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Scott Black: Why is it that mechanized scoring systems are in games, the site of so much joy and fluidity and play, and why, in the realm of public measures and institutional metrics, do they drain the life out of everything? Welcome to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center.

I'm Scott Black, director of the Tanner Humanities Center, and today I am joined by Thi Nguyen. Thi is a professor of philosophy and games here at the University of Utah. He is author of Games: Agency as Art and a new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. The Score has gotten a tremendous amount of interest across the country.

It's been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, and on dozens and dozens of webcasts, podcasts. So I'm delighted that you're joining us today. Thi, welcome.

Thi Nguyen: Hello. Hello. It's good to be here.

Scott Black: Really good to talk to you. I've been hearing about this book for a while now. I'm really delighted it's out, and I'm delighted it's making such a big splash.

How has it felt to be a star philosopher?

Thi Nguyen: I've gotten to experience something that I think you rarely get to experience as an academic, especially a philosopher. I've been getting a lot of fan mail from people being like, “This changed how I view my life,” to everything from “This made me less ashamed to be writing fanfic,” to, actually, I've been getting a bunch of emails lately that are like, “Oh yeah, you know, I'm an administrator in a medical school that I've been imposing metrics I'm really proud of, and now I'm really uneasy and I think I might have done wrong.

“I'm very upset now,” and that is also very satisfying.

Scott Black: That's great. The book is actually marketed like a self-help book—How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. And I realize that's probably the publisher's decision, but it sounds like it has helped people.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah, I mean, there's a way in which self-help is a term that I think a lot of people in academia think of as lowly, but I don't know.

I kind of think, in a deep way, philosophy has always been in this tradition of helping people. I came to philosophy ’cause I wanted to know what the hell to do with my life, and I wanted to cope with various feelings of confusion and despair. And I also wanted it to help me figure out certain nauseating questions I had about what I was supposed to be doing with my life, and I think that is what I'm trying to do.

A lot of the book is about analyzing large-scale institutions and analyzing the kind of informational loss that shows up in metrics and analyzing why things that look like metrics are useful in games. A lot of the reason I wrote this book is I feel like a lot of people have come to presumptively think that the way that an institution scores a particular activity is the way that we should be thinking about our lives, that it is just straightforwardly a measure of value. And just even shaking that thought a little bit, I think, can be really useful. I slip myself often into thinking, “Oh, here's what I'm for. I'm trying to publish philosophy articles in fancy journals,” and at some point I have to step back and ask whether that's actually the thing I want.

Scott Black: I think that's what's really captured people, captured people. I know value capture is your big term for that. The idea that the institution's values, the institution's metrics, become your own in a really damaging way, and I want to get— But I actually wanna start on the first half of the book, or at least I think the positive, pleasurable half, and that's talk about games.

I think this book picks up a lot of your arguments from your first book on agency, which is a wonderful book, in a really, really terrific account of why games, as an art form, are so powerful and so fun and so necessary. So let's just talk about this. You say a few things in this book. Games suggest the outlines of an alternative self, a kind of fluidity of agency in which you can take on different roles. You call it a library of agency, which is a terrific phrase. And I'm an English professor, so we will get to the writing in a moment. There's some absolutely beautiful lines here that I can feel the sweat not dripping off of, but I recognize, as a writer, as the result of a lot of effort, and I appreciate that.

So let's, you know, tell me why games are so good and so important for a full, healthy life.

Thi Nguyen: Games to me are really interesting structures. I mean, I've been a lifetime player of games, but I think the thing that really helped me to see why games are important is a part of Bernard Suits’s book, The Grasshopper.

So this is one of the big inspirations I had in my own work. So Bernard Suits is a philosopher in the seventies who wrote this kind of cult-classic book, The Grasshopper, and he offers a definition of games, which is really an exploration of the value of the phenomenon. So what he says about games is that to play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them. It's, I think, a beautiful definition. One way to put that is that what he's saying is that games are voluntary inefficiencies, that there's something you're trying to do, and then there's some voluntary constraint or restriction or difficulty [that you add], and there's, I think, already a really deep value insight behind this.

What he's saying is, in a game, you're trying to do something, but that thing in and of itself isn't what's really important to you, because if it was what you wanted by itself, you'd just take the fastest and most efficient way there. So if I wanted to get to a particular point in space in the city, I should just go there by the most direct route, using the fastest means, which is either gonna be a bicycle or a car. I would not run around the entire city on my legs. But if I'm running a marathon, what it is to run a marathon is to follow this long, circuitous path while under the constraint of only running. So if what I care about is crossing the finish line of a marathon, and not just being there at that, let's say, park, what that means is that my value in the activity has to be inextricably tangled with a particular process of doing something.

So this is what I think the games really rub our face in. So Suits was an Aristotle scholar, and the core Aristotelian idea is the value in human activity, the meaning in human activity, comes from our engagement in activity, from the exercise of our capacities. It comes from the doing and not the product of that doing. I think games are interesting for Suits ’cause they forefront that, right? Because games involve voluntary obstacles. Either they're completely stupid and silly, or they represent the crystallization of the value of action itself, and I think that's something we lose. I think the reason games and play often look silly is that the world we are in has come to primarily locate its values in clear products and clear outcomes, and [it] has kind of forgotten that so much of the value of what's important is in the process of doing. And games, I think, they highlight that, and they're also a technology that lets us shape that.

John Dewey, one of my favorite philosophers, says that every art form takes something we do in ordinary life and it kind of refines it and crystallizes it. Fiction takes ordinary acts of storytelling and it crystallizes it into a narrative with some unity. I think what games do is they take ordinary things that we do—stacking things, dodging around things, building things, optimizing our resources—and then [they shape] them, using specific rules and goals, to create an activity that is extra lovely.

Scott Black: And it's, as you said, profoundly inefficient. It's designed to be inefficient. It's designed to make you take the trouble to do something because