantage to the people who want these things, while offering very little to those who don't. To extend his metaphor, it isn't true that "the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a computer is a good guy with a computer." Or, in other words, you can't wield the One Ring for good, and your only choice is to cast it into the fires of Mount Doom.
As someone who similarly was hoping that this group could help continue to clarify the "is technology today bad or just designed badly?" but who also had done a lot of academic research on this question even going back a decade or so? Continue to have hope, because everything I've learned and am still learning continues to point to it being not the technology's fault but instead terrible choices we've made related instead to how to regulate it (or not do so, really), who to allow in charge of it, and who it exists to benefit. Nguyen is not wrong that technologies aren't values-neutral. But the issue is that typically we tend to treat technologies as neutral and then neglect to consider their value systems as we implement them, and so the outcome is often not the fault of the technologies themselves. They always arrive in particular political and social contexts that are going to then activate or negate different values inherent in the tool or pull it in different directions. Like metrics, I feel like Nguyen isn't down on technology as much as on the lack of capacity to be reflective on it and recognize its lack of neutrality as we use it.
This is why I'm more drawn to questions about the ideology of technologists (particularly Silicon Valley) than just the technologies themselves. The two have to be considered together. Technology and modernism went hand in hand and reinforced each other and this continues to be true today.
If you want a really interesting read (and one that inspired an entire thesis paper from me), you should check out this early article called "The Californian Ideology" from the 90's. I may have mentioned it before, but it demonstrates how aware people were even early on about the potential lack of attention people were paying to the way that neoliberal values and the values of the internet were interacting and mutating one another. It's EXTREMELY prescient.
I hope that is true. As I said, I like computers. Nguyen makes a great point with guns though. You can't keep kids safe from school shooters by arming teachers, because a gun is a technology that gives more power to people who want kids dead than it gives to people who want kids safe. Perhaps computers empowers control and surveillance but not freedom.
I haven't done academic research for a decade, but I've experimented to try to find a way to have to good side of computers without the bad -- Linux, De-googled Android, FOSS software, encryption, privacy-first software, self-hosted replacements for big tech products. And it helps. I don't experience algorithmic recommendations or AI slop. I look forward to software updates again. But it still isn't exactly *great*. In fact, it makes me spend more time thinking about computers, which is sub-optimal. I'm happier if I unplug and read a book. Almost every computer program I've ever written is to fix a problem that was created by computers, which is absurd. Hope isn't lost, but it's dwindling.
I'm going to read "The California Ideology" now....
Your point about whether computers just innately empower control and surveillance but not freedom is actually a really vital one. Because I actually do think you're right that computers do enable those things and that this fact is part of the story of how we lost the plot, basically.
My paper ended up referring back to the Californian Ideology but also then going back to do a further dive on a really critical transition that occurred even prior to the internet in which the attitude of countercultural activists towards technology somehow got completely distorted and turned around on itself in the 1960's/70's. The message of early political activists like Mario Savio and the Free Speech movement or the burgeoning environmentalist/anti-nuclear movement in that era was explicitly anti-technological but particularly concerned with the role of computers in institutionalizing bureaucracy and statistical dehumanization, with Savio even burning IBM punch cards and connecting them to the Vietnam draft system and portrayals like that of HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey explicitly connecting technology to dystopia. And yet, by the 1980's you then see that same supposedly countercultural generation's attitude shift towards a more libertarian, techno-utopian ethos best illustrated by the famous 1984 superbowl ad for Apple Computers that implied that personal computers were actually going to be the thing that liberated people from Big Brother. It's a pretty striking and dramatic shift with huge implications for us today and how we understand the dangers of technology or the values computers and media technologies embody, and it led me on a really interesting historical path through ahistorical understandings of the counterculture in the first place and how factional it was as well as divergences considering LSD, the Whole Earth Catalog and communes, and Walt Disney as part of the story. But it demonstrates that your instinct that Nguyen is correct is valid and that we should remain concerned about the values that computers at least lean us towards that need to be guarded against more than we have been.
I think that much like modern Randian libertarians have misused and abused economic concepts like the free market that they claim are values neutral which absolutely aren't, they've also hitched themselves to the idea of the personal computer and the internet in the same way and essentially tied the two together with a kind of evangelical fervor that often then creates cognitive dissonance and contradiction with reality. This is in part because they KNOW that the free market and the internet together, when fundamental to our society's infrastructure and embedded in daily life and thought, institutionalize their particular value system in ways that are then much harder to counter or uproot.
I would be interested in reading your paper. I'm generally aware that the initial reaction to computers was very negative, but then reversed in the late 1960s. But I have no conception about what those early criticisms were. I've been meaning to check out those early sources.
I wrote it as the capstone of my undergraduate degree in Interdisciplinary Studies (which basically means I couldn't choose a major, lol, and reflects a mix of studies in history, sociology, and psychology.)
I found the example on pg. 210 about value-laden standards particularly illuminating:
"Diurnal time and standardized clock time serve deeply different purposes and ways of life. This is why the choice of timing systems is value-laden."
Standards like this produce a convergence that I'm often not aware of. It feels like a neutral system, yet there is clearly a worldview promoted and facilitated by our agreement on that standard. It's been fascinating to unpack some of those assumptions, like the mapping sound quality example he gives on pg. 212.
I was thinking about this a lot too! I just added a really interesting-sounding book to my reading list called Against Money that gets into issues with the entire way in which we currently discuss economics and the way in which economic metrics drive our understanding of the world. And it demonstrates that Nguyen's point may start at something seemingly less consequential like gaming but has massive implications for our larger understanding of today's problems and challenges.
Because economic metrics - things like GDP and unemployment - illustrate really well how convergence and then value capture can distort our view of the world through a kind of neutralization of subjective values that, as Jared reminded us in the post, totally cut off our ability to be self-reflective about them. At some point, economists have come to see money not as a concept/tool which humans created to serve human needs and desires but as an external mandate that humans must serve. They've reversed the natural order rather than discovered it as they imagine they have.
This has also happened with technology as well and is particularly salient right now in the AI conversation. The very notion of the "singularity" is dependent upon technology as an external actor who humans must catch up to or will be overtaken by rather than recognizing that it is us, human beings, who are actively choosing at each stage to develop a technology or not. The very ideology of Silicon Valley has become almost religiously devoted to the idea of humans preparing themselves for and enabling technological innovation even at the expense of human lives or present wellbeing in philosophies like longtermism and transhumanism.
