Once you know “The Score,” you’ll see it everywhere

If I had to pick a favorite highly specific microgenre, it might be “nonfiction with a once-you-see-it, you-can’t-unsee-it big idea.” Think The New Jim Crow, The Black Swan, or, more recently, The Anxious Generation. Now, along comes philosopher and lifelong gamer C. Thi Nguyen with The Score, which has opened my eyes to a largely invisible system that can dramatically reshape our goals, motivations, and behaviors: scoring.

The book presents a fascinating two-part hypothesis: one, that scores are an elegant and incredibly effective mechanism for making games and sports more action-packed and fun. But two, the mechanism that works so beautifully for games has been co-opted by societal institutions and forces us to quantify our lives and attach value in ways we might not choose on our own—and whether we realize we’re playing or not, this can be a dangerous game. I couldn’t wait to dig in with Nguyen on the background behind the book, what it was like to narrate, and how his big idea plays out in different situations. Game on!

Kat Johnson: Congratulations on The Score. It’s fascinating. It’s one of those books that gave me a new lens for looking at the world, making the invisible structure and importance of scoring in so many areas of life visible. It also feels like a love letter to games from a true fan. Can you tell us a bit about your unique background as a philosopher, game player, and more, and how it led to this book?

C. Thi Nguyen: I’ve been a game player all my life—boardgames, video games, sport—and during graduate school I became particularly fascinated by the breaking world of new European boardgames and new indie tabletop role-playing games. The rule systems seemed so innovative and so exciting—and I kept writing about them online. Philosophers, serious ones, weren’t supposed to think about games. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how weird the game-playing experience was, and what a distinctive kind of beauty it was, that most people missed.

Your narration of the book is simply awesome! What did you think of the recording process—any highlights that stood out or special prep or advice that informed your approach?

The hardest part was reading the text *exactly as written.* I’m used to being able to adjust words on the fly if I’m reading my own text, to make them a bit more spoken. The “personal” parts written in a more human voice were definitely more fun to read; it turned really difficult in the parts written by my academic brain.

Your deep love and infectious appreciation of games shine through in The Score. Yet you warn about how gamification—and particularly the crucial element of scoring—can be dangerous, in part because of this concept of value capture. Can you talk more about what that is and how it affects us?

When we genuinely play games, we get a deep choice about which scoring systems affect us. And we can modify them to suit ourselves; we are free to, so long as the games are relatively disconnected from massive institutions. When we’re value captured—when we guide our lives by a metric—we don’t have that freedom, because the world of metrics isn’t a diverse ecosystem of approaches that we can dance between. It locks us into a singular measure that wasn’t designed for our pleasure or fascination.

What do you think of popular social scoring systems such as Instagram likes and Reddit upvotes, especially as the author of some viral tweets yourself? Is the sense of "consensus reality" they offer an illusion—and does the advent of generative AI, which often serves up single, summarized answers to users’ questions, hold even greater capability to potentially lead us astray?

One huge difference is that game-scoring systems occur in an isolated world; they don’t change anything. Social scoring systems take a real-world act—like communication or reporting news—and simplify it and drag it towards a scoring system that’s out of our control. It is exactly an illusory consensus reality—a fake one that takes the easy road to agreement, by focusing on exactly those things in life that everybody already counts the same way. It’s easy to count lifespan and likes the same way, and hard to count joy and community the same way.

What do you make of the popularity of gaming, esports, and gamified activities like sports betting, particularly as digital experiences increasingly supplant real-world activities? Do you have any advice on setting boundaries or making games a more healthful part of life for folks who may be in danger of losing balance?

“Balance” isn’t the right idea for me. If you manage to make your life fully playful—if you manage to have interesting, self-chosen, rich activities—all the more power to you. The worry is more the particular attitude that locks in. The worry is that, throughout games and non-game work life, we stop choosing and engineering our own scoring systems, and permit large-scale institutions to set them for us.

Do you have a “desert island” favorite game? If so, which is it and why?

The classic is Go. If I had only one RPG, it would be Apocalypse World.

What do you most hope listeners take away from this book?

A name for the weird sense that the world is stealing something of immense value from us, but which is hard to point to, because there isn’t data for it—because it is precisely the thing that data can’t capture.