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The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game
A philosophy of games to help us win back control over what we value
The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen—one of the leading experts on the philosophy of games and the philosophy of data—takes us deep into the heart of games, and into the depths of bureaucracy, to see how scoring systems shape our desires.
Games are the most important art form of our era. They embody the spirit of free play. They show us the subtle beauty of action everywhere in life in video games, sports, and boardgames—but also cooking, gardening, fly-fishing, and running. They remind us that it isn’t always about outcomes, but about how glorious it feels to be doing the thing. And the scoring systems help get us there, by giving us new goals to try on.
Scoring systems are also at the center of our corporations and bureaucracies—in the form of metrics and rankings. They tell us exactly how to measure our success. They encourage us to outsource our values to an external authority. And they push on us to value simple, countable things. Metrics don’t capture what really matters; they only capture what’s easy to measure. The price of that clarity is our independence.
The Score asks us is this the game you really want to be playing?
The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen—one of the leading experts on the philosophy of games and the philosophy of data—takes us deep into the heart of games, and into the depths of bureaucracy, to see how scoring systems shape our desires.
Games are the most important art form of our era. They embody the spirit of free play. They show us the subtle beauty of action everywhere in life in video games, sports, and boardgames—but also cooking, gardening, fly-fishing, and running. They remind us that it isn’t always about outcomes, but about how glorious it feels to be doing the thing. And the scoring systems help get us there, by giving us new goals to try on.
Scoring systems are also at the center of our corporations and bureaucracies—in the form of metrics and rankings. They tell us exactly how to measure our success. They encourage us to outsource our values to an external authority. And they push on us to value simple, countable things. Metrics don’t capture what really matters; they only capture what’s easy to measure. The price of that clarity is our independence.
The Score asks us is this the game you really want to be playing?
368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 13, 2026
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February 10, 2026We like to keep score. And about many things and in lots of ways. Steps. Mile times. Splits. Max Reps. One Rep Maxes. Fran times. BMI. Runs. Batting Averages. RBI. Elo numbers. Ranks. K/D Ratios. Win percentages. Screen time. KPIs. Views. Engagement. Likes. Reach. Citations. H-index. (I could keep going, but I assume that‘s enough.) And beyond just keeping score— a lot of us like to chase high scores for some reason or another. And it’s maybe easiest to see that we like to do that when we think about games or certain sports. As Nguyen writes about so well, score chasing in those contexts can yield experiences that are novel, fun, challenging, and aesthetically significant. And the often intensive lead up or training that goes into playing well enough to reach those goals can be very rewarding, enriching, and fulfilling in their own right. In doing that very difficult thing, in jumping over that real high bar, in making it to the finish line, in executing some elaborate sequence of actions perfectly; we achieve something we might have thought impossible for us at some point. Some action that seemed to lie well outside our capacities has become part of our repertoire. Nguyen provided an interesting philosophical account of games in his last book. And there he defended games as an art form working in the medium of agency. And he reiterates that case here in a more accessible way. In both places, he spends some time dwelling on the way scoring systems can shape the experience of play in positive ways.
But, and here’s the catch, score chasing often goes well beyond games. We basically always had to chase scores when we were in school. And then, later on, we might wind up having to chase a score as part of our job. And eventually we might wind up chasing something like a score in our lives as a whole. And, in the worst case, then we chase that one thing our whole life and get it and it turns to ash in our mouth. You’ve read the books and seen the movies.
So sometimes scores are good fun and sometimes they’re not good or fun at all. Nguyen tends to use the term ‘metric’ for when he is discussing a score outside of a game—in school or work or life. And so Nguyen raises the question— why are scores in games often great and yet many of the metrics we use to direct our action in life outside of them often feel kind of wrong—misguided, shallow, hollow, or reductive as the case may be? And this book is an exploration of these thoughts and an attempt at providing a few answers to that question. It’s not exactly a simple story. And that’s reasonable enough since part of Nguyen’s point is that life and what we value in it is complex and hard to boil down. So, while it would be tempting to sum this book up as—-scores get high marks, metrics get low marks— that would just be a reductive paraphrase.
Nguyen acknowledges the usefulness, even necessity, of metrics in modern life—but cautions us that metrics might hijack our lives if we let them. We adopt a metric because we believe it to capture some important value we have. Those values are often highly intuitive and yet somewhat fuzzy. Metrics rarely fully track everything we find significant about that pre-theoretical value. Metrics may necessarily reflect our values imperfectly. Sometimes they miss what matters most about those values entirely. And so Nguyen urges us to think very carefully before adopting any given metric as a target. And calls on us to pursue any metric that we have adopted very judiciously—that is with good judgment always at our side to all the particular details along the way.
Nguyen’s first book about games is already modern classic in analytic philosophy of art. I’ve read that book three times now and could easily pick it up again. The fact that he does another pass on that material here aimed at general audiences is enough for me to recommend this book to friends, family, and probably some passersby who just seems like the sort to enjoy it. You probably need to read this if you like games or sports and happen to be philosophically inclined.
And there’s definitely food for thought in his new exploration of metrics. And we coincidentally also get quite a few thoughts about food. And the nuanced differences between different styles of cookbooks and the values they reflect.(Nguyen worked as a food critic before his philosophy professor days began.) The recipes in some classic cookbooks left things a bit vague and so asked and expected the would-be cook to have some judgment. The new recipes are like algorithms or standard operating procedures. Exact quantities, times, and temps are all specified. The smallest steps are included. Anyone can make a meal with the recipe, judgement or no.
I’m not exactly sure where I stand on these concerns about metrics and the role they play in our lives. On one hand, it’s pretty clear that Nguyen’s list of downsides that come along with making use of metrics are valid concerns and even things that are all-too common. On the other hand, Nguyen acknowledges that it’s not like we can toss the practice of relying on metrics and universal consistent standards out and still maintain a functioning modern society. His thought, at bottom, seems to be something pretty close to: we need metrics to live, but can’t rely on them too much if we really want to live well.
One last thing that has to be said: this book has one of the best concluding chapters in any recent work of philosophy. It’s possibly the most honest conclusion I’ve ever read.
But, and here’s the catch, score chasing often goes well beyond games. We basically always had to chase scores when we were in school. And then, later on, we might wind up having to chase a score as part of our job. And eventually we might wind up chasing something like a score in our lives as a whole. And, in the worst case, then we chase that one thing our whole life and get it and it turns to ash in our mouth. You’ve read the books and seen the movies.
So sometimes scores are good fun and sometimes they’re not good or fun at all. Nguyen tends to use the term ‘metric’ for when he is discussing a score outside of a game—in school or work or life. And so Nguyen raises the question— why are scores in games often great and yet many of the metrics we use to direct our action in life outside of them often feel kind of wrong—misguided, shallow, hollow, or reductive as the case may be? And this book is an exploration of these thoughts and an attempt at providing a few answers to that question. It’s not exactly a simple story. And that’s reasonable enough since part of Nguyen’s point is that life and what we value in it is complex and hard to boil down. So, while it would be tempting to sum this book up as—-scores get high marks, metrics get low marks— that would just be a reductive paraphrase.
Nguyen acknowledges the usefulness, even necessity, of metrics in modern life—but cautions us that metrics might hijack our lives if we let them. We adopt a metric because we believe it to capture some important value we have. Those values are often highly intuitive and yet somewhat fuzzy. Metrics rarely fully track everything we find significant about that pre-theoretical value. Metrics may necessarily reflect our values imperfectly. Sometimes they miss what matters most about those values entirely. And so Nguyen urges us to think very carefully before adopting any given metric as a target. And calls on us to pursue any metric that we have adopted very judiciously—that is with good judgment always at our side to all the particular details along the way.
Nguyen’s first book about games is already modern classic in analytic philosophy of art. I’ve read that book three times now and could easily pick it up again. The fact that he does another pass on that material here aimed at general audiences is enough for me to recommend this book to friends, family, and probably some passersby who just seems like the sort to enjoy it. You probably need to read this if you like games or sports and happen to be philosophically inclined.
And there’s definitely food for thought in his new exploration of metrics. And we coincidentally also get quite a few thoughts about food. And the nuanced differences between different styles of cookbooks and the values they reflect.(Nguyen worked as a food critic before his philosophy professor days began.) The recipes in some classic cookbooks left things a bit vague and so asked and expected the would-be cook to have some judgment. The new recipes are like algorithms or standard operating procedures. Exact quantities, times, and temps are all specified. The smallest steps are included. Anyone can make a meal with the recipe, judgement or no.
I’m not exactly sure where I stand on these concerns about metrics and the role they play in our lives. On one hand, it’s pretty clear that Nguyen’s list of downsides that come along with making use of metrics are valid concerns and even things that are all-too common. On the other hand, Nguyen acknowledges that it’s not like we can toss the practice of relying on metrics and universal consistent standards out and still maintain a functioning modern society. His thought, at bottom, seems to be something pretty close to: we need metrics to live, but can’t rely on them too much if we really want to live well.
One last thing that has to be said: this book has one of the best concluding chapters in any recent work of philosophy. It’s possibly the most honest conclusion I’ve ever read.
February 9, 2026
Could have been roughly a quarter of the length to get the relevant message across, and the rest just felt a bit more like the author wanted to talk passionately about the gamification and intricacies of all of his hobbies, many of which I actually share, but too many of which felt overly belabored.