And as "finance bros" then took over Silicon Valley around the time of the dot-com boom in the 2000's, these two areas actually accelerated the convergence around economic metrics by even then pushing technological expansion into something measured more often by financial outcomes - stock market value of technology companies, number of releases pushed out (regardless of their quality), market share, etc. - rather than other measures of actual human gains from any new innovation. Even productivity metrics right now are extraordinarily confusing and obscured when it comes to AI and increasingly difficult for the average person to parse vs. what executives desire divorced from reality for workers.
It really should draw us to the key question Nguyen seems to be getting at, which is that we need to recognize the point at which metrics are no longer serving our needs, we're serving theirs. Which then of course leads to the question of who benefits from those being the chosen metrics.
(Here is the link to a review of Against Money in case anyone else is interested:
The discussion of diurnal time was like stepping through the looking glass for me. Unlike his suggestion that many people are horrified by the idea of diurnal time when first encountering it, I was immediately drawn to the idea, and have started to consider how I can try and 'hack' the system to give it more of a place in my life. Maybe instead of a fixed wake up and sleep time as recommended by so many sleep experts I should stop resisting waking up earlier and going to bed later in the summer, and staying in bed longer during the winter.
I am deeply in the world of computers and technology as both a career and hobby, so I've been trained to view time in a very mechanistic way, even relatively was just a math problem to be solved to ensure accurate time keeping across systems. The idea of living more in line with the sun is fascinating to me. Maybe I'm just burnt out. =p
So one thing I thought was worth clarifying after some of last week's conversations is how Nguyen is using the term metrics and just what we mean by a metric vs. just a more general measurement of something.
There was some discussion of the absolute need for information, and this is accurate. Obviously, we need to know how much money is in our bank account. We need to collect some data about the world, and we need obviously some measurements that are relevant to that data. However, what I think is worth considering is that metrics and measurements are not the same thing. Metrics (particularly of the kind that Nguyen is concerned with and equating to scorekeeping) are measurements that are specifically engineered to convert simple data or measurements into a judgment or assessment of some kind so that it can more easily turned into knowledge or wisdom (to use the DIKW pyramid if people are familiar with that concept). Metrics can be chosen from a selection of measurements, but often metrics will determine what we even choose to measure in the first place.
So, for example, a display of all of my bank transactions with columns for money coming out and in is not a metric. Nor even, really, is the list of how much money I have in the bank. I can choose to do what I would like with that information, and traditionally most people have been given the autonomy over their personal finances to largely determine their own metrics of financial health - am I trying to save money? Control spending? Give more money to good causes? Earn enough money even to not end up insolvent and have a paycheck that at least covers bills? Those will all determine my own personal metrics. However, recently my bank has begun pivoting towards the kinds of things that financial apps like Mint used to do for people and has begun building metrics into my banking app. So now, instead of seeing my balance right away, I immediately see a little tracker that tells me that last month I spent x amount by this period in the month and now this month I am spending x amount. And it even says "Good job, keep it up, you're doing well!" if it's lower. That's the bank determining for me a metric by which I can judge my financial success or not. The bank has determined that everyone's goal should always be to spend less than previously and save more. Probably fair for most people. It's paternalistic, personally I think teaches people to let others tell them what their goals are or judge them rather than forcing them to reflect personally on their goals, and I hate it. But that's really also what Nguyen is talking about in terms of metrics and self-reflexivity and value capture.
That's the simplest version of it. But when you get into the business world and you look at how, for example, customer service metrics are intent on measuring some things (those that measure costs or efficiencies) over not measuring or tracking perhaps other things at all (the number of angry customers or hang-ups or the quitting of frustrated employees) and the tying the things they choose to measure to dashboards and employee bonuses or pay? You can see how easy it is for metrics to determine what success looks like and then from the top down influence the entire system at every level to force conformance to that definition of success.
We often have to measure things in order to actually understand the world around us and get a handle on it. But measurements alone don't mean anything until we choose which ones to care about and what we believe they can or should tell us and why we're measuring. And metrics are measurements that specifically distill and reflect that process. Games are a great way to view this clearly because game designers are among the most aware and attuned to the manipulation of small changes in metrics and "win" conditions in service of creating shared (temporary) goals and workflows. This is why I really am not convinced that Nguyen is making an anti-metrics argument in the alternating chapters. He's making an argument for us to remain attuned to that question game designers care about regarding the fact that metrics have the capacity to converge and to create value capture and so we need to never allow them to go uncontested in our lives without reflecting on them.
Yes, exactly. What bank you use, its distance from your home, its distance from your work, the average drive-time, the wait time to see a teller, how many accounts you have, how many credit cards -- all of that is data.
The line about scoring systems producing convergence, not merely discovering it, feels important far beyond games. Once we decide what counts, people start bending themselves toward being countable.
You can see it in fitness, business, social media, even self-improvement. The metric begins as a tool, then quietly becomes the definition of success. Steps become health. Revenue becomes value. Likes become impact. None of those are useless, but they flatten the thing they were supposed to illuminate.
Maybe the question is not "are metrics bad?" but "what part of the human experience does this metric make harder to see?"
This makes a conversation between ‘You & Your Profile’ and ‘The Score’ very interesting. If you pair their observations together, I think you get a more damning picture of the profilicity thesis.
Thanks for writing this, Jared. I want to point out a typo which tripped me up and may well trip up other readers: you've reproduced one of the quotes from the book as "If you accept this prefabricated, public value system into your heart, you will become instantly incomprehensible." This sent me back to my copy of the book because it seemed to be the opposite of what I thought Nguyen should be saying here. And indeed, this should say "comprehensible".
Usually typos are pretty meaningless, but I thought I'd point this one out simply because of the paramount significance those two letters have for the meaning of the sentence!
I love sorting and categorizing immensely, possibly more than playing games. I am thankful to Thi and this book for making me feel safe/validated in wanting to explore why I love and hate games, and love and hate tracking and metrics.
