The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game

by C. Thi Nguyen

'Lucid, entertaining and precise... a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life' Tim Clare, Guardian

Is this the game you want to be playing?

Scoring systems are everywhere. Underpinning our daily lives – whether it’s the fit bits on our wrists, likes on social media, and even school rankings – they have become pervasive and increasingly dangerous, warping our desires and outsourcing our values to external institutions. Instead of encouraging us to be more playful, to take pleasure in the journey of striving towards a goal, institutions, corporations and bureaucracies weaponize scoring systems to impose their own interests. No matter what, we always seem to be playing by someone else’s rules.

In The Score, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen shows us how this newly ‘gamified’ world has fundamentally captured our value systems, turning what might be moral or personal life choices into numerical data, and forcing us to prioritise what can be measured and monetized over what is truly meaningful to us.

A life-long lover of online and board games himself, Nguyen argues that we should not stop playing games but rather take a step back and become more aware of their immersive and profound power, so that we might chart a way towards more creative and joyful lives. To start playing our own game.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology, Games, Audiobook, Sociology, Self Help

328 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 13, 2026

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

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,

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.

[Daniel Hageman · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

We 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.

[Jason Pollard · Rating 2 out of 5]

More like The Snore if you ask me!

[David Steele · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.
If the above concept appeals to you, I'd suggest you check out Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results instead.
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.

[Eric Mayhew · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Lada · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Paul Cothenet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book I’ve read in a while

[Nat]

Kudos to Thi for producing something so compulsively readable; I easily finished this on a flight from Heathrow to SFO and had time to watch a bunch of episodes of Pantheon. I'm writing something with Zed about how Thi is wrong that "Art is a game" (the title of one of the final chapters), but there's plenty of sensible takes in here (alongside some more contestable ones). Mainly I was struck with how Thi gets value captured over and over by almost every activity he seriously engages in before learning how to escape to a broader conception of value: Professional philosophy (obsesses over department and journal rankings); rock climbing (wants to maximize the difficulty of his climbs); yoga (wants to master a bunch of moves); dieting and exercise (wants to keep his weight loss down and his metrics easy to input, so starts eating less interesting but easily quantifiable food). I think I disagree with his proposal that it is by playing games that we will fight back against the always widening gap between what institutions and activities are supposed to be doing and what they actually end up promoting; what we actually need is some kind of counter-culture(s) that offer alternative systems of value and relentlessly criticize the dominant culture and its corruption.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Score examines the disconnect between scoring systems in games and scoring systems in society (metrics). This is highly relevant (if you stop what you're doing right now and listen closely, you can hear an analyst somewhere uttering the phrase 'data-driven' for the umpteenth time). Nguyen unpacks these two scenarios and drills down to reveal why they affect us in such different ways. Underlying this analysis is a sort of connotation that once you understand these differences, you will be able to reexamine your own life with this new lens and make changes. Regarding this, I appreciate that he makes no grand promise or claim about radically changing your life due to his revelations. Ultimately, this book is a philosopher's long form response to the question 'Why do we play games?' or, better yet, 'Why do we have fun playing games?', or, finally, 'How can we play the games that we actually want to play?'

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. In a way, it felt like Nguyen was leading me out of Plato's cave. However, I don't recall ever entering it and I know I wasn't born in it. So, somewhere along the way, I must have entered it and gradually fallen deeper into the abyss of metrics. It's an alluring idea. Nguyen himself admits so and in fact states that this is one of the major appealing attributes of metrics. Being able to offload all of the nuance and minutiae of an event from your brain and distill it into a set of numbers provides consistency and accessibility across all contexts. This is one of the aspects that make them great. However, one of Nguyen's key points is that this distillation is far from perfect, and can actually never be perfect. Thus, we lose quite a bit when we do this. The more universal the metric, the more nuance is lost.

The other side of the coin that Nguyen spends ~300 pages rolling around his fingers focuses on games. Here, we purposely constrict ourselves yet find immense joy in doing so. Why is that? You will learn various terms such as striving play, achieving play, and process art as Nguyen attempts, successfully in my opinion, to give a satisfactory answer to this question.

It feels reductive to condense this book down to the aphorism 'It's the journey, not the destination' but I really feel like this is what Nguyen wants you to walk away with. More precisely, in a world that is continuing to gamify every aspect of our lives, it becomes even more important to not let ourselves be value captured and to aim for striving play. This theme is particularly relevant today as people are offloading more and more tasks to LLMs. Ultimately, there are three categories of readers for The Score:

1) Readers for which this book will have a profound impact.
2) Readers for which this book will not have a profound impact (in a good way).
3) Readers for which this book will not have a profound impact (in a bad way).

