The games we want to be playing

The Score, Part I

Welcome back to our philosophy of technology book club.

In May, we’re reading The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. Here’s the reading schedule for that book:

• May 4: Chapters 1-4

• May 11: Chapters 5-11

• May 15: Paid Subscriber Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern

• May 18: Chapters 12-18

• May 25: Chapters 19-24

• May 29: Chapters 25-29

• May 31: Paid Subscriber Q&A with C. Thi Nguyen, 3 PM Eastern

Notice that the final post is on Friday, May 29. That’s to give us a little more time to finish discussing the book by breaking up that week’s reading and having an additional post. Notice also that we’ll be joined by C. Thi Nguyen on May 31, where you’ll be able to ask him questions about the book directly.

In June, we’ll be reading The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor, and in July, we’ll be reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

The Score is, very broadly, a book about games and metrics. It is not, however, a book about gamification.

When I interviewed C. Thi Nguyen for The Honest Broker, I asked Nguyen about this, and he told me the origin story of The Score. After publishing his book Games: Agency as Art, Nguyen was often asked what he thought about gamification. The assumption behind these questions, he said, was that as someone who loves games, he would also love gamification—after all, that is just turning more of life into a game. It should be great, right? It should take a bit of drudgery from the ordinary world and, at the very least, make it fun. But this was not Nguyen’s view of gamification at all. You could understand The Score as an extended discussion of how and why gamification goes wrong. This is then extended to discuss the role of metrics in society.

The big question the book asks is found on page 22:

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?

Consider a simple game—it can be whatever game you like. It almost certainly has a scoring system of some kind. (Even tag – the children’s game – has a way to keep score: you lose if you’re tagged, you win if you tag someone else.) I like board games, though I don’t get to play them very often these days, and each of these games has a variety of scoring systems: resource points, victory points, cards with certain powers. If you’re playing a game, you are somehow keeping score. And for many of us, this is great fun. If you removed the mechanical scoring system from the game, you might even destroy the fun.

Video games are a good example. A YouTuber, Juniper Dev, made a video about how satisfying it is to see the numbers go up in a good game:

Juniper, I’ll add, is a very thoughtful game design student, and I often watch her videos even if I don’t have any interest in the games she’s discussing.

But mechanical scores aren’t limited to games. Your bank account has one, if you think about it. We’ve also imported mechanical scoring into evaluations of work, teaching, school quality, and even our own health—if you have an Apple Watch, it is keeping score. And these feel different, Nguyen says, in a way that cries out for explanation.

---

In this week’s readings, we are introduced to some of the basic concepts of the book.

First, we need to understand something about games themselves. Games, Nguyen tells us, do more than just let us have fun:

[Games] tell you what to desire. And we players are fluid enough that we can let those scoring systems shape our desires. We can slip into alternative motivational states like a new set of clothes. We have the ability to start a game, find out what will get us points, and then – for a period of time – care intensely, exactly as we’re told to.

Understood this way, games tell us something interesting about our own minds. Our motivational states – that which we desire, that which drives us to action – are fluid, not fixed. We are able to adopt new motivations depending on the context. Games seem to be just artificial enough that we do so easily, often with very little thought to what is going on in our own minds.

In graduate school, I’d often spend a Saturday playing games with my fellow students. Sometimes we played Dungeons & Dragons – I am usually the DM, and if not, I’m always a dwarf – but we’d play board games too. I remember playing Bohnanza for the first time. It’s a very silly game: you draw cards and try to grow beans, which convert to coins, and whoever has the most coins at the end wins. Yes, it’s silly, but it’s fun, and the first time I played it, I cared intensely about those beans. For a little while, the only thing that mattered to me was growing beans and getting coins. That’s the power of a well-designed game.

I think I lost. Andrew, my friend from the department, had played before, and he probably dominated. Yet, I still had fun. I think this is because I am a striving player, a term that Nguyen defines in Chapter 2:

[Striving players] don’t truly cafe about winning—not cosmically. They care about something else: fun, relaxation, a challenge, the experience of beautiful movement. But to get those cherished experiences, they need to get themselves into the mental state of wanting to win. Their interest in winning, however, is only temporary. The may get themselves to want to win pretty intensely during the game, but they throw away their interest in winning once they finish the game. Their real, lasting purpose lies in the struggle. For striving players, winning is a disposable end.