For example, a few months ago I decided to find every game I own on PC (or for which I hold a temporary license, à la Steam/Epic) and categorize them into discrete categories, so that I could stop complaining that "I have nothing to play." I started with very clear-cut tags, like "Completed", for games I had completed all the way through, and "Games with Friends", for games that are co-op or multiplayer only (like Left 4 Dead 2); but soon I ran into a roadblock. How could I compare an unplayed deckbuilder that I could play for 300 hours, and an unplayed puzzle game that might last only 10? If the goal of this was to find games to play, I had to make tags that reflected my purposes.
So, I resorted to less measurable, but much more valuable categories: things like, "I want to play this", for games I am actually excited at the prospect of playing, and "I've had my fill", for games I've played a bit, and I'm not interested in returning to. I ended up with 9 categories: some were discrete and rigid, others were much more qualitative and subtle.
I probably worked on this for a week or two, with ferocious intensity. I would get home from work, put on some music, and crank out a bunch of games. It was such a blast, to know I was making something so helpful to myself, and putting everything into nice, neat boxes.
Since then, I've played maybe... 3 games from the "I want to play this" category, in as many months. I haven't even finished one game! I'm curious as to why I pursued the sorting with such vigour, yet I couldn't muster the same energy to play the games themselves!
I feel this so much. I am constantly categorizing and sorting and re-organizing my movie and music collections. But it is weirdly an activity that seems to delight me more than the actual listening to or watching anything even once I make myself a nice, neat set of things I have been meaning to get to!
I think the human brain (and particularly certain people's brains) just enjoys order and simplicity.
This is also why productivity methods that actually are unproductive are so common and I have had to learn to stay away from them. It is so easy to spend more time forming systems to do things than do anything.
For some reason, this is reminding me about how Owen Barfield talked about idolatry in his book "Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry", he talks about the what is means to know something and what we mean by thing. He defines idolatry is any human made model or image whose limitations have been forgotten, modern science is idolatrous to Barfield because it assumes that its model of the world is the Truth (capital T truth) and forgets that science is limited.
So a score, is a model that is supposed to signify something inside of its context, but if the limitations of what that score is is forgotten then that score would be considered idolatrous within its context because it seen to be more than it is. All scoring systems are hackable because all scoring systems are limited.
In our logical times, we tend to ascribe more to the model of the world that to world itself, just as we tend to ascribe more to a rating of 1-10 'how much did you enjoy this' instead of to the enjoyment itself.
This actually connects really clearly as well to another key point that previous book You And Your Profile seemed to be a little too unquestioning about - the advantages of human experiences and life reorganizing themselves around second order observation rather than first order.
Not only do D'Ambrosio and Mueller in that book fail to consider whether the metrics used to measure the "general peer" are susceptible to the kind of abstraction from real meaning that you point out, they also just seem to assume that people's preference for second order knowledge is a natural progression towards more complex thinking that is somehow advantageous rather than something perhaps just a less critical or simpler impulse in people reinforced by those abstracted metrics.
Well abstraction does not necessarily allow for more complex thinking, but it does allow for those who use the abstraction to have greater power over the nature and even other people (if we think of people are not a part of nature, but that is a different conversation).
To borrow my previous example, it is very easy to use, transmit, quantify and leverage a rating of 1-10 how did you enjoy this, absent such a score it the only way to transmit an understanding of your enjoyment is to have a conversation with the interested party. It is something that cannot be quantified.
This use of abstraction allows a greater degree of control over nature, but to pull from "The Abolition of Man" by C.S. Lewis, the last part of nature to be conquered will be human nature, and it isn't mankind's conquest of nature but some men's conquest of nature that is happening.
(An interesting thing about Owen Barfield is that he does believe that this separation of abstraction from the concrete is a part of a long chain of evolution of consciousness starting sometime around the start of the Iron Age. At our point in time we are able to conceive of ourselves as individuals because where we are in this evolution. The further back you go the less people would have been able to even think of themselves as an individual. That is just one example of how Barfield understands evolution of consciousness. More about that in "Saving the Appearances")
I find myself naturally returning to metrics causing us to 'lose' something. I fundamentally think Nguyen is right here, and that metrics aren't neutral. When we gain a metric, we lose something else. Or even many things only tangentially related to the metric. I'm thinking specifically related to languages here (not actually Irish this time!) and different ways cultures have approached and understood the world.
Take, for instance, the language Oksapmin. This language traditionally had a base-27 counting system, starting from one thumb, going up over the arm and the face down to the other thumb. Under the pressures due to English, but more to the dominance of base-10 in schools and the modern world, this is falling out of use (see Nicholas Evans's *Dying Words* for more information, and a schematic of the way they broke down this counting). We're literally losing a different way to conceive and perceive the world, in a broad sense. This is happening world-wide due to the metrics we've put in place; Enthusiasm Girl mentioned economic metrics, but I'd also include *scientific* ones and even the metric for what counts as true knowledge, etc. I think it's really hard to say these metrics are neutral, rather than serving to exist and promote a certain worldview - and they're often used as tools to beat other worldviews into submission - see *Bad Samaritans* by Ha-Joon Chang for economic examples. We just often don't see them because they arise out of our own culture.
And this doesn't even take into account the people abandoning their traditional languages in droves for the majority ones because the metrics they're told to pursue (namely, 'money') essentially demand it. Or how those metrics and new cultural attitude then go back into the culture and wipe out its traditional understandings (expressed via idioms and metaphors à la Lakoff) by imposing those of the majority one because these new ways of talking about the world are seen as 'neutral' or obvious.
Edit: To elaborate on the second paragraph. The metric itself is the pursuit of money, and the correlation of money being a status symbol and necessary for living. I do think this is a metric that has imposed a lot of value capture on us, as well as 'level of education attained'. As I said the change is only indirectly related to the metric itself, but a direct result of the value capture from the metric foisted on the world by the US (in particular) after WW2 and, especially, from the 1980s onwards.
One thing that genuinely does terrify me a little as someone who is just old enough now to have experienced clearly both the pre-online and post-online world fully is that increasingly younger generations seem to have absolutely zero sense of what has been lost. Because why would they? They weren't around to experience it! But trying to explain it to them always makes me conscious of being perceived as just, well... old.