[A. Housewife · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd like to get this thesis right because it's a very important thesis. It's valuable and enlightening to think about how the metrics we use are valuable and what they are trying to do and *also* how they stifle us, mislead us, lead us astray into following numbers that don't really give us the information nor the growth or depth we are seeking.

I felt that the book was too long for the point it made. I felt that it was too slow in developing the points. Even though I actually enjoyed the writing, I particularly loved the examples and found them illuminating and illustrative, and thought it had a great writing style. I just kept feeling that I'd prefer it to be shorter. I know he was trying to explain nuances of this problem of metrics, but I fear that I lost the specifics of the nuances he was developing because he took too much time getting there.

The idea of going back and forth between gaming to illustrate his points and the more expository style of what society is trying to do (in many different fields) with measurable metrics was interesting in theory but I didn't find it so in practice. I didn't find that the gaming illuminated the points about metrics; I would have preferred less of this. I did enjoy the gaming points on their own but it didn't quite meld into the one big theme for me. Like I said, too long, too meandering. Despite me really enjoying many things he said *and* his style of saying it, on the way.

I also read a review by a scientist here and I agree with some of his complaints.

Overall, though, I think that he makes many excellent points that we have to be aware that in making things measurable, we are losing very important aspects. He says this so well and so many times and in so many different ways. Like I said, I'd love to see this as an article or a podcast because I think society needs to really reflect on this and how we do that and the prices we pay for it, both in our personal lives and as society.

[Yan Castaldo · Rating 3 out of 5]

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!!!

[Elif · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 😪

[Summer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting book about how we score things like games, school, work, etc… It also showcases how using standardized metrics can remove individuality. Really enjoyed the author sharing all his hobbies as examples for scoring systems. Great read!

[Dan Bouchelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional work. Engaging and useful. Essential for anyone who uses metrics in human service arenas.

[Melanie Duong · Rating 3 out of 5]

i got halfway through this book and did not complete it; pls take my thoughts w the tiniest of grains of salt.

perhaps my disappointment is my own fault as I came in with sky high expectations. a viet philosopher author, passionate about climbing and games, cautioning readers about the risks/consequences of modern day’s obsession w metrics. i wanted to love this book so badly.

but alas, while some chapters were quite insightful/informative (e.g. Nguyen’s chapter on surveillance and value capture)

This book was very anecdotal, and I found it a bit fluffy for my liking. Don’t get me wrong, this book had some beautiful writing and clear dissections of what makes games/scores/metrics so alluring. I particularly enjoyed Nguyen’s chapters “transparency is surveillance,” “value capture,” and “striving play.” I also appreciated the clear, accessible language Nguyen uses to explain these otherwise complex and novel (imo) ideas. However, a good chunk of the book was dedicated to his personal interests—fly fishing, climbing, and cooking/food. At times, I felt like I was reading a book about his personal lifestyle and entrenched beliefs rather than about the philosophy of scoring systems. Perhaps that was his intention?

I also feel like some of the claims he made were quite strong and unqualified, which could have worked had he contextualized them as his own subjective opinion/interpretation. This may not be the best example, but in one of his chapters, he talks about learning piano and the difference between composers Beethoven and Chopin. He writes, “Beethoven didn’t give a damn about what it feels like for the pianist to play his pieces. You could tell that he had this grand sonic architecture in his head, and you just have to force your fingers to make sounds for him. Chopin, on the other hand, clearly loved the physical act of playing the piano.” These statements feel a bit bold to me idk!

he also writes about charity navigator—the charity review site that ranks the “best” charities. Nguyen offers valid critiques, such as the overhead ratio being a poor metric for determining a charity's efficacy/quality bc it incentivizes cutting internal personnel costs and doesn’t effectively incentivize outcomes (I believe his example was the quality of homes built with donated funds). However, to me, this was more of a critique of the metric used to score charities rather than the scoring itself. Considering other philanthropic sites like GiveWell, which uses different scoring criteria, what critiques can be offered there?

Through the first half of the book, some criticisms felt cherry-picked, and some reasoning felt anecdotal, leaving me with many uncertainties and unresolved follow-up questions. Nguyen would scratch the surface of potentially exciting and worthwhile topics to dive into, but would then make generalizations based on his own experience and jump to unsatisfactory conclusions.

Perhaps Im misconstruing the purpose of the book, imposing my subverted expectations onto it. If this book is intended to be more of a “why metrics aren’t perfect or why scores can be misleading,” then I think it serves that end. However, I can’t help but wish there were more rigorous philosophical analysis, especially considering Nguyen’s undeniable depth of knowledge in philosophy and gaming. Overall, while I might seem quite critical of this book, I still think Nguyen offers easily digestible analyses on scoring and interesting parallels between games and the modern-day fervent push towards more metrics/data. This book is an entertaining sampler platter of cool ideas, but as a reader, I would still be sure to leave ample room to pursue further reading and form my own conclusions.