March 26, 2026
Sometimes 3 stars from me means a book is broadly fine. A uniformly decent read, but nothing that particularly thrills the intellect or the emotions.
Not the case here. This is a book where I alternated between “Yes, this is insightful!” and “No, this is completely wrong!” It’s well worth grappling with this book, but it has some serious flaws.
What’s insightful: the distinction between games and metrics, the appreciation of striving play, the value of metrics to institutions, and the discussion of value capture.
What’s flawed: the author assuming people are motivated the same way he is, missing much of the purpose and benefit of metrics, lack of understanding of the bias and noise in qualitative judgements, the complete lack of any research behind his theses (either original or using the vast body of existing relevant research), having a lot of fluff and filler, and having no discussion at all of gamification.
Let’s start with the good.
Nguyen’s central puzzle is why games are so fun and metrics are so soul-crushing, despite both often relying on rigid, externally imposed scoring systems. This is a good question, though it’s annoying how much he repeats it. (Dude, just answer the question. If this relies on building an extensive framework first, build it and then answer the question. Don’t just keep posing the same question.) He takes a long time to answer the question, but I think it just boils down to games are things we choose, where we voluntarily and only for a short time agree to use this scoring system for the purpose of having fun. Striving play is key to this (according to Nguyen): we must genuinely try to win while we’re playing the game, but always with the deeper purpose of having fun, and knowing that it’s the process of playing that really matters rather than the ultimately meaningless scoring system. Metrics, on the other hand, are long-term systems used by institutions to make real-world decisions in ways that suppress the real complexity of the world. In Nguyen’s conception, we don’t choose metrics, they miss important things, and we can’t get out of the metric game.
Value capture is where we come to believe that the metrics are what really matters rather than the thing the metric is supposed to be measuring. To give an example from my field of higher education, we want students to learn the material well and make good progress towards their degrees. A metric related to this is the “DFW rate”, the percentage of students in a class earning a D (technically passing but not learning the material well), or failing or withdrawing (not learning and not making progress towards the degree). “Learning” is hard to measure, but “DFW rate” is easy to measure. People who are value captured by the DFW rate want to lower it by any means. This includes pressuring professors to engage in grade inflation (give students Cs or Bs for work that used to earn them Ds) or discontinuing degrees that have a high DFW rate (DFW rates are higher in Physics and Chemistry than in Communications and Psychology, so let’s get rid of Physics and Chemistry). Of course, these responses alter the DFW rates but don’t help at all with the underlying goal of student learning. They help with progress towards degree only if you redefine what a degree means, removing notions of rigor, eliminating certification that the degree means the student has competently completed difficult training, or even removing entire content areas.
Now the not so good.
While Nguyen admits metrics are useful things for large-scale cooperation and coordination, simplified things that enable our modern highly interconnected world, he misses very crucial aspects of why metrics are good and necessary. He admits that “different experts might end up doing different things” (p. 145) when following fuzzier principles rather than algorithmic, mechanical procedures. He doesn’t acknowledge at all that this could be a serious problem. Simple algorithms can make consistently better decisions than even highly trained experts in numerous situations, in part because experts can be influenced by all sorts of irrelevant things. For example, the famous “hungry judge effect”, where there’s an indication that judges are more lenient after meal breaks. See Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein’s Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment for a more in-depth discussion of noise in judgements and cases where algorithms are superior.
Second, metrics are necessary in situations where people can know in advance that they will perform poorly, even if trained experts. In science we know that “chi by eye” is not a good procedure. This is a term for deciding whether or not a model fits the data just by looking at the fit and the data. Such overlays are a good way to see that the model is not a good fit, but they’re a terrible way to find very good fits. Instead, we’ve invented extensive statistical procedures to quantify these things in rigorous ways (some involving chi squared).
This is particularly important in medicine. Say you want to determine if a particular drug is effective for a particular condition, and what the side effects are. It turns out that asking patients how the drug is working for them and asking them to list their side effects is an absolutely garbage way of determining this. So is asking an experienced physician if they’ve seen the drug work in their patients over time and what side effects there are. It doesn’t matter how extensive your qualitative studies are, the best they can do is provide hints and clues. They can’t give anything determinative.
To really get at the truth of drug efficacy and side effects, you have to do bench lab work, animal models, and then randomized controlled trials. You crucially cannot let the patients know who’s actually getting the true treatment vs. a placebo. You can’t even let the scientists in charge of the experiment know while they’re doing their analysis. As the famous saying goes, “the plural of anecdote is not data”. That is, all the qualitative research in the world can fail to get at a truth that quantitative research can reveal.
The same is true for everything in nature that is complicated (human medicine) or subtle (detection of the Higgs boson). Even just figuring out Newtonian physics required quantitative research. Qualitative physics, like Aristotle did, had two thousand years of zero progress. Quantitative experimentation, like Galileo used, led to an explosion of understanding of the world. Metrics were fundamentally necessary to make progress.
Nguyen doesn’t address any of this. He even claims that “we systematically over-trust quantitative claims and under-trust qualitative ones” (p. 287), which sounds like an absurd claim to any scientist who’s dealt with the public, where a single story about a child falling ill after vaccination gets far more attention and has far more influence than dozens of high-quality statistical studies of millions of vaccinations. A world where decades of careful climate research get dismissed by one person saying “but it’s snowing today!”
Nguyen doesn’t cite his claims, because he doesn’t engage at all with psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, or any other scientific discipline that would be highly relevant to his discussion. Zero engagement. Nada. He took his personal experience, bolstered it with anecdotes from others (including some historical ones), and developed his theses. This is armchair philosophy. That kind of philosophy can sound insightful—there’s a reason we still read Plato and Descartes. But it makes little if any progress in helping us understand the real world (for fuck’s sake, we’re still reading—and arguing over—Plato and Descartes?!).
This approach to the world just leads to erudite expositions of one’s own prejudices. Tiny example, consider Nguyen’s repeated insistence that the printing press “pushes the world toward centralized authority and control” due to the fact that “it is a big, expensive piece of machinery” (p. 315; see also 201). Dunno, man, an entire monastery of scribes was way more expensive. Do you have any evidence that printing presses centralized authority? It was very shortly after the printing press in Europe that a thousand years of Catholic monoculture fell to the Protestant revolution, for example. (We can all cite anecdotes for our purposes!)
I hate the huge amount of personal anecdote in this book. Talking a little bit about his own rock climbing or game-playing experiences would be fine, but it’s way overdone. However, it’s useful in showing how Nguyen is going wrong by assuming people are like him.
Nguyen is super motivated by scoring systems, so he’s devoted a tremendous amount of effort into understanding them and explaining why sometimes they’re good and sometimes they’re bad. But he’s a philosopher, not a psychologist or sociologist, so he tries to figure these things out just by thinking lots about these systems rather than actually experimenting or even drawing on the experiments of others.
As a result, he entirely misses people like me, who are much less motivated by scoring systems than he is. He thinks scoring systems are required to make games engaging, while I play Scrabble with my mom without keeping track of points. I enjoyed casual basketball in middle school, but I quit a rec league team because even that low level of play stressed me out by keeping score and designating winners. Nguyen didn’t get into sports until he found rock climbing, the one sport I know of where even the most casual dilettante is ranked because all established routes are rated with a numerical difficulty score. I avoid all competitive sports, but enjoy the movement of hiking and biking in untimed and unrated ways. I like finding my own scrambling routes, where the joy comes from the travel and nothing is ranked or rated. I know striving play, and have felt it when trying to make a summit, but I feel it a lot less than Nguyen does.
Nguyen is a gamer, very aware of the large diversity of games out there. But he’s not a scientist, so he’s only aware of the biggest, most widely used metrics. As a result, he argues that “play is the opposite of standardization” and “when we play games, we disunify” (p. 227), whereas metrics “are technology that standardizes values” (p. 226) and lead to “monolithic convergence” (p. 205).
I’m not much of a gamer, but I am a professional scientist. As such, I’ve come up with many metrics myself, and interrogated those of my colleagues. We’re trying to measure things, and much of the work we do is figuring out how to do that. We’re presented with novel data, sometimes from novel instruments or novel objects, and we need to figure out how to measure things to understand the world. Sometimes I was the only one in the world using my particular metric, while other times there were one or two other research groups adopting it. Meanwhile, the games that come to my non-gamer mind are things like Monopoly, which has sold over 275 million copies and been played the exact same way by probably close to a billion people. (Sure, every time it’s played is slightly different, but the GDP of every country is different too.)
Nguyen and I are both biased by our background knowledge, formed by the experiences of our different lives. But while I’m aware of this and wouldn’t claim that metrics are far more creative and exploratory than games (even though that’s been my personal life experience), Nguyen is unaware of this and blithely assumes he doesn’t need any data on his theses. Indeed, his rejection of all data as quantitative and thus “thin” feels like a self-justification to avoid his having to do any of the hard work of looking at the relevant science.