This has then caused me to not only side-eye the knee-jerk "old people just can't handle change" conversations that come up when we talk about new technologies or societal shifts that presume with very little nuance or real argumentation that new things ARE better because they are new. But it has also made me more open to really going back to prior generational discourses around past technologies like television or radio or even the printing press and looking at them without that bias towards presuming that their introduction always made the world better or that those people were obviously wrong. Because obviously I also can't truly conceive of the value of things lost before I was born any more than younger people can.
I think we need to shift away from discourses that say things like "you can't look backwards" or "stop living in the past" and presume it is always conservatism to draw on historical solutions or ideas as much as we also need to recognize the lie in things like "you can't fight the future". We need to learn to stop and take each argument made about history or the future in its own context. There are ways to draw what was actually good forth from the past and learn from it without repeating past mistakes. Not everything abandoned was left behind because it was worse. And there are ways that the future could absolutely be worse if we make thoughtless choices about it, because history isn't innately progressive.
Like so many adults.... We are missing the care-giving part within competitive competitions. This ideal is opposing opposite of this: University of Michigan — Felix Warneken’s Research on Early Altruism
Core finding: Infants and toddlers spontaneously help others without being taught. This research overturns the old assumption that children are born selfish and must be trained into cooperation.
Key Observations
• Children as young as 18 months show spontaneous helping behaviors.
• They will put another person’s interest ahead of their own, even without reward or instruction.
• This includes helping adults solve problems and sharing resources.
• Warneken’s work is featured in the Netflix series Babies, highlighting how infants naturally act from social concern and relational awareness.
• A related Michigan project investigates the neural circuitry of altruism, showing that caregiving and helping behaviors activate brain systems associated with parental care and social bonding. This suggests altruism is biologically rooted, not culturally imposed.
Fourteen years of developmental psychology research, which includes Felix Warneken’s work at the University of Michigan and the University of Washington’s food-sharing studies does validate infants display spontaneous, untrained altruism. They help others solve problems, share resources, and even give up valuable food when hungry. These behaviors appear before language, before identity, and before social conditioning. This research confirms that selflessness is the biological baseline of the human being, and that selfishness emerges only after collapse enters through fear, scarcity, and ownership
I have offered this within a 30-page, 35+ year independent study offered to The Berggruen Institute as well as the librarian within the Masonic Library in Boston, Massachusetts. This work is too important to hold (to sell) .... So, I researched institutions studying Human Consciousness and the society wanting/desiring understanding of Philosophical Research... Two organizations now house this work.
Note: The key being behavior. Think of either a book store, or a library. The space offers differing/separate human behaviors... This work offered bridges those separations with behavior: How, then what, then why the star transforms into a black hole = The infant unto perishing. Then the $1 trillion question: Are we humans joyous care-givers, or Egotistical: Creators by means of destruction, everything and everyone for the joys in winning?
So one thing that Nguyen doesn't really seem to get into so far that I wish was delved into further is actually the way in which "scores" in gaming are historically understood as driving competition but in recent years have trended towards new styles of gameplay in which players are encouraged to cooperate rather than compete. These other styles of games actually better nurture the notion that Nguyen forwards of the "striving" vs. "achievement" player. They also help us see what the concept of "gamification" as it gets used in the modern business world or to drive engagement with video games in particular is so potentially noxious.
There is a difference, for example, between styles of gameplay where players are encouraged to view each other as competitors and individually seek a victory over others vs. other styles of gameplay. Games can be more or less vicious as well in how they construct the idea of "winning". Think, for example, of Monopoly and the way in which it encourages players to not only score well but do so at the expense of the scores of others and how the only way to win is through a total victory in which everyone else is left with nothing.
However, there are other games like Dungeons & Dragons or RPGs in which players are actually not competing at all. They're working as a team towards an end, typically - to beat a final boss or loot a dungeon - even as they are given opportunities to creatively play however they would like and set their own metrics in truth. D&D doesn't really "keep score" - you can choose as a player to make a fun character, to try and earn a lot of gold, to mess with the DM, etc. - but it's using XP and certain scorekeeping aspects really more as just a marker for you, the player, to show that you're progressing so you get that feeling of striving at something.
Then there's the fairly recent market for actual cooperative board games like Pandemic, where you are still instructed to head towards a "win" condition and keep score, but the score is actually shared across the group and you're working together to "beat" the game itself.
And of course these categories are all different even than when Nguyen talks about something like fly fishing or rock climbing, where players could theoretically choose to engage in them without ever competing with nor encountering another player and they can be wholly individual pursuits.
The games we play and the metrics and win conditions that game designers use, basically, demonstrate for us the way that incentives drive us in different directions that impact how we act towards each other and can produce value capture and alter our values depending upon their structure. The gamification favoured by the business world or productivity optimizers in the sense of earning badges or unlocking achievements is all about the instant gratification of "number go up" basically, rather than looking towards the fuller scope of games in the world and actually engaging with how they can encourage other attributes in us.
I'll also point you towards some solid academic research done on the same question you mentioned regarding whether humans are innately care-giving vs. egotistical but with adults involving rigged games of monopoly:
In short, researchers used the game and altered its conditions via player handicaps that changed the experience of play and status of each player to try and illuminate the ways in which levels of privilege and wealth once bestowed can actually in and of themselves warp our attitudes towards others instinctively.
I don't mind being psychoanalyzed! Looking a few chapters ahead, Nguyen possibly put his finger on it on page 240 when he talks about "rules skeptics." "They don't hold any rules sacred" fits. "Won't submerge themselves in a new game" fits. "Unwilling to try something new" doesn't fit -- I do like trying new things. But, in spite of being willing to try things, I'm definitely a skeptical person -- not to the point of reflexively disbelieving everything I'm told, but I question everything. I can't feel like I know anything if I don't examine the assumptions it's based on. Anyway, enough about myself!
In chapters 12-18, I began to understand much better the distinction between games and metrics which I wrote last week that I thought wasn't well supported. I do see the difference now between games -- process-centric, adjustable rules and difficulty, affecting small number of participants -- and bureaucratic metrics -- results-centric, fixed and self-perpetuating rules, affecting large numbers of people. Even if I do feel unduly constrained by the rules when I play games, the difference is clear to me now. I withdraw the criticism.