I might go ahead and skim to the end to see if I can find the call to action for “How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game”.

Update: I found no call-to-action. The endings were also unsatisfactory.

[Noah Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

C. Thi Nguyen has become one of my favorite active philosophers. While there’s a lot of overlap between this and his previous book, this one is less technical and also takes a few steps in new directions. It’s wonderful. I don’t think a summary of this book really matters, and I may do some fuller writing on this later anyway. I just want you to read this book, whoever you are.

You should read this book if you live in the modern world and need to think more clearly about your purposes, goals, and values, and in particular, how you measure success in achieving those things. Just to be clear: that’s everyone.

You should especially read this book if you worry about how success is defined and measured in large-scale institutions like government, healthcare, education, religion, sports, economics, business, etc.

You should also especially read this book if you have any interest in games, art, hobbies, and everything else that may be “marginal” relative to realms like those listed above. Nguyen shows why these other things shouldn’t be considered unimportant “side” interests. They might be at the center of meaning in life.

Don’t be afraid that the author is a philosopher—he’s an excellent writer and stays very grounded and conversational.

Sometimes the book felt a little repetitive and not linear enough for me, but I have a suspicion it’s because the publisher was trying to make sure that Nguyen holds the audience’s hand throughout. To me, this made the book less clear, not more (i.e.—wait, didn’t we already talk about this?). But what works about the book is so important to me that I’m willing to make excuses for any stylistic issues.

[Chris Boutté · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much that it’s going to be hard to put into words, but this is easily my favorite new book of the year, and it’ll be hard for other books to beat it. Transparently, this book just hit on a lot of things I find extremely interesting, like games, philosophy, and psychology. This book is all about the games we play on a daily basis, whether it’s with ourselves, with others, at our jobs, for social status, or in other aspects of our lives.

I think what I enjoyed most about this book is the valuable life lesson of turning things into games. For example, I’m on a weight loss journey after my insurance stopped covering my GLP-1, and gamifying it has helped. I’m also insanely competitive when it comes to the video games I play, and it can be to an annoying degree. This book has helped me find mini-games I can play that take the focus off winning and put it into improving.

Overall, if you enjoy philosophy, I think you’ll really enjoy this book. I don’t know how many will love it as much as me, but I think it’s one that everyone can get something out of.

[Jarrett Goodwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Terry Pearce · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Allan N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nguyen is really good at trying to humanize these deep philosophical ideas and convey them to a wider reader base. It left me with some really interesting ideas about what we do, why we do it, and how we got here. Sometimes you just need to take a step back.

At times, it does just feel a bit like talking in circles. It might have been better served if I was more actively taking notes. But I took it as a reflection opportunity more than a studying one. After all, isn’t that Nguyen’s thesis anyways?

Lots of good ideas, we’ll see how much of it sticks and what habits I can change. We must stay playful. Metrics don’t control everything we are or strive to be. They are a means to an end, not the end itself.

[Naomi Greenberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really excited to read this book because I’ve been talking about this issue for AGES. However, I think Nguyen should have discussed this with some of his Gen Z students first. It comes across as a rather quaint, millennial-to-gen-X approach to metrics (I.e. related to entirely to hobbies and jobs). I agree with the problems he mentions , but he’s completely missing how personal lives have become metrics too. What about the myriad ways to rate attractiveness these days? The metrics involved in dating apps? What about and “wellness” data like sleep quality, number of steps, VO2 max and other metrics that people measure their self worth on? What about macros and supplements and calorie counting from the age of 10?
Bottom line: he recognizes and explains part of the problem, but it feels like it’s 20 years behind in recognizing the extent of the issue he’s criticizing.

[Stijn Segers · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5/5
Het is een beetje ironisch om dit boek een score te geven, want gaat net om hoe gamification en scoresystemen de waarde(volle delen) van ons leven domineren. Nguyen schippert qua stijl tussen twee van mijn favoriete non-fictie schrijvers: Neil Postman en Johann Hari. Maar hij moet nog wat schaven om echt tot dat niveau te komen. Sommige delen van het boek waren zeer diepgravend en boeiend, andere delen waren te veel herhalend en zelfs een beetje saai. Het topic zelf zou ik echter aan iedereen aanraden.

[Christina Helen Birch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is philosophy at its best: accessible, theoretically interesting, and directly applicable to the good life both on a collective and individual level.

I can tell the ideas in this book are going to become part of my fundamental architecture for understanding the world and making decisions about life going forward.

[Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5

[Eli Sugerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

BRILLIANT

[David Biello · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me think differently about both games and life.

[Cam White · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Ashley Robinson]

As someone in the business was of measuring public services, I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time. Excellent.