I was deeply disappointed that he had nothing regarding “gamification”. This would appear to be a topic custom-made for this book, and one that would easily fit within his thesis. It’s a particularly odd omission since Nguyen is a university professor like me, and there have been strong pushes to “gamify” education. It would have been a rich vein to mine: gamification can lead to addictive-like behaviors that increase interaction, but which seem to entirely miss the point, because they assign game-like goals (points, experience points, badges, etc.) to real-life meaningful tasks (say, learning physics to prepare oneself to be an engineer). But in Nguyen’s conception, the whole point of games is that we know the goals—points, etc.—are not the purpose. The purpose is in the act of playing. If the students valued the act of learning, then our existing metrics of grades would be score enough. But if students truly value the experience points and badges, and that’s how we get them to go through the actions we think will lead to learning, then the students have succumbed to the stupidest kind of value capture.
Quotable quotes:
P. 25,
P. 79–80
P. 185
(I agree that this absolutely happens, when people aren’t in charge of the metrics and/or are valued captured by them.)
P. 190, quotes Robert Musil noting that
(This is theoretical physics in a nutshell.)
P. 260
(This is why humanities people need to take lots of science classes, by the way. They need to see under the hood and behind the curtain of the objectivity of science, to understand what that really means and where human judgement comes into play.)
P. 276
P. 278
Page numbers from the Penguin Press hardcopy, 2026.
Not the case here. This is a book where I alternated between “Yes, this is insightful!” and “No, this is completely wrong!” It’s well worth grappling with this book, but it has some serious flaws.
What’s insightful: the distinction between games and metrics, the appreciation of striving play, the value of metrics to institutions, and the discussion of value capture.
What’s flawed: the author assuming people are motivated the same way he is, missing much of the purpose and benefit of metrics, lack of understanding of the bias and noise in qualitative judgements, the complete lack of any research behind his theses (either original or using the vast body of existing relevant research), having a lot of fluff and filler, and having no discussion at all of gamification.
Let’s start with the good.
Nguyen’s central puzzle is why games are so fun and metrics are so soul-crushing, despite both often relying on rigid, externally imposed scoring systems. This is a good question, though it’s annoying how much he repeats it. (Dude, just answer the question. If this relies on building an extensive framework first, build it and then answer the question. Don’t just keep posing the same question.) He takes a long time to answer the question, but I think it just boils down to games are things we choose, where we voluntarily and only for a short time agree to use this scoring system for the purpose of having fun. Striving play is key to this (according to Nguyen): we must genuinely try to win while we’re playing the game, but always with the deeper purpose of having fun, and knowing that it’s the process of playing that really matters rather than the ultimately meaningless scoring system. Metrics, on the other hand, are long-term systems used by institutions to make real-world decisions in ways that suppress the real complexity of the world. In Nguyen’s conception, we don’t choose metrics, they miss important things, and we can’t get out of the metric game.
Value capture is where we come to believe that the metrics are what really matters rather than the thing the metric is supposed to be measuring. To give an example from my field of higher education, we want students to learn the material well and make good progress towards their degrees. A metric related to this is the “DFW rate”, the percentage of students in a class earning a D (technically passing but not learning the material well), or failing or withdrawing (not learning and not making progress towards the degree). “Learning” is hard to measure, but “DFW rate” is easy to measure. People who are value captured by the DFW rate want to lower it by any means. This includes pressuring professors to engage in grade inflation (give students Cs or Bs for work that used to earn them Ds) or discontinuing degrees that have a high DFW rate (DFW rates are higher in Physics and Chemistry than in Communications and Psychology, so let’s get rid of Physics and Chemistry). Of course, these responses alter the DFW rates but don’t help at all with the underlying goal of student learning. They help with progress towards degree only if you redefine what a degree means, removing notions of rigor, eliminating certification that the degree means the student has competently completed difficult training, or even removing entire content areas.
Now the not so good.
While Nguyen admits metrics are useful things for large-scale cooperation and coordination, simplified things that enable our modern highly interconnected world, he misses very crucial aspects of why metrics are good and necessary. He admits that “different experts might end up doing different things” (p. 145) when following fuzzier principles rather than algorithmic, mechanical procedures. He doesn’t acknowledge at all that this could be a serious problem. Simple algorithms can make consistently better decisions than even highly trained experts in numerous situations, in part because experts can be influenced by all sorts of irrelevant things. For example, the famous “hungry judge effect”, where there’s an indication that judges are more lenient after meal breaks. See Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein’s Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment for a more in-depth discussion of noise in judgements and cases where algorithms are superior.
Second, metrics are necessary in situations where people can know in advance that they will perform poorly, even if trained experts. In science we know that “chi by eye” is not a good procedure. This is a term for deciding whether or not a model fits the data just by looking at the fit and the data. Such overlays are a good way to see that the model is not a good fit, but they’re a terrible way to find very good fits. Instead, we’ve invented extensive statistical procedures to quantify these things in rigorous ways (some involving chi squared).
This is particularly important in medicine. Say you want to determine if a particular drug is effective for a particular condition, and what the side effects are. It turns out that asking patients how the drug is working for them and asking them to list their side effects is an absolutely garbage way of determining this. So is asking an experienced physician if they’ve seen the drug work in their patients over time and what side effects there are. It doesn’t matter how extensive your qualitative studies are, the best they can do is provide hints and clues. They can’t give anything determinative.
To really get at the truth of drug efficacy and side effects, you have to do bench lab work, animal models, and then randomized controlled trials. You crucially cannot let the patients know who’s actually getting the true treatment vs. a placebo. You can’t even let the scientists in charge of the experiment know while they’re doing their analysis. As the famous saying goes, “the plural of anecdote is not data”. That is, all the qualitative research in the world can fail to get at a truth that quantitative research can reveal.
The same is true for everything in nature that is complicated (human medicine) or subtle (detection of the Higgs boson). Even just figuring out Newtonian physics required quantitative research. Qualitative physics, like Aristotle did, had two thousand years of zero progress. Quantitative experimentation, like Galileo used, led to an explosion of understanding of the world. Metrics were fundamentally necessary to make progress.
Nguyen doesn’t address any of this. He even claims that “we systematically over-trust quantitative claims and under-trust qualitative ones” (p. 287), which sounds like an absurd claim to any scientist who’s dealt with the public, where a single story about a child falling ill after vaccination gets far more attention and has far more influence than dozens of high-quality statistical studies of millions of vaccinations. A world where decades of careful climate research get dismissed by one person saying “but it’s snowing today!”
Nguyen doesn’t cite his claims, because he doesn’t engage at all with psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, or any other scientific discipline that would be highly relevant to his discussion. Zero engagement. Nada. He took his personal experience, bolstered it with anecdotes from others (including some historical ones), and developed his theses. This is armchair philosophy. That kind of philosophy can sound insightful—there’s a reason we still read Plato and Descartes. But it makes little if any progress in helping us understand the real world (for fuck’s sake, we’re still reading—and arguing over—Plato and Descartes?!).
This approach to the world just leads to erudite expositions of one’s own prejudices. Tiny example, consider Nguyen’s repeated insistence that the printing press “pushes the world toward centralized authority and control” due to the fact that “it is a big, expensive piece of machinery” (p. 315; see also 201). Dunno, man, an entire monastery of scribes was way more expensive. Do you have any evidence that printing presses centralized authority? It was very shortly after the printing press in Europe that a thousand years of Catholic monoculture fell to the Protestant revolution, for example. (We can all cite anecdotes for our purposes!)
I hate the huge amount of personal anecdote in this book. Talking a little bit about his own rock climbing or game-playing experiences would be fine, but it’s way overdone. However, it’s useful in showing how Nguyen is going wrong by assuming people are like him.
Nguyen is super motivated by scoring systems, so he’s devoted a tremendous amount of effort into understanding them and explaining why sometimes they’re good and sometimes they’re bad. But he’s a philosopher, not a psychologist or sociologist, so he tries to figure these things out just by thinking lots about these systems rather than actually experimenting or even drawing on the experiments of others.
As a result, he entirely misses people like me, who are much less motivated by scoring systems than he is. He thinks scoring systems are required to make games engaging, while I play Scrabble with my mom without keeping track of points. I enjoyed casual basketball in middle school, but I quit a rec league team because even that low level of play stressed me out by keeping score and designating winners. Nguyen didn’t get into sports until he found rock climbing, the one sport I know of where even the most casual dilettante is ranked because all established routes are rated with a numerical difficulty score. I avoid all competitive sports, but enjoy the movement of hiking and biking in untimed and unrated ways. I like finding my own scrambling routes, where the joy comes from the travel and nothing is ranked or rated. I know striving play, and have felt it when trying to make a summit, but I feel it a lot less than Nguyen does.
Nguyen is a gamer, very aware of the large diversity of games out there. But he’s not a scientist, so he’s only aware of the biggest, most widely used metrics. As a result, he argues that “play is the opposite of standardization” and “when we play games, we disunify” (p. 227), whereas metrics “are technology that standardizes values” (p. 226) and lead to “monolithic convergence” (p. 205).
I’m not much of a gamer, but I am a professional scientist. As such, I’ve come up with many metrics myself, and interrogated those of my colleagues. We’re trying to measure things, and much of the work we do is figuring out how to do that. We’re presented with novel data, sometimes from novel instruments or novel objects, and we need to figure out how to measure things to understand the world. Sometimes I was the only one in the world using my particular metric, while other times there were one or two other research groups adopting it. Meanwhile, the games that come to my non-gamer mind are things like Monopoly, which has sold over 275 million copies and been played the exact same way by probably close to a billion people. (Sure, every time it’s played is slightly different, but the GDP of every country is different too.)