The most interesting idea to me in this section was when Nguyen talks about the fallacy of value-neutral technology. When I decided to participate in this reading group, one of the questions I hoped to answer was whether digital technology itself is bad or if it's just designed badly. My hope going in was that it's the latter, because in spite of everything I *like* computers. (They aren't my passion, but I'm a programmer and database administrator, and I find working with data interesting and fulfilling.) Unfortunately, Nguyen goes a long way toward convincing me it's actually the former. On page 201-202, he explodes the idea that technology is value-neutral by quoting the infamous "guns don't kill people, people kill people," and goes on to show that the "inherent politics" of data -- and, by extension, of data systems, i.e. computers -- is centralized control and surveillance. Computers will always give an asymmetrical advantage to the people who want these things, while offering very little to those who don't. To extend his metaphor, it isn't true that "the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a computer is a good guy with a computer." Or, in other words, you can't wield the One Ring for good, and your only choice is to cast it into the fires of Mount Doom.
As someone who similarly was hoping that this group could help continue to clarify the "is technology today bad or just designed badly?" but who also had done a lot of academic research on this question even going back a decade or so? Continue to have hope, because everything I've learned and am still learning continues to point to it being not the technology's fault but instead terrible choices we've made related instead to how to regulate it (or not do so, really), who to allow in charge of it, and who it exists to benefit. Nguyen is not wrong that technologies aren't values-neutral. But the issue is that typically we tend to treat technologies as neutral and then neglect to consider their value systems as we implement them, and so the outcome is often not the fault of the technologies themselves. They always arrive in particular political and social contexts that are going to then activate or negate different values inherent in the tool or pull it in different directions. Like metrics, I feel like Nguyen isn't down on technology as much as on the lack of capacity to be reflective on it and recognize its lack of neutrality as we use it.
This is why I'm more drawn to questions about the ideology of technologists (particularly Silicon Valley) than just the technologies themselves. The two have to be considered together. Technology and modernism went hand in hand and reinforced each other and this continues to be true today.
If you want a really interesting read (and one that inspired an entire thesis paper from me), you should check out this early article called "The Californian Ideology" from the 90's. I may have mentioned it before, but it demonstrates how aware people were even early on about the potential lack of attention people were paying to the way that neoliberal values and the values of the internet were interacting and mutating one another. It's EXTREMELY prescient.
https://web.archive.org/web/20171223010130/https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology
I hope that is true. As I said, I like computers. Nguyen makes a great point with guns though. You can't keep kids safe from school shooters by arming teachers, because a gun is a technology that gives more power to people who want kids dead than it gives to people who want kids safe. Perhaps computers empowers control and surveillance but not freedom.
I haven't done academic research for a decade, but I've experimented to try to find a way to have to good side of computers without the bad -- Linux, De-googled Android, FOSS software, encryption, privacy-first software, self-hosted replacements for big tech products. And it helps. I don't experience algorithmic recommendations or AI slop. I look forward to software updates again. But it still isn't exactly *great*. In fact, it makes me spend more time thinking about computers, which is sub-optimal. I'm happier if I unplug and read a book. Almost every computer program I've ever written is to fix a problem that was created by computers, which is absurd. Hope isn't lost, but it's dwindling.
I'm going to read "The California Ideology" now....
Your point about whether computers just innately empower control and surveillance but not freedom is actually a really vital one. Because I actually do think you're right that computers do enable those things and that this fact is part of the story of how we lost the plot, basically.
My paper ended up referring back to the Californian Ideology but also then going back to do a further dive on a really critical transition that occurred even prior to the internet in which the attitude of countercultural activists towards technology somehow got completely distorted and turned around on itself in the 1960's/70's. The message of early political activists like Mario Savio and the Free Speech movement or the burgeoning environmentalist/anti-nuclear movement in that era was explicitly anti-technological but particularly concerned with the role of computers in institutionalizing bureaucracy and statistical dehumanization, with Savio even burning IBM punch cards and connecting them to the Vietnam draft system and portrayals like that of HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey explicitly connecting technology to dystopia. And yet, by the 1980's you then see that same supposedly countercultural generation's attitude shift towards a more libertarian, techno-utopian ethos best illustrated by the famous 1984 superbowl ad for Apple Computers that implied that personal computers were actually going to be the thing that liberated people from Big Brother. It's a pretty striking and dramatic shift with huge implications for us today and how we understand the dangers of technology or the values computers and media technologies embody, and it led me on a really interesting historical path through ahistorical understandings of the counterculture in the first place and how factional it was as well as divergences considering LSD, the Whole Earth Catalog and communes, and Walt Disney as part of the story. But it demonstrates that your instinct that Nguyen is correct is valid and that we should remain concerned about the values that computers at least lean us towards that need to be guarded against more than we have been.
I think that much like modern Randian libertarians have misused and abused economic concepts like the free market that they claim are values neutral which absolutely aren't, they've also hitched themselves to the idea of the personal computer and the internet in the same way and essentially tied the two together with a kind of evangelical fervor that often then creates cognitive dissonance and contradiction with reality. This is in part because they KNOW that the free market and the internet together, when fundamental to our society's infrastructure and embedded in daily life and thought, institutionalize their particular value system in ways that are then much harder to counter or uproot.
I would be interested in reading your paper. I'm generally aware that the initial reaction to computers was very negative, but then reversed in the late 1960s. But I have no conception about what those early criticisms were. I've been meaning to check out those early sources.
Here is a link for you or anyone else interested.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/164wq3avMBZR29yoeaNedXjX888zWVPxW/view?usp=drive_link
I wrote it as the capstone of my undergraduate degree in Interdisciplinary Studies (which basically means I couldn't choose a major, lol, and reflects a mix of studies in history, sociology, and psychology.)
I found the example on pg. 210 about value-laden standards particularly illuminating:
"Diurnal time and standardized clock time serve deeply different purposes and ways of life. This is why the choice of timing systems is value-laden."
Standards like this produce a convergence that I'm often not aware of. It feels like a neutral system, yet there is clearly a worldview promoted and facilitated by our agreement on that standard. It's been fascinating to unpack some of those assumptions, like the mapping sound quality example he gives on pg. 212.