This is a good description of my own relationship with climbing—another game I don’t have much time for these days. When I would climb on the wall, getting to the top of the problem was only part of the fun. The process was the point, as was the fellowship with my fellow climbers. (You should always climb in a group, because much of the fun comes from resting on the mats and talking about the problem with your friends.) But while on the wall, I had to think about getting to the top, had to want it intensely. If I didn’t, I’d never have a chance of succeeding, but more importantly, I would be robbing myself of the full, rich experience. Yet, when I failed, I could fall to the ground and say, ‘That was great. I’ll try again soon.’

We can contrast striving play with achievement play. For the achievement player, the only thing that matters is winning. I’ve found that achievement players don’t seem to have much fun while playing anything, and they’re likely to decline playing games that they can’t win. They aren’t always the sort of person you invite over for a night of drinking and board games. That’s because the achievement player desires above all a particular result, and if that result isn’t guaranteed – or at least likely – there’s no point to playing.

For the striving player, trying to win is part of the fun. They relish the delicious struggle. For the achievement player, the only thing that matters is the result.

Source

We now have a basic understanding of Nguyen’s theory of games. We can now discuss what I believe is the most important concept in this book: value capture. This is a three-step process, where:

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.

There are many examples of value capture that we could discuss—I’d be interested in hearing examples that came to mind while you read The Score. Nguyen briefly mentions ranking systems for philosophy departments. This is something known as the PGR: The Philosophical Gourmet Report. What started as a one-man project to rank philosophy departments, in the way that law schools are ranked, became a large-scale effort to evaluate departments by asking a board of experts to score each department by specialty on a scale from 1-5. The best department is the one with the highest average score. The PGR had huge effects on professional philosophy: I used the PGR to find departments to apply to, and it is always known that the higher PGR departments are (i) more selective in admissions, and (ii) have much better placement rates. (I attended a midlist school, though with higher scores for my chosen specialization, and we had an admission rate of something like 5%. The top schools on the PGR might have admission rates closer to 1%.)

This is value capture. Assessing philosophical quality is a rich and subtle matter: it is context-sensitive, reasonable people can disagree, etc. But the PGR offers a simplified and quantified rendition of those values. Eventually, the rich and subtle values stopped mattering in the minds of many, and what did matter was the PGR score, and in particular, the ranking.

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday; she’s a doctor. I asked what she thought about sleep scores as a medical professional, the sort of scores your Apple Watch might give you. She told me she hates them. What matters is if you wake up feeling rested, not the number on your screen. But even she found that once she started tracking her sleep, she really wanted to get that number up. That’s yet another instance of value capture.

These mechanical scoring systems also produce convergence. Nguyen defines scoring systems on page 55:

A scoring system is a social process that delivers a quantified evaluation, and so enters a singular verdict into some official record.

The phrase ‘singular verdict’ is important. A scoring system is going to tell you who the winners and losers are; there is no room for disagreement. People who are interested in ‘winning’ thus begin to play by the rules of the game—even if this isn’t a game they want to be playing. Scoring systems present themselves as objective, when in fact they are value-laden and project a very particular vision of quality onto the subject.

Mechanical scoring systems offer us a trade-off. We get automatic agreement by using a mechanical evaluation procedure, but there is a price to be paid for that automatic convergence. Mechanical scoring systems will tend to ignore things that are hard and subtle to count. They will tend to change what we score – and what we care about –to what is easy to count mechanically.

Let me use another example drawn from academia. You can measure a scholar’s productivity by counting the number of articles they’ve published in the last year, perhaps weighted by journal quality. This provides an ‘objective’ assessment of the scholar. But let’s ask ourselves a question: is that how we want to measure scholars? Do we want to incentivize more publications or do we want to incentivize better publications? But if we want to incentivize better publications, are we willing to treat it as a rich and subtle value, something that is not easily tracked?