Nguyen and I are both biased by our background knowledge, formed by the experiences of our different lives. But while I’m aware of this and wouldn’t claim that metrics are far more creative and exploratory than games (even though that’s been my personal life experience), Nguyen is unaware of this and blithely assumes he doesn’t need any data on his theses. Indeed, his rejection of all data as quantitative and thus “thin” feels like a self-justification to avoid his having to do any of the hard work of looking at the relevant science.
I was deeply disappointed that he had nothing regarding “gamification”. This would appear to be a topic custom-made for this book, and one that would easily fit within his thesis. It’s a particularly odd omission since Nguyen is a university professor like me, and there have been strong pushes to “gamify” education. It would have been a rich vein to mine: gamification can lead to addictive-like behaviors that increase interaction, but which seem to entirely miss the point, because they assign game-like goals (points, experience points, badges, etc.) to real-life meaningful tasks (say, learning physics to prepare oneself to be an engineer). But in Nguyen’s conception, the whole point of games is that we know the goals—points, etc.—are not the purpose. The purpose is in the act of playing. If the students valued the act of learning, then our existing metrics of grades would be score enough. But if students truly value the experience points and badges, and that’s how we get them to go through the actions we think will lead to learning, then the students have succumbed to the stupidest kind of value capture.
Quotable quotes:
P. 25,
Is this the game you really want to be playing?
P. 79–80
Transparency, [Onora O’Neill] said, demands that experts explain themselves to nonexperts. But they can’t actually do it, because an expert’s real reasons are often opaque or incomprehensible to nonexperts.
P. 185
Metrics discourage reflective control.
(I agree that this absolutely happens, when people aren’t in charge of the metrics and/or are valued captured by them.)
P. 190, quotes Robert Musil noting that
the love for elegant thinking is “a complicated passion for thrift”.
(This is theoretical physics in a nutshell.)
P. 260
This objectivity is only a facade. Such metrics often contain value judgements hidden at the core. We take a subjective choice and then hide it under tons of precise math… Let’s call this objectivity laundering. We take a complex matter, like well-being, education, or success. Somebody—often, a very distant somebody—makes a value-laden decision about what that means, about what counts as well-being or success. Then we process it. What comes out the other end looks objective and free of any taint of human values.
(This is why humanities people need to take lots of science classes, by the way. They need to see under the hood and behind the curtain of the objectivity of science, to understand what that really means and where human judgement comes into play.)
P. 276
Conspiracy theories are much more satisfying than actual science, because science has a complexity problem. You can’t actually cram all of science into one human head. At best, you’ll have a partial understanding of a few little patches. There will always be unknowns, in which you have to trust other people. An honest understanding of the real world won’t give you that all-encompassing knowledge-orgasm you crave, because the world is too awkwardly large.
P. 278
As the philosopher of science William Wimslatt puts it, the scientific method is built to be constantly on the lookout for any signals of error and then relentlessly use those errors to improve its models. Science, says Wimslatt, is built around a system of error metabolism.
Page numbers from the Penguin Press hardcopy, 2026.
March 11, 2026
4.25 but it's going on the favorites shelf because I'm going to be thinking about it forever
I listened to the author's appearance on the Pablo Torre podcast and LOVED IT but I was a little worried going into his book that all of his best points would have already been touched on in the aforementioned podcast. I had yet to encounter a self-helpy/philosophy book that I didn't think could've easily been condensed into a blog post.
While this did get slightly repetitive in the middle, the beginning and end were so strong that they made it well worth the read. I am honestly devastated that my ebook went back to the library in the middle of my read, forcing me to finish physically and stop highlighting every other line.
I personally loved the digressions into yo-yoing, rock climbing, board games, and recipes. The concluding chapters about the universality of language and the art of play really got to me. I feel like I read this at the perfect time.
I listened to the author's appearance on the Pablo Torre podcast and LOVED IT but I was a little worried going into his book that all of his best points would have already been touched on in the aforementioned podcast. I had yet to encounter a self-helpy/philosophy book that I didn't think could've easily been condensed into a blog post.
While this did get slightly repetitive in the middle, the beginning and end were so strong that they made it well worth the read. I am honestly devastated that my ebook went back to the library in the middle of my read, forcing me to finish physically and stop highlighting every other line.
I personally loved the digressions into yo-yoing, rock climbing, board games, and recipes. The concluding chapters about the universality of language and the art of play really got to me. I feel like I read this at the perfect time.
March 4, 2026
A reasonably interesting book, but one that in no way does what it says on the tin.
The sub-title is a lie because "how to stop playing someone else's game" suggests a book that offers a framework for rethinking or re-evaluating notions of success, providing a healthier alternative not based on society's expectations. But it doesn't.
There's a lot in this book about measurements, data, statistics and how we analyse KPIs and metrics. There's a lot about how such data are evaluated, used, and abused, and how they become the focus of our attention when so many other things are overlooked.
The author goes into great detail to describe the effects of a data-heavy approach, arguing that an obsession with scale, mechanical rules, interchangeable parts, and control overlooks the nuance that could be found if we looked at intangible factors rather than worrying about easily measurable data points.
Okay, so far, so obvious. There are a couple of lengthy chapters given over to explaining the limitations of data, with some very lengthy and tedious examples to explain something that Goodhart's Law could tell you in a minute. He does touch on Goodhart, but only to tell you it doesn't go far enough, before going into way too much detail to bring to life concepts that Goodhart makes clear anyway.
Laborious sections are devoted to the nuanced arts of tabletop gaming, skateboarding, and yo-yo playing, to make the point that modern metrics focus on the wrong things. In this section, he at least references the brilliant Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed to explain why simplified measurements never capture the intrinsic value of a system, but he adds nothing new to the discussion.
So, I read through this whole book about the fine details of measurement, the philosophy of scale and the intricacies of data, all the while, waiting for the promise of the premise: Okay we know all this - but how can we stop playing somebody else's game?
And then the book ended.
The sub-title is a lie because "how to stop playing someone else's game" suggests a book that offers a framework for rethinking or re-evaluating notions of success, providing a healthier alternative not based on society's expectations. But it doesn't.
There's a lot in this book about measurements, data, statistics and how we analyse KPIs and metrics. There's a lot about how such data are evaluated, used, and abused, and how they become the focus of our attention when so many other things are overlooked.
The author goes into great detail to describe the effects of a data-heavy approach, arguing that an obsession with scale, mechanical rules, interchangeable parts, and control overlooks the nuance that could be found if we looked at intangible factors rather than worrying about easily measurable data points.
Okay, so far, so obvious. There are a couple of lengthy chapters given over to explaining the limitations of data, with some very lengthy and tedious examples to explain something that Goodhart's Law could tell you in a minute. He does touch on Goodhart, but only to tell you it doesn't go far enough, before going into way too much detail to bring to life concepts that Goodhart makes clear anyway.
Laborious sections are devoted to the nuanced arts of tabletop gaming, skateboarding, and yo-yo playing, to make the point that modern metrics focus on the wrong things. In this section, he at least references the brilliant Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed to explain why simplified measurements never capture the intrinsic value of a system, but he adds nothing new to the discussion.
So, I read through this whole book about the fine details of measurement, the philosophy of scale and the intricacies of data, all the while, waiting for the promise of the premise: Okay we know all this - but how can we stop playing somebody else's game?
And then the book ended.
February 6, 2026
Best book I’ve read in a while
March 24, 2026
It’s a great book, and the actual arguments and ideas are insightful and novel! I’ve heard Nguyen on a bunch of podcasts, and he’s obviously super bright and understands this topic - scores and games - better than anyone.
So many of the actual ideas here are great and I feel deserving of a write up for a slightly more savvy audience. Where this kinda suffers is that it tries to make itself too accessible a lot of the time, and ends up feeling a little facile. If this was written with a little more willingness to dive deeper and use more precise language, I think it would’ve been better. Stuff like “I can think that Shannon did the most athletically impressive trick, but Liang had this beautiful chilled-out flow” is really hard to read in what is basically a philosophy book
Also half of this I swear is literally written by ChatGPT!!!! Lines like “this is porters central insight: institutional quantifications blah blah…” or “crucially, public metrics get rid of intuition or gut instinct—the wordless certainty blah blah …”, etc are all so obviously written by AI that I’m wondering how they got into the final edit!!!
So many of the actual ideas here are great and I feel deserving of a write up for a slightly more savvy audience. Where this kinda suffers is that it tries to make itself too accessible a lot of the time, and ends up feeling a little facile. If this was written with a little more willingness to dive deeper and use more precise language, I think it would’ve been better. Stuff like “I can think that Shannon did the most athletically impressive trick, but Liang had this beautiful chilled-out flow” is really hard to read in what is basically a philosophy book
Also half of this I swear is literally written by ChatGPT!!!! Lines like “this is porters central insight: institutional quantifications blah blah…” or “crucially, public metrics get rid of intuition or gut instinct—the wordless certainty blah blah …”, etc are all so obviously written by AI that I’m wondering how they got into the final edit!!!