I was thinking about this a lot too! I just added a really interesting-sounding book to my reading list called Against Money that gets into issues with the entire way in which we currently discuss economics and the way in which economic metrics drive our understanding of the world. And it demonstrates that Nguyen's point may start at something seemingly less consequential like gaming but has massive implications for our larger understanding of today's problems and challenges.
Because economic metrics - things like GDP and unemployment - illustrate really well how convergence and then value capture can distort our view of the world through a kind of neutralization of subjective values that, as Jared reminded us in the post, totally cut off our ability to be self-reflective about them. At some point, economists have come to see money not as a concept/tool which humans created to serve human needs and desires but as an external mandate that humans must serve. They've reversed the natural order rather than discovered it as they imagine they have.
This has also happened with technology as well and is particularly salient right now in the AI conversation. The very notion of the "singularity" is dependent upon technology as an external actor who humans must catch up to or will be overtaken by rather than recognizing that it is us, human beings, who are actively choosing at each stage to develop a technology or not. The very ideology of Silicon Valley has become almost religiously devoted to the idea of humans preparing themselves for and enabling technological innovation even at the expense of human lives or present wellbeing in philosophies like longtermism and transhumanism.
And as "finance bros" then took over Silicon Valley around the time of the dot-com boom in the 2000's, these two areas actually accelerated the convergence around economic metrics by even then pushing technological expansion into something measured more often by financial outcomes - stock market value of technology companies, number of releases pushed out (regardless of their quality), market share, etc. - rather than other measures of actual human gains from any new innovation. Even productivity metrics right now are extraordinarily confusing and obscured when it comes to AI and increasingly difficult for the average person to parse vs. what executives desire divorced from reality for workers.
It really should draw us to the key question Nguyen seems to be getting at, which is that we need to recognize the point at which metrics are no longer serving our needs, we're serving theirs. Which then of course leads to the question of who benefits from those being the chosen metrics.
(Here is the link to a review of Against Money in case anyone else is interested:
https://jacobin.com/2026/05/against-money-economics-book-review)
The discussion of diurnal time was like stepping through the looking glass for me. Unlike his suggestion that many people are horrified by the idea of diurnal time when first encountering it, I was immediately drawn to the idea, and have started to consider how I can try and 'hack' the system to give it more of a place in my life. Maybe instead of a fixed wake up and sleep time as recommended by so many sleep experts I should stop resisting waking up earlier and going to bed later in the summer, and staying in bed longer during the winter.
I am deeply in the world of computers and technology as both a career and hobby, so I've been trained to view time in a very mechanistic way, even relatively was just a math problem to be solved to ensure accurate time keeping across systems. The idea of living more in line with the sun is fascinating to me. Maybe I'm just burnt out. =p
So one thing I thought was worth clarifying after some of last week's conversations is how Nguyen is using the term metrics and just what we mean by a metric vs. just a more general measurement of something.
There was some discussion of the absolute need for information, and this is accurate. Obviously, we need to know how much money is in our bank account. We need to collect some data about the world, and we need obviously some measurements that are relevant to that data. However, what I think is worth considering is that metrics and measurements are not the same thing. Metrics (particularly of the kind that Nguyen is concerned with and equating to scorekeeping) are measurements that are specifically engineered to convert simple data or measurements into a judgment or assessment of some kind so that it can more easily turned into knowledge or wisdom (to use the DIKW pyramid if people are familiar with that concept). Metrics can be chosen from a selection of measurements, but often metrics will determine what we even choose to measure in the first place.
So, for example, a display of all of my bank transactions with columns for money coming out and in is not a metric. Nor even, really, is the list of how much money I have in the bank. I can choose to do what I would like with that information, and traditionally most people have been given the autonomy over their personal finances to largely determine their own metrics of financial health - am I trying to save money? Control spending? Give more money to good causes? Earn enough money even to not end up insolvent and have a paycheck that at least covers bills? Those will all determine my own personal metrics. However, recently my bank has begun pivoting towards the kinds of things that financial apps like Mint used to do for people and has begun building metrics into my banking app. So now, instead of seeing my balance right away, I immediately see a little tracker that tells me that last month I spent x amount by this period in the month and now this month I am spending x amount. And it even says "Good job, keep it up, you're doing well!" if it's lower. That's the bank determining for me a metric by which I can judge my financial success or not. The bank has determined that everyone's goal should always be to spend less than previously and save more. Probably fair for most people. It's paternalistic, personally I think teaches people to let others tell them what their goals are or judge them rather than forcing them to reflect personally on their goals, and I hate it. But that's really also what Nguyen is talking about in terms of metrics and self-reflexivity and value capture.
That's the simplest version of it. But when you get into the business world and you look at how, for example, customer service metrics are intent on measuring some things (those that measure costs or efficiencies) over not measuring or tracking perhaps other things at all (the number of angry customers or hang-ups or the quitting of frustrated employees) and the tying the things they choose to measure to dashboards and employee bonuses or pay? You can see how easy it is for metrics to determine what success looks like and then from the top down influence the entire system at every level to force conformance to that definition of success.
We often have to measure things in order to actually understand the world around us and get a handle on it. But measurements alone don't mean anything until we choose which ones to care about and what we believe they can or should tell us and why we're measuring. And metrics are measurements that specifically distill and reflect that process. Games are a great way to view this clearly because game designers are among the most aware and attuned to the manipulation of small changes in metrics and "win" conditions in service of creating shared (temporary) goals and workflows. This is why I really am not convinced that Nguyen is making an anti-metrics argument in the alternating chapters. He's making an argument for us to remain attuned to that question game designers care about regarding the fact that metrics have the capacity to converge and to create value capture and so we need to never allow them to go uncontested in our lives without reflecting on them.
Yes, exactly. What bank you use, its distance from your home, its distance from your work, the average drive-time, the wait time to see a teller, how many accounts you have, how many credit cards -- all of that is data.
Your credit score is a metric.
The line about scoring systems producing convergence, not merely discovering it, feels important far beyond games. Once we decide what counts, people start bending themselves toward being countable.
You can see it in fitness, business, social media, even self-improvement. The metric begins as a tool, then quietly becomes the definition of success. Steps become health. Revenue becomes value. Likes become impact. None of those are useless, but they flatten the thing they were supposed to illuminate.
Maybe the question is not "are metrics bad?" but "what part of the human experience does this metric make harder to see?"
