What it is to be more playful in the world is to take from games the spirit of play and the possibility of moving lightly and taking control over the systems you’re in. – C. Thi Nguyen
This episode explores games, metrics and scorecards, the ones handed to us at work and the ones we adopt ourselves. Think revenue, performance reviews, grades, followers, productivity and fitness metrics.
Scores can be useful. They can motivate us. But they can also quietly take over, until we start serving the metric instead of the reason we were playing the game in the first place. And sometimes we didn’t choose the game at all. At work, for example, the scoring system often just comes with the role.
So how do we keep the score useful without letting it take over, and for the games we choose, how do we make sure that we don’t lose the sense of play that made them worth doing in the first place?
My guest is philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. Thi is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and specializes in the philosophy of games, technology and value. He was named to Vox’s 2024 Future Perfect 50, its list of thinkers, innovators and changemakers working to make the world better. And His first book, Games: Agency as Art, won the American Philosophical Association’s Book Prize. His newest book is The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.
I really enjoyed this conversation with Thi because some of the ideas are a little paradoxical at first. Why should you sometimes try desperately hard to win while still not caring whether you ultimately win? We talk about things like “process beauty,” and why struggle itself might be part of what makes an activity worthwhile? And as AI gets better at giving us the outcomes we want, what might we lose if it also allows us to skip the meaningful parts of getting those outcomes?
This one genuinely changed the way I think about some of the games I’m playing in my own life.
A few highlights from the episode:
- How metrics can replace the values they were meant to serve
- Work OKRs and the problem of measuring at scale
- Why organizations rely on numbers, even when the numbers are imperfect
- How accountability changes what we measure
- Goals, scoring systems, and when the numbers start taking over
- Can you gamify your work without becoming trapped by a score
- Goals and a purpose
- When scoring and competition kill the joy of an activity
- Self-effacing games that subvert their own winning conditions
- What to do when a goal that once motivated you stops working
- Retirement and new games to play
- Process beauty: why the doing can matter more
- On being playful in diffucult circmstance
- AI and the danger of getting the outcome while skipping the valuable part
Resources / Links
- Site: Objectionable
- Book : The Score, How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game
- The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits
- Film: Empire of the Sun