February 17, 2026
I think I really identified with this book partially as a climber but mostly as an academic who also is disillusioned and slightly revolted by the tenure process and sycophantic microcosm of the academy yet still find myself forced to participate 😪
March 8, 2026
Others have written more thoroughly on the Tyranny of Metrics (e.g. Jerry Muller). Nguyen spends a lot of time thinking about his own hobbies and only toward the end of the book starts quoting other thinkers, though without seriously engaging with them. Games as a counterpoint to metrics makes no sense to me. Nguyen claims that games permit a creativity in rule bending, but this happens mostly when close friends or repeat playing partners play. When strangers play a board game they will typically default to the standard rules. We are "wired" to play because play is a way to practice what we do in life (optimizing under constraints) and to bond socially. It's little wonder we enjoy it. If people were really only fixated on outcome/product vs process, they wouldn't spend so much time watching people performing tasks live or on video, so I'm not sure that critique is valid either.
I had hoped that this book might deconstruct the quantified self and what it gives up, or that it would suggest how to construct incentives to play the game you want to play rather than one that has been imposed on you, but it does neither.
I had hoped that this book might deconstruct the quantified self and what it gives up, or that it would suggest how to construct incentives to play the game you want to play rather than one that has been imposed on you, but it does neither.
March 21, 2026
Exceptional work. Engaging and useful. Essential for anyone who uses metrics in human service arenas.
March 18, 2026
The Score completely shifted how I think about progress and self-improvement. It made me realize how easy it is to get trapped chasing arbitrary benchmarks, the number on the bar, the weight on the scale, the metrics someone else decided matter, while completely ignoring the real, intricate work happening within. The book pushed me to look inward, to pay attention to the small muscles, the subtle movements, the quiet improvements that no leaderboard will ever capture. It’s a powerful reminder that growth isn’t something you measure against others, it’s something you feel in yourself. A genuinely perspective-shifting read. 10/10 would recommend
March 19, 2026
This book is pretty much perfect. Sometimes you read something and just think, this author has seen through to the underside of the world and what makes things tick. Nguyen just cuts through complexities in noise in a way that I think Robert Pirsig would appreciate: that knife that can dvide the world into categories that make sense of the confusion around us.
If you love games, read this book. If you're pissed off at how often you have to, or end up, striving for some metric that's meaningless, read this book. Just read the damn book.
If you love games, read this book. If you're pissed off at how often you have to, or end up, striving for some metric that's meaningless, read this book. Just read the damn book.
March 12, 2026
I landed at about three stars on this one 2.5 rounded up. The core idea is genuinely interesting—the way scores and metrics slowly reshape what we value and how we behave. Once you see it, you start noticing it everywhere: grades, social media numbers, productivity trackers, all these little systems that subtly push us to optimize for the score rather than the underlying activity. That’s a smart and timely insight.
The problem is that the book keeps circling the same point. After a while the examples start to feel like slightly different angles on the same argument. What might have been a sharp long essay gets stretched into a full book, and the repetition becomes noticeable.
The prose also has a few stylistic tics that started to grate on me, especially the author’s fondness for calling things “delicious.” Not just food or literal pleasures, but ideas, situations, ironies—everything becomes “delicious.” I get the intention: he’s trying to convey the sensory, almost aesthetic pleasure of certain intellectual experiences. But once you notice the word, you start seeing it everywhere, and it begins to feel like a shortcut rather than a fresh description.
Still, the central concept is strong enough that the book is worth reading. Even if the argument could have been tighter, the lens it offers—thinking about how scoring systems warp our motivations—is a useful one. I just found myself wishing for either more depth or more restraint.
The problem is that the book keeps circling the same point. After a while the examples start to feel like slightly different angles on the same argument. What might have been a sharp long essay gets stretched into a full book, and the repetition becomes noticeable.
The prose also has a few stylistic tics that started to grate on me, especially the author’s fondness for calling things “delicious.” Not just food or literal pleasures, but ideas, situations, ironies—everything becomes “delicious.” I get the intention: he’s trying to convey the sensory, almost aesthetic pleasure of certain intellectual experiences. But once you notice the word, you start seeing it everywhere, and it begins to feel like a shortcut rather than a fresh description.
Still, the central concept is strong enough that the book is worth reading. Even if the argument could have been tighter, the lens it offers—thinking about how scoring systems warp our motivations—is a useful one. I just found myself wishing for either more depth or more restraint.
March 7, 2026
BRILLIANT
March 8, 2026
This book made me think differently about both games and life.
March 8, 2026
Thoroughly enjoyed this one and will be chewing on it awhile. Helped me understand what's happening when I engage with my work at a corporation and the discomfort I feel around metrics in general.
February 11, 2026
Very interesting exploration of games and their place in society.
March 25, 2026
This is a philosophy professor writing about personal experiences, motivation, corporations, and games.
Without citing the established academics that do study each of these areas, separately and in combination.
The points are few and well known, although not presented with clarity. Spoiler sections below contain quotes and details.
So what does this book contribute? Well, assertions are made, terms are suggested, and sources are name-dropped, without further research or critical analysis.
People perform to what is measured; decide what metrics you want to work toward. Lacks principles or a philosophy on how to accomplish that or what those should be.
This has some kernels for discussion with friends, but overall it disappoints. The points are not well made, cited research is not validated, assertions are not well defended. Even the language is sloppy.
Hoped for new insights, enlightening analyses, some humor, maybe guiding principles; not in this book.
Ch 3 starts "I spent the beginning of my life completely in my head." This book shows that persists.
Without citing the established academics that do study each of these areas, separately and in combination.
The points are few and well known, although not presented with clarity. Spoiler sections below contain quotes and details.
So what does this book contribute? Well, assertions are made, terms are suggested, and sources are name-dropped, without further research or critical analysis.
People perform to what is measured; decide what metrics you want to work toward. Lacks principles or a philosophy on how to accomplish that or what those should be.
This has some kernels for discussion with friends, but overall it disappoints. The points are not well made, cited research is not validated, assertions are not well defended. Even the language is sloppy.
Hoped for new insights, enlightening analyses, some humor, maybe guiding principles; not in this book.
Ch 3 starts "I spent the beginning of my life completely in my head." This book shows that persists.
February 23, 2026
I saw Nguyen, a philosophy professor, on Pablo Torre Finds Out and his work sounded interesting, so I gave it a gander. And it is interesting.
At the heart of this book lay this cunundrum: both games people play for fun, and performance metrics that guide much of our lives are based on clear rules and fixed guidelines - but people (including Nguyen) find the former to be joyful and enriching to one's soul, while the latter often are horrible and drain away your soul. How do you explain the difference? Well, that one has a simple answer -- we play games out of choice and for fun, but the metrics are often thrust upon us.
That said, an even deeper question is addressed: if we hate metrics so much, why is our life so full of them? For that matter, you can't always blame "they're thrust upon us" as an excuse for metrics. People even follow them when they don't have to. Nguyen uses law school rankings as an example: before the rankings began, different law schools would prioritize different approaches. This one focuses more on having members of marganized communities enter, another focuses more on a particular type of law, still another on getting their students into particular law firms. It was an issue of values and students would need to do soul-searching on their own part about what sort of law school they wanted to enter. Then came rankings and everyone started just following the rankings. No soul-searching for students, and law schools themselves adjusted their missions, jettisoning their old values to score better in the areas the rankings base their metrics on. Nguyen calls this Value Capture: when you don't just have metrics, but internalize those metrics to determine your own values. And that's what really causes so much grief. Nguyen noted that in his own life, metrics that determine how his philosophy department should be run cost him so much anguish, that he at one point lost much of his interest in the field he's based his life studying.
OK, that went on too long about one example from the book, but it highlights the problems of metrics that determine sooooo many facets of our life. Nguyen identifies what he calls The Four Horsemen of Byreaucracy. These are the engines that really drive them, make them so important, and often oppressive.
The Horsemen: 1) Scale, which makes things comprehensible across wide areas, allowing for the power of portability, at the cost of paying attention to specific contexts the data came from. 2) (Mechanical) Rules, which gives us clear guidelines that everyone can follow, just like they follow the recipes in modern day cookbooks). They make it so everyone can follow along the same, but also mandate that everyone do it This Way. You trade accessibilty for adaptability. 3) (Replaceable) Parts: It makes it so that everything is a cog in the same machine - even the people being metric'd. You get interchangeability at the sacrifice of individual sensitivity and specificity. 4) Control, which Nguyen attests is the real key one. All metrics operate under the facade of objectivity, but in reality, they're always at the behest of whoever made them. They serve that person's purpose (whether the purpose is conscious or not) and with any bias baked into the concrete so deep you can't even see it. (That you can't see it makes it even better). Coordination is gained and autonomy lost. And this is how people just heard towards law school rankings and ignore any differing values law schools have (which, at this point, they don't really have any differing values due to complete Value Capture of the entire system).
So you lose adaptability, recognition of specific context, specificity, and autonomy while gaiing accessbility, portability, interchangibilty, and coordination. No wonder people often hate them.
He has no great plan of how to undo it. He argues on behalf on the spirit of play and an aesthetic appreciation of art, which doesn't just mean things you see in a museum but also anything you see around you can be appreciated like that. I'm not sure it comes up as a point in the book, but one thing I got out of the Pablo Torre interview is just how being aware of this process can help you navigate it and avoid the worst. Being aware of how you might have experienced Value Capture can help you break free of it, which seems to have helped Nguyen. (No, it's not systematic, but at least you can get a personal win out of it).