This makes a conversation between ‘You & Your Profile’ and ‘The Score’ very interesting. If you pair their observations together, I think you get a more damning picture of the profilicity thesis.
Thanks for writing this, Jared. I want to point out a typo which tripped me up and may well trip up other readers: you've reproduced one of the quotes from the book as "If you accept this prefabricated, public value system into your heart, you will become instantly incomprehensible." This sent me back to my copy of the book because it seemed to be the opposite of what I thought Nguyen should be saying here. And indeed, this should say "comprehensible".
Usually typos are pretty meaningless, but I thought I'd point this one out simply because of the paramount significance those two letters have for the meaning of the sentence!
Thanks for the note
I love sorting and categorizing immensely, possibly more than playing games. I am thankful to Thi and this book for making me feel safe/validated in wanting to explore why I love and hate games, and love and hate tracking and metrics.
For example, a few months ago I decided to find every game I own on PC (or for which I hold a temporary license, à la Steam/Epic) and categorize them into discrete categories, so that I could stop complaining that "I have nothing to play." I started with very clear-cut tags, like "Completed", for games I had completed all the way through, and "Games with Friends", for games that are co-op or multiplayer only (like Left 4 Dead 2); but soon I ran into a roadblock. How could I compare an unplayed deckbuilder that I could play for 300 hours, and an unplayed puzzle game that might last only 10? If the goal of this was to find games to play, I had to make tags that reflected my purposes.
So, I resorted to less measurable, but much more valuable categories: things like, "I want to play this", for games I am actually excited at the prospect of playing, and "I've had my fill", for games I've played a bit, and I'm not interested in returning to. I ended up with 9 categories: some were discrete and rigid, others were much more qualitative and subtle.
I probably worked on this for a week or two, with ferocious intensity. I would get home from work, put on some music, and crank out a bunch of games. It was such a blast, to know I was making something so helpful to myself, and putting everything into nice, neat boxes.
Since then, I've played maybe... 3 games from the "I want to play this" category, in as many months. I haven't even finished one game! I'm curious as to why I pursued the sorting with such vigour, yet I couldn't muster the same energy to play the games themselves!
I feel this so much. I am constantly categorizing and sorting and re-organizing my movie and music collections. But it is weirdly an activity that seems to delight me more than the actual listening to or watching anything even once I make myself a nice, neat set of things I have been meaning to get to!
I think the human brain (and particularly certain people's brains) just enjoys order and simplicity.
This is also why productivity methods that actually are unproductive are so common and I have had to learn to stay away from them. It is so easy to spend more time forming systems to do things than do anything.
For some reason, this is reminding me about how Owen Barfield talked about idolatry in his book "Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry", he talks about the what is means to know something and what we mean by thing. He defines idolatry is any human made model or image whose limitations have been forgotten, modern science is idolatrous to Barfield because it assumes that its model of the world is the Truth (capital T truth) and forgets that science is limited.
So a score, is a model that is supposed to signify something inside of its context, but if the limitations of what that score is is forgotten then that score would be considered idolatrous within its context because it seen to be more than it is. All scoring systems are hackable because all scoring systems are limited.
In our logical times, we tend to ascribe more to the model of the world that to world itself, just as we tend to ascribe more to a rating of 1-10 'how much did you enjoy this' instead of to the enjoyment itself.
I hope I was clear.
This actually connects really clearly as well to another key point that previous book You And Your Profile seemed to be a little too unquestioning about - the advantages of human experiences and life reorganizing themselves around second order observation rather than first order.
Not only do D'Ambrosio and Mueller in that book fail to consider whether the metrics used to measure the "general peer" are susceptible to the kind of abstraction from real meaning that you point out, they also just seem to assume that people's preference for second order knowledge is a natural progression towards more complex thinking that is somehow advantageous rather than something perhaps just a less critical or simpler impulse in people reinforced by those abstracted metrics.
Well abstraction does not necessarily allow for more complex thinking, but it does allow for those who use the abstraction to have greater power over the nature and even other people (if we think of people are not a part of nature, but that is a different conversation).
To borrow my previous example, it is very easy to use, transmit, quantify and leverage a rating of 1-10 how did you enjoy this, absent such a score it the only way to transmit an understanding of your enjoyment is to have a conversation with the interested party. It is something that cannot be quantified.
This use of abstraction allows a greater degree of control over nature, but to pull from "The Abolition of Man" by C.S. Lewis, the last part of nature to be conquered will be human nature, and it isn't mankind's conquest of nature but some men's conquest of nature that is happening.
(An interesting thing about Owen Barfield is that he does believe that this separation of abstraction from the concrete is a part of a long chain of evolution of consciousness starting sometime around the start of the Iron Age. At our point in time we are able to conceive of ourselves as individuals because where we are in this evolution. The further back you go the less people would have been able to even think of themselves as an individual. That is just one example of how Barfield understands evolution of consciousness. More about that in "Saving the Appearances")
I find myself naturally returning to metrics causing us to 'lose' something. I fundamentally think Nguyen is right here, and that metrics aren't neutral. When we gain a metric, we lose something else. Or even many things only tangentially related to the metric. I'm thinking specifically related to languages here (not actually Irish this time!) and different ways cultures have approached and understood the world.
Take, for instance, the language Oksapmin. This language traditionally had a base-27 counting system, starting from one thumb, going up over the arm and the face down to the other thumb. Under the pressures due to English, but more to the dominance of base-10 in schools and the modern world, this is falling out of use (see Nicholas Evans's *Dying Words* for more information, and a schematic of the way they broke down this counting). We're literally losing a different way to conceive and perceive the world, in a broad sense. This is happening world-wide due to the metrics we've put in place; Enthusiasm Girl mentioned economic metrics, but I'd also include *scientific* ones and even the metric for what counts as true knowledge, etc. I think it's really hard to say these metrics are neutral, rather than serving to exist and promote a certain worldview - and they're often used as tools to beat other worldviews into submission - see *Bad Samaritans* by Ha-Joon Chang for economic examples. We just often don't see them because they arise out of our own culture.
And this doesn't even take into account the people abandoning their traditional languages in droves for the majority ones because the metrics they're told to pursue (namely, 'money') essentially demand it. Or how those metrics and new cultural attitude then go back into the culture and wipe out its traditional understandings (expressed via idioms and metaphors à la Lakoff) by imposing those of the majority one because these new ways of talking about the world are seen as 'neutral' or obvious.
