“Is this the game you really want to be playing?” 

This question is at the core of Thi Nguyen’s new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, published this year by Penguin. At the Utah Museum of Fine Arts on February 5, 2026, Nguyen discussed his book with Shelby Moser (Games Division and Department of Philosophy). Nguyen (Department of Philosophy) explained how this book emerged from a collision of two separate research interests: On the one hand, he has argued in a previous book, Games: Agency As Art, that games offer expressive ways of aiming, choosing, and caring that feel different from everyday life. On the other hand, he has been developing an account of value capture: what happens when institutions replace rich, meaningful understandings of the value of something with thin, countable proxies or scores; value capture is when people gradually internalize those proxies as if they were their own values. 

The question is not whether scoring systems are simply good or bad, but why they can feel stimulating in play and alienating in other contexts. The main distinction Nguyen identifies lies in choice: People opt into games and hobbies as experiences that invite interest but also allow participants to step back and ask whether they were fun, meaningful, or worth the effort. This freedom of choice is essential to recreation, from board games to rock climbing. The trouble begins when institutional scoring systems stop being temporary and voluntary and instead become pervasive, inescapable, and compulsory. Value capture, in Nguyen’s framing, is not just a bad incentive; it is the loss of the ability to opt out and assess whether something truly matters to you.

Metrics are not inherently authoritarian or repressive. Institutional measurements are often essential for equity, transparency, detecting discrimination, and preventing corruption. Drawing on the work of historians Theodore Porter (Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life) and Lorraine Daston (Rules: A Short History of What We Live By), Nguyen explained that institutional metrics work by making measurements portable and comparable across domains, which by design requires a loss of nuance and complexity.

This loss can occur in both public and private life. In one vivid example, Nguyen recounted a scene from his youth in which he mocked his mother’s traditional recipes, which relied on experience and discernment rather than discrete measurements and timings; the lack of metrics seemed backward to him at the time, when in fact it reflected greater expertise and skill. Similarly, the spread of metrics in competitive skateboarding and figure skating scoring systems can weaken understanding of what makes them compelling, shifting attention instead to the accumulation of tallyable tricks. In education, grading and assessment regimes likewise obscure more than they reveal and become goals in themselves, encouraging gamified behavior rather than deeper learning.

Questions from the audience touched on resisting value capture in educational settings (including Nguyen’s own classes), and the ambivalent role of complexity in scoring systems and game enjoyment. A book-signing followed, sponsored by The King’s English Bookshop. 

Robert Carson — Associate Director, Tanner Humanities Center

This event was supported in part by Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts, and Parks, and the Salt Lake City Arts Council. Views expressed in Tanner Humanities Center events do not reflect the official views of the Center, its supporters, or the University of Utah.