At the heart of this book lay this cunundrum: both games people play for fun, and performance metrics that guide much of our lives are based on clear rules and fixed guidelines - but people (including Nguyen) find the former to be joyful and enriching to one's soul, while the latter often are horrible and drain away your soul. How do you explain the difference? Well, that one has a simple answer -- we play games out of choice and for fun, but the metrics are often thrust upon us.
That said, an even deeper question is addressed: if we hate metrics so much, why is our life so full of them? For that matter, you can't always blame "they're thrust upon us" as an excuse for metrics. People even follow them when they don't have to. Nguyen uses law school rankings as an example: before the rankings began, different law schools would prioritize different approaches. This one focuses more on having members of marganized communities enter, another focuses more on a particular type of law, still another on getting their students into particular law firms. It was an issue of values and students would need to do soul-searching on their own part about what sort of law school they wanted to enter. Then came rankings and everyone started just following the rankings. No soul-searching for students, and law schools themselves adjusted their missions, jettisoning their old values to score better in the areas the rankings base their metrics on. Nguyen calls this Value Capture: when you don't just have metrics, but internalize those metrics to determine your own values. And that's what really causes so much grief. Nguyen noted that in his own life, metrics that determine how his philosophy department should be run cost him so much anguish, that he at one point lost much of his interest in the field he's based his life studying.
OK, that went on too long about one example from the book, but it highlights the problems of metrics that determine sooooo many facets of our life. Nguyen identifies what he calls The Four Horsemen of Byreaucracy. These are the engines that really drive them, make them so important, and often oppressive.
The Horsemen: 1) Scale, which makes things comprehensible across wide areas, allowing for the power of portability, at the cost of paying attention to specific contexts the data came from. 2) (Mechanical) Rules, which gives us clear guidelines that everyone can follow, just like they follow the recipes in modern day cookbooks). They make it so everyone can follow along the same, but also mandate that everyone do it This Way. You trade accessibilty for adaptability. 3) (Replaceable) Parts: It makes it so that everything is a cog in the same machine - even the people being metric'd. You get interchangeability at the sacrifice of individual sensitivity and specificity. 4) Control, which Nguyen attests is the real key one. All metrics operate under the facade of objectivity, but in reality, they're always at the behest of whoever made them. They serve that person's purpose (whether the purpose is conscious or not) and with any bias baked into the concrete so deep you can't even see it. (That you can't see it makes it even better). Coordination is gained and autonomy lost. And this is how people just heard towards law school rankings and ignore any differing values law schools have (which, at this point, they don't really have any differing values due to complete Value Capture of the entire system).
So you lose adaptability, recognition of specific context, specificity, and autonomy while gaiing accessbility, portability, interchangibilty, and coordination. No wonder people often hate them.
He has no great plan of how to undo it. He argues on behalf on the spirit of play and an aesthetic appreciation of art, which doesn't just mean things you see in a museum but also anything you see around you can be appreciated like that. I'm not sure it comes up as a point in the book, but one thing I got out of the Pablo Torre interview is just how being aware of this process can help you navigate it and avoid the worst. Being aware of how you might have experienced Value Capture can help you break free of it, which seems to have helped Nguyen. (No, it's not systematic, but at least you can get a personal win out of it).
February 23, 2026
I first came across C. Thi Nguyen’s work a couple of years back when I read his paper on “Value Capture”. This was about the tendency in today’s world to obsess about rankings and ratings, about performance and optimisation, better and best in all areas of life. This resonated with me - the idea and danger of metrics (“indicators” from an external source) becoming goals becoming personal internal values to live by.
This book expands this line of thought - and a very good one it is, too. There is so much evidence today of people losing sight of what really matters and spending energy instead on chasing easily-measured vampiric metrics. The book is full of insight - on the distinction between goal and purpose, the psychology of games in the broadest sense, the idea of outsourcing values to an istitutional metric. And the distinction between what’s easy to measure and what really matters.
In describing metrics, Nguyen introduces “The Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy: Rules, Scale, Parts and Control.” In work situations, we’re constantly under pressure from these four to be transparent, to be clear, to KISS. But are transparency and clarity always a good thing? Nguyen shows how transparency can undermine expertise when experts feel demand to explain and justify themselves to non-experts. We cannot understand everything, so sometimes we need to put trust in the specialists.
“Sometimes vague language is better because it expresses the truth that things are unclear or unsettled.”
However, although there’s so much good stuff in this book, the author is an unapologetic games enthusiast. His boisterous ebullience starts charmingly enough with anecdotes about fly-fishing, yo-yos, rock-climbing and all manner of “weird sh*t” in the way of board and online games. But after a while this started to grate and even alienate me. Everything is “glorious” or “delicious."
I have never played D&D. At university there was a group who were into that but I wanted nothing to do with it - I was too busy living my life. I do have games I enjoy, and hobbies and pastimes that I’m quite wrapped in. But I know that others aren’t fascinated by my trumpet-playing or writing children’s adventures. I’ve never understood the “thrill" of watching others playing video games, or got into esports - and I loathe being bullied by family and friends into playing games that I really don’t fancy.
Overall, there are some brilliant ideas here, but the book is repetitive and needs editing. I found it too black and white regarding the grey, life-sucking institutionalised metrics vs. the delightful, playful, individual world of games.
This book expands this line of thought - and a very good one it is, too. There is so much evidence today of people losing sight of what really matters and spending energy instead on chasing easily-measured vampiric metrics. The book is full of insight - on the distinction between goal and purpose, the psychology of games in the broadest sense, the idea of outsourcing values to an istitutional metric. And the distinction between what’s easy to measure and what really matters.
In describing metrics, Nguyen introduces “The Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy: Rules, Scale, Parts and Control.” In work situations, we’re constantly under pressure from these four to be transparent, to be clear, to KISS. But are transparency and clarity always a good thing? Nguyen shows how transparency can undermine expertise when experts feel demand to explain and justify themselves to non-experts. We cannot understand everything, so sometimes we need to put trust in the specialists.
“Sometimes vague language is better because it expresses the truth that things are unclear or unsettled.”
However, although there’s so much good stuff in this book, the author is an unapologetic games enthusiast. His boisterous ebullience starts charmingly enough with anecdotes about fly-fishing, yo-yos, rock-climbing and all manner of “weird sh*t” in the way of board and online games. But after a while this started to grate and even alienate me. Everything is “glorious” or “delicious."
I have never played D&D. At university there was a group who were into that but I wanted nothing to do with it - I was too busy living my life. I do have games I enjoy, and hobbies and pastimes that I’m quite wrapped in. But I know that others aren’t fascinated by my trumpet-playing or writing children’s adventures. I’ve never understood the “thrill" of watching others playing video games, or got into esports - and I loathe being bullied by family and friends into playing games that I really don’t fancy.
Overall, there are some brilliant ideas here, but the book is repetitive and needs editing. I found it too black and white regarding the grey, life-sucking institutionalised metrics vs. the delightful, playful, individual world of games.
March 16, 2026
Why do clear rules and scoring metrics make games so fun and fascinating, but "gamifying" real-life rules and metrics makes us miserable? Nguyen is a leading philosopher in the study of games, and this book is his attempt to answer that question. It's clear how much games matter to Nguyen, and as a person who gets so much creative, emotional, and social fulfillment from them (particularly indie tabletop role-playing games, which get some nice shout-outs here), I completely agree. Nguyen offers a quote that captures exactly what I've said quite often to friends - if we ever made a utopia where all of our needs were cared for, what would be left for humans to do?
We'd play games. In that sense, playing games with your friends might be the meaning of life, the thing we're all ultimately striving for. Nguyen argues that making art is a game too - any practice that gets us to momentarily take on different incentives and agencies, while focusing on the process instead of the output is a game. He also muses on another central question I've been dealing with - why are the most critically and commercially lauded mediums ones that create static pieces of art that others must examine or consume, rather than all the forms of art that require and encourage wider acts of creation, like fanfiction or RPGs or sports? Some games, some forms of art, are focused more on the process and the act of doing rather than on producing some marketable or understandable item.
There's a bunch more ideas in here (more densely packed than most pop-philosophy books, even if it still gets a little repetitive) worth engaging with, but I'd be remiss if I didn't say that I had so much fun with this because of how much I already agree with it. Still, Nguyen offers some compelling arguments and coins some terms that clarify some of my own inchoate thoughts about this. The book goes beyond just games, spending a good bit of its length on the benefits and consequences of bureaucracies and their simplifying of contextual information into easily transferable and understandable metrics. It draws a lot from Seeing like a State by James C. Scott in this regard. Ultimately, Nguyen is pointing out a fundamental, complicated duality of humanity, one that we'll never be able to find a perfect balance for, but that we're currently skewed too far in (outsourcing our values to metrics like money or clicks).
If you have any interest in the world of games writ large, or you're feeling disheartened by a world that only seems to care about simple numbers going up, this is a great read.