Edit: To elaborate on the second paragraph. The metric itself is the pursuit of money, and the correlation of money being a status symbol and necessary for living. I do think this is a metric that has imposed a lot of value capture on us, as well as 'level of education attained'. As I said the change is only indirectly related to the metric itself, but a direct result of the value capture from the metric foisted on the world by the US (in particular) after WW2 and, especially, from the 1980s onwards.
One thing that genuinely does terrify me a little as someone who is just old enough now to have experienced clearly both the pre-online and post-online world fully is that increasingly younger generations seem to have absolutely zero sense of what has been lost. Because why would they? They weren't around to experience it! But trying to explain it to them always makes me conscious of being perceived as just, well... old.
This has then caused me to not only side-eye the knee-jerk "old people just can't handle change" conversations that come up when we talk about new technologies or societal shifts that presume with very little nuance or real argumentation that new things ARE better because they are new. But it has also made me more open to really going back to prior generational discourses around past technologies like television or radio or even the printing press and looking at them without that bias towards presuming that their introduction always made the world better or that those people were obviously wrong. Because obviously I also can't truly conceive of the value of things lost before I was born any more than younger people can.
I think we need to shift away from discourses that say things like "you can't look backwards" or "stop living in the past" and presume it is always conservatism to draw on historical solutions or ideas as much as we also need to recognize the lie in things like "you can't fight the future". We need to learn to stop and take each argument made about history or the future in its own context. There are ways to draw what was actually good forth from the past and learn from it without repeating past mistakes. Not everything abandoned was left behind because it was worse. And there are ways that the future could absolutely be worse if we make thoughtless choices about it, because history isn't innately progressive.
Like so many adults.... We are missing the care-giving part within competitive competitions. This ideal is opposing opposite of this: University of Michigan — Felix Warneken’s Research on Early Altruism
Core finding: Infants and toddlers spontaneously help others without being taught. This research overturns the old assumption that children are born selfish and must be trained into cooperation.
Key Observations
• Children as young as 18 months show spontaneous helping behaviors.
• They will put another person’s interest ahead of their own, even without reward or instruction.
• This includes helping adults solve problems and sharing resources.
• Warneken’s work is featured in the Netflix series Babies, highlighting how infants naturally act from social concern and relational awareness.
• Neurobiological Extension (Michigan Psychiatry Collaboration)
• A related Michigan project investigates the neural circuitry of altruism, showing that caregiving and helping behaviors activate brain systems associated with parental care and social bonding. This suggests altruism is biologically rooted, not culturally imposed.
Fourteen years of developmental psychology research, which includes Felix Warneken’s work at the University of Michigan and the University of Washington’s food-sharing studies does validate infants display spontaneous, untrained altruism. They help others solve problems, share resources, and even give up valuable food when hungry. These behaviors appear before language, before identity, and before social conditioning. This research confirms that selflessness is the biological baseline of the human being, and that selfishness emerges only after collapse enters through fear, scarcity, and ownership
I have offered this within a 30-page, 35+ year independent study offered to The Berggruen Institute as well as the librarian within the Masonic Library in Boston, Massachusetts. This work is too important to hold (to sell) .... So, I researched institutions studying Human Consciousness and the society wanting/desiring understanding of Philosophical Research... Two organizations now house this work.
Note: The key being behavior. Think of either a book store, or a library. The space offers differing/separate human behaviors... This work offered bridges those separations with behavior: How, then what, then why the star transforms into a black hole = The infant unto perishing. Then the $1 trillion question: Are we humans joyous care-givers, or Egotistical: Creators by means of destruction, everything and everyone for the joys in winning?
So one thing that Nguyen doesn't really seem to get into so far that I wish was delved into further is actually the way in which "scores" in gaming are historically understood as driving competition but in recent years have trended towards new styles of gameplay in which players are encouraged to cooperate rather than compete. These other styles of games actually better nurture the notion that Nguyen forwards of the "striving" vs. "achievement" player. They also help us see what the concept of "gamification" as it gets used in the modern business world or to drive engagement with video games in particular is so potentially noxious.
There is a difference, for example, between styles of gameplay where players are encouraged to view each other as competitors and individually seek a victory over others vs. other styles of gameplay. Games can be more or less vicious as well in how they construct the idea of "winning". Think, for example, of Monopoly and the way in which it encourages players to not only score well but do so at the expense of the scores of others and how the only way to win is through a total victory in which everyone else is left with nothing.
However, there are other games like Dungeons & Dragons or RPGs in which players are actually not competing at all. They're working as a team towards an end, typically - to beat a final boss or loot a dungeon - even as they are given opportunities to creatively play however they would like and set their own metrics in truth. D&D doesn't really "keep score" - you can choose as a player to make a fun character, to try and earn a lot of gold, to mess with the DM, etc. - but it's using XP and certain scorekeeping aspects really more as just a marker for you, the player, to show that you're progressing so you get that feeling of striving at something.
Then there's the fairly recent market for actual cooperative board games like Pandemic, where you are still instructed to head towards a "win" condition and keep score, but the score is actually shared across the group and you're working together to "beat" the game itself.
And of course these categories are all different even than when Nguyen talks about something like fly fishing or rock climbing, where players could theoretically choose to engage in them without ever competing with nor encountering another player and they can be wholly individual pursuits.
The games we play and the metrics and win conditions that game designers use, basically, demonstrate for us the way that incentives drive us in different directions that impact how we act towards each other and can produce value capture and alter our values depending upon their structure. The gamification favoured by the business world or productivity optimizers in the sense of earning badges or unlocking achievements is all about the instant gratification of "number go up" basically, rather than looking towards the fuller scope of games in the world and actually engaging with how they can encourage other attributes in us.
I'll also point you towards some solid academic research done on the same question you mentioned regarding whether humans are innately care-giving vs. egotistical but with adults involving rigged games of monopoly:
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean
In short, researchers used the game and altered its conditions via player handicaps that changed the experience of play and status of each player to try and illuminate the ways in which levels of privilege and wealth once bestowed can actually in and of themselves warp our attitudes towards others instinctively.