DB Dialogues: C. Thi Nguyen on the Dark Side of Keeping Score
How gamification and metrics reshape what you value and drain the joy from your pursuits
We all have numbers we track to see how we’re doing. Maybe you count macros, or wear an Oura ring that grades your sleep and counts your steps. At work, you’ve got metrics to hit: sales made, reports filed, projects shipped. And then there’s social media. When you make a post on Instagram or even leave a comment on Reddit, you look to see how many likes it got.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably noticed that tracking all these numbers can suck the joy right out of whatever you’re tracking. I know I’ve been guilty of neurotically checking my sleep score every morning, which only morphed sleep from restful slumber to something akin to getting a report card in middle school. I admittedly like to check the statistics of how one of my posts did here on Substack, and if it didn’t do so hot, it can bum me out, even though I believe in its inherent worth (actually, because I believe in its inherent worth!).
While scorekeeping in life can suck the fun out of things, what’s strange is that scorekeeping in actual games tends to have the opposite effect. Keeping score in bowling or golf or a board game adds intrinsic interest. Scores and rules are what make games fun. So why do points make games more enjoyable, but make everything else in life feel like a grind?
That’s the question C. Thi Nguyen explores in his book, The Score. Thi is a professor at the University of Utah and one of the world’s leading philosophers of games (yes, that’s a real academic specialty). He’s spent his career thinking about why we voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for fun, and what happens when the scoring systems we love in games creep into the rest of life.
In our conversation below, Thi explains what makes a game a game, why a courtroom trial is almost (but not quite) a game, how the trend to gamify everything in life is subverting what you care about, and how he coined the term “value capture” after watching journal rankings hijack his own love of philosophy.
We get into why the metrics of things like social media change our goals, how we’re all kind of pick-up artists now, and what you can do to keep external scoring systems from consuming and flattening the things you love.
Thi also shares the tabletop game he’s currently excited about, and the unusual unprovable metric he tracks on vacation.
The Score has been one of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking books I’ve read this year. So much to chew on. I hope this fascinating interview inspires you to pick it up for yourself.