We'd play games. In that sense, playing games with your friends might be the meaning of life, the thing we're all ultimately striving for. Nguyen argues that making art is a game too - any practice that gets us to momentarily take on different incentives and agencies, while focusing on the process instead of the output is a game. He also muses on another central question I've been dealing with - why are the most critically and commercially lauded mediums ones that create static pieces of art that others must examine or consume, rather than all the forms of art that require and encourage wider acts of creation, like fanfiction or RPGs or sports? Some games, some forms of art, are focused more on the process and the act of doing rather than on producing some marketable or understandable item.
There's a bunch more ideas in here (more densely packed than most pop-philosophy books, even if it still gets a little repetitive) worth engaging with, but I'd be remiss if I didn't say that I had so much fun with this because of how much I already agree with it. Still, Nguyen offers some compelling arguments and coins some terms that clarify some of my own inchoate thoughts about this. The book goes beyond just games, spending a good bit of its length on the benefits and consequences of bureaucracies and their simplifying of contextual information into easily transferable and understandable metrics. It draws a lot from Seeing like a State by James C. Scott in this regard. Ultimately, Nguyen is pointing out a fundamental, complicated duality of humanity, one that we'll never be able to find a perfect balance for, but that we're currently skewed too far in (outsourcing our values to metrics like money or clicks).
If you have any interest in the world of games writ large, or you're feeling disheartened by a world that only seems to care about simple numbers going up, this is a great read.
February 10, 2026
I’m split on my score here, honestly a 3.5 would be my score but as fractions aren’t valid, I’m going to be generous because this book had a few questions worth pondering.
Namely that we (humans) chase numbers, but mostly we chase the wrong numbers. For example I’ve had my kids do Duolingo daily to “keep their streak”. The daily number increasing daily had hypnotized me in some way, and through this book I realized that number was meaningless. It’s the joy of learning, the engagement of using the mind that’s what I’m ultimately wanting to inspire in them. I appreciate I got to shift my focus thanks to reading this.
That said this book was kind of a rollercoaster in terms of structure. I enjoyed the quick chapters, but ultimately the weaving in of judgmental pronouncements (I.e. “if you’re playing the market to maximize your money then you’re an asshole” (paraphrasing here but curses were sprinkled in and that sentiment was echoed a few times)) made me feel it cheapened the message. Where’s the author experiencing these people? Felt like a straw man waiting in the wing.
Additionally, halfway through I got to thinking, where the hell are all the references? This one was on me, finding them in the back under a nonstandard format. Even with these reference in form of name dropping (as opposed to say, APA or some other standard format), the arguments seemed prima facie at best, non sequitur text message at worst. Statements like “(process beauty) seems less important, less meaningful than object beauty” irk me on some deeper level. Maybe Chris never read “You are here” by Thích Nhất Hạnh— statements like that feel like arbitrary judgement calls.
The main issue posed by this book was the difference between metrics and games. Why does bureaucracy drain us while games lift us up, they both score things so what’s the deal. A solution that popped to my mind and which Chris eventually mentions briefly in a paragraph (before rambling for another 50 pages before the end of the book), is to create a game that’s projected onto the metric space that maps to your goals instead of their “metric/bureaucratic” form. This allows you to avoid having metrics dictate what you’re trying to achieve, allowing for both playfulness while achieving some duller more sweeping “metric” based objective.
All in all this is a book on a subject I hold dear (why we love games), and Chris clearly feels passionately about his hobbies and the craft in his mind space they create.
Namely that we (humans) chase numbers, but mostly we chase the wrong numbers. For example I’ve had my kids do Duolingo daily to “keep their streak”. The daily number increasing daily had hypnotized me in some way, and through this book I realized that number was meaningless. It’s the joy of learning, the engagement of using the mind that’s what I’m ultimately wanting to inspire in them. I appreciate I got to shift my focus thanks to reading this.
That said this book was kind of a rollercoaster in terms of structure. I enjoyed the quick chapters, but ultimately the weaving in of judgmental pronouncements (I.e. “if you’re playing the market to maximize your money then you’re an asshole” (paraphrasing here but curses were sprinkled in and that sentiment was echoed a few times)) made me feel it cheapened the message. Where’s the author experiencing these people? Felt like a straw man waiting in the wing.
Additionally, halfway through I got to thinking, where the hell are all the references? This one was on me, finding them in the back under a nonstandard format. Even with these reference in form of name dropping (as opposed to say, APA or some other standard format), the arguments seemed prima facie at best, non sequitur text message at worst. Statements like “(process beauty) seems less important, less meaningful than object beauty” irk me on some deeper level. Maybe Chris never read “You are here” by Thích Nhất Hạnh— statements like that feel like arbitrary judgement calls.
The main issue posed by this book was the difference between metrics and games. Why does bureaucracy drain us while games lift us up, they both score things so what’s the deal. A solution that popped to my mind and which Chris eventually mentions briefly in a paragraph (before rambling for another 50 pages before the end of the book), is to create a game that’s projected onto the metric space that maps to your goals instead of their “metric/bureaucratic” form. This allows you to avoid having metrics dictate what you’re trying to achieve, allowing for both playfulness while achieving some duller more sweeping “metric” based objective.
All in all this is a book on a subject I hold dear (why we love games), and Chris clearly feels passionately about his hobbies and the craft in his mind space they create.
February 4, 2026
C. Thi Nguyen sets out with a genuinely compelling question: Why do scoring systems in games bring us joy while metrics at work leave us hollow? Unfortunately, The Score never really answers it. Instead, the book meanders through philosophical abstractions that romanticize ambiguity as if vagueness itself were a virtue. At times it reads less like philosophy and more like an extended shrug—celebrating the beauty of not knowing what we truly value while offering little guidance for those of us actually trying to navigate a world saturated with KPIs and performance reviews.
The structure feels scattered. One chapter dives into rock climbing aesthetics, the next into bureaucratic value capture, then suddenly we're analyzing cookbook instructions. These vignettes might have worked with grounding interviews—real people wrestling with metrics in their actual lives—but Nguyen largely stays in the theoretical ether. I kept waiting for the concrete examples that would bridge his ideas to lived experience. They never arrived.
Most frustrating is the bait-and-switch at the book's core. The premise promises insight into why game scores energize us while workplace metrics drain us. But Nguyen sidesteps the real answer: games offer voluntary constraints with immediate feedback and intrinsic rewards, while workplace metrics are imposed with delayed, extrinsic rewards tied to survival. Instead of excavating this distinction, he retreats into poetic musings about "choosing your game"—advice that rings hollow when your mortgage depends on playing the game your employer designed.
There are glimmers of insight here, particularly around how metrics flatten complex values into countable proxies. But these moments get buried under layers of academic preening and an almost willful refusal to land a point. A book about scoring systems shouldn't itself feel unmoored from any clear metric of success. The Score fails its own test.
The structure feels scattered. One chapter dives into rock climbing aesthetics, the next into bureaucratic value capture, then suddenly we're analyzing cookbook instructions. These vignettes might have worked with grounding interviews—real people wrestling with metrics in their actual lives—but Nguyen largely stays in the theoretical ether. I kept waiting for the concrete examples that would bridge his ideas to lived experience. They never arrived.
Most frustrating is the bait-and-switch at the book's core. The premise promises insight into why game scores energize us while workplace metrics drain us. But Nguyen sidesteps the real answer: games offer voluntary constraints with immediate feedback and intrinsic rewards, while workplace metrics are imposed with delayed, extrinsic rewards tied to survival. Instead of excavating this distinction, he retreats into poetic musings about "choosing your game"—advice that rings hollow when your mortgage depends on playing the game your employer designed.
There are glimmers of insight here, particularly around how metrics flatten complex values into countable proxies. But these moments get buried under layers of academic preening and an almost willful refusal to land a point. A book about scoring systems shouldn't itself feel unmoored from any clear metric of success. The Score fails its own test.
February 10, 2026
A masterpiece from C. Thi Nguyen.
This is one of those books where I am frequently re-reading paragraphs to mentally process what I just read and try to view the idea from a different lens.
One of the main concepts discussed in this book is the idea the author coins as “Value Capture” which is when we are exposed to a simple scoring system like a ranking or a metric and let it take over our decision making.
Fitness is a good example that the author uses where what actually matters is being healthy but often we chase down goals such as a lower total body weight or a faster marathon pace. Those things can help provide context of good health but shouldn’t be the be all end all.
But the larger tie into this and a central concept that the author brings back in is games. Most games provide metrics and a clear scoring system but the author reminds us that these metrics and scoring systems help provide meaning and focus to the game.
Metrics help reduce bias which is a great thing the author mentions! Metrics give transparency and hugely benefit organizations that are operating at scale. Metrics undermine expertise.
A very public metric the author discusses is the US News & World Reports Law School ranking. This metric forces the schools to optimize for that very ranking which is only based on a few criteria such as job placement and acceptance rate. The latter criteria is to the point where schools target certain people to apply to then decline to juice that metric. This eliminates all context for programs who may be best for political lobbyist or people who want to study tech reform.
There are tons of ideas in this book discussed where it’ll take me quite some time to fully digest. Highly recommend as this is one of my most thoughtful reads in while.
This is one of those books where I am frequently re-reading paragraphs to mentally process what I just read and try to view the idea from a different lens.
One of the main concepts discussed in this book is the idea the author coins as “Value Capture” which is when we are exposed to a simple scoring system like a ranking or a metric and let it take over our decision making.
Fitness is a good example that the author uses where what actually matters is being healthy but often we chase down goals such as a lower total body weight or a faster marathon pace. Those things can help provide context of good health but shouldn’t be the be all end all.
But the larger tie into this and a central concept that the author brings back in is games. Most games provide metrics and a clear scoring system but the author reminds us that these metrics and scoring systems help provide meaning and focus to the game.
Metrics help reduce bias which is a great thing the author mentions! Metrics give transparency and hugely benefit organizations that are operating at scale. Metrics undermine expertise.
A very public metric the author discusses is the US News & World Reports Law School ranking. This metric forces the schools to optimize for that very ranking which is only based on a few criteria such as job placement and acceptance rate. The latter criteria is to the point where schools target certain people to apply to then decline to juice that metric. This eliminates all context for programs who may be best for political lobbyist or people who want to study tech reform.
There are tons of ideas in this book discussed where it’ll take me quite some time to fully digest. Highly recommend as this is one of my most thoughtful reads in while.
March 19, 2026
I borrowed the audio for this book from the library and it took a bit for me to dial in, but by the end of it I was thinking I'd better buy it and read it again, maybe more than once. For me at least, it companions Thinking Fast & Slow, which I read not long ago, with metrics representing the fast-track process. For Nguyen, metrics are valuable in particular circumstances but are generally insidious, displacing contextualized, responsive, adaptive thinking via "value capture." Metrics narrow the field creating blind spots and generating oversimplified solutions. Unfortunately, value capture by way of metrics is king in our economy, and that king has deputized "Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy" to reinforce its rule: a bias toward scale, a rigid and impersonal regulatory environment, a push toward partitioning that emphasizes parts over the whole, and a prioritization of standardization over autonomy/subsidiarity. "Striving play" is his solution, a counter to a cult of achievement. When we go all in on a game for the sheer love of it--a pickup basketball game, say, or a garage band, or cooking through the recipes of Julia Child--we gain mastery in a more comprehensive way, and we're better equipped to clear the gravitational pull of the diluting effects of the four horsemen. (I, apparently, have comprehensively mastered the mixed metaphor.) I'm drawn to his proposal because of my work, in publishing, which is constantly being shoved toward scalability, perennially being partitioned. A sense of the whole is inherent to book publishing (or ought to be), as is (or should be) the joy of striving play, and I feel increasingly that my main effort should go toward protecting this discipline from the encroaching cult of achievement. So, yeah, I'm into this book.
March 13, 2026
Wow, what an awesome book! I think I originally found it on my Youtube recommendations, an interview on a philosophy podcast. But the author is a philosophy professor from my alma mater, the University of Utah, and the book is all about games, also up my alley, as I use roleplaying games in my pedagogy. He has this interesting pairing of games and metrics, you can think if the argument being that games are an antidote for the soul-sucking-out-ness of metrics in the real world. It's like this book was written to me. I'm LDS and I served an LDS mission. As a missionary, you are evaluated on a series of weekly indicators: how many lessons you teach, how many baptisms you get, how many progressing investigators you have. And that just felt so antithetical to the preaching of the gospel to me. Right in Preach My Gospel, it quotes Thomas S. Monson, "When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates." Nguyen doesn't say that all metrics or attempts to centralize control are bad: we need them for society to exist. But it's not where we should center our locus of meaning. He uses the term "value capture" to represent when you internalize externally defined metrics into your value system. I still wrangle whenever I have to adhere to metrics e.g. student evaluations as one example, that don't capture everything. A great book, and will likely be thinking about it for a long time.
February 22, 2026
In C. Thi Nguyen’s world games are small tools of subversion that help you figure out when other people’s value systems are capturing your attention, control your outlook on life, and, by extension, society.
Nguyen spends a lot of time in this book on the minutiae of systems thinking, on standards, and bureaucracy. It tries to help you recognize that you are living in a maze of bureaucracy and how to break out of it.
How does Nguyen break out? He goes mountain climbing, plays yo-yo, and, it seems, a lot of video games.
He’s a teacher of philosophy and often sounds like one.
It is a self-help book of sorts disguised as a philosophical treatise.
I liked his quip that “games are quarantine zones for meaning,” ie that you get to play out scenarios in games that in real life could be disastrous, but give you leisure to think about them in the game environment.
Do gamers have better insights on the meaning of life than the rest of us? Remind me to ask my daughter that question.
In many of such books I have a little trouble identifying who the reader is or who it should be. Undergraduates? Corporate executives? The voting public?
Nguyen gets a little hung up with (presumably Republican) voters who want to do away with philosophy programs in universities.
He also wanders away from the theme with some personal anecdotes, like running down a beach late at night with one of his dates. (Too much information, bud.)
I found the book a useful corrective to 1984.
But I’m not a gamer.
Nguyen spends a lot of time in this book on the minutiae of systems thinking, on standards, and bureaucracy. It tries to help you recognize that you are living in a maze of bureaucracy and how to break out of it.
How does Nguyen break out? He goes mountain climbing, plays yo-yo, and, it seems, a lot of video games.
He’s a teacher of philosophy and often sounds like one.
It is a self-help book of sorts disguised as a philosophical treatise.
I liked his quip that “games are quarantine zones for meaning,” ie that you get to play out scenarios in games that in real life could be disastrous, but give you leisure to think about them in the game environment.
Do gamers have better insights on the meaning of life than the rest of us? Remind me to ask my daughter that question.
In many of such books I have a little trouble identifying who the reader is or who it should be. Undergraduates? Corporate executives? The voting public?
Nguyen gets a little hung up with (presumably Republican) voters who want to do away with philosophy programs in universities.
He also wanders away from the theme with some personal anecdotes, like running down a beach late at night with one of his dates. (Too much information, bud.)
I found the book a useful corrective to 1984.
But I’m not a gamer.
March 19, 2026
I've worked in marketing for over two decades, the past few years as a VP at a marketing agency...and I have never been a numbers and data guy. I'm a storyteller, a creative, a producer. I like actually making cool stuff. I like surprising people. I like having fun, because our jobs are SUPPOSED to be fun and interesting.
The more science infected my day-to-day work, the less I loved what I was doing. I was less a creator, less a brand whisperer, and more the guy who had to try to justify decisions our team was making based on goals and metrics I didn't come up with and never agreed to. That sucks.
That said, this book offers an explainer of the metric-obsessed, mechanical world that's burning down around us and an alternative perspective on the importance of games, play, and artistic endeavors.
It was exactly what I needed to hear, and I frankly want to hand a copy to all my KPI sweating friends. Don't lose your values in this nerfed, robotic world. Seek beauty, ideas, the weird, the fascinating, the novel...
...any of this hitting you? Just read it.
I will say it feels a bit repetitive at times, but it's in service of the overall point. The good stuff really resonates. Don't try to gulp it down. Savor it and reflect on the ideas. I dug it.
The more science infected my day-to-day work, the less I loved what I was doing. I was less a creator, less a brand whisperer, and more the guy who had to try to justify decisions our team was making based on goals and metrics I didn't come up with and never agreed to. That sucks.
That said, this book offers an explainer of the metric-obsessed, mechanical world that's burning down around us and an alternative perspective on the importance of games, play, and artistic endeavors.
It was exactly what I needed to hear, and I frankly want to hand a copy to all my KPI sweating friends. Don't lose your values in this nerfed, robotic world. Seek beauty, ideas, the weird, the fascinating, the novel...
...any of this hitting you? Just read it.
I will say it feels a bit repetitive at times, but it's in service of the overall point. The good stuff really resonates. Don't try to gulp it down. Savor it and reflect on the ideas. I dug it.
February 17, 2026
I think this is a must-read if you're a writer. And I think it'd be a great read even if you're not.
I've been thinking about how to redefine success on my own terms -- because # of books sold, awards won, or # of best-of lists that you're on has been feeling kind of thin. And then along comes this book at the perfect time.
"But when we precisely define the edges of what we value--when we give our values mechanical edges--we eliminate that exploratory zone. Things are either in or they're out immediately. Mechanical values have been reengineered with obvious edges, which we can apply instantly without judgment or deliberation. If you value only what's low-calorie, what gets more clicks and follows or what gets more money, you can throw out most of the world without a second thought. Mechanical values make it easier to dismiss much of the world.
And it’s easy to get stuff done when you’ve learned how to dismiss the majority of the world in an instant. We can eliminate wasted time exploring worthless garbage. We are now much more ruthlessly efficient and successful—or at least we will look successful to anybody who shares our narrowed notion of success."
I've been thinking about how to redefine success on my own terms -- because # of books sold, awards won, or # of best-of lists that you're on has been feeling kind of thin. And then along comes this book at the perfect time.
"But when we precisely define the edges of what we value--when we give our values mechanical edges--we eliminate that exploratory zone. Things are either in or they're out immediately. Mechanical values have been reengineered with obvious edges, which we can apply instantly without judgment or deliberation. If you value only what's low-calorie, what gets more clicks and follows or what gets more money, you can throw out most of the world without a second thought. Mechanical values make it easier to dismiss much of the world.
And it’s easy to get stuff done when you’ve learned how to dismiss the majority of the world in an instant. We can eliminate wasted time exploring worthless garbage. We are now much more ruthlessly efficient and successful—or at least we will look successful to anybody who shares our narrowed notion of success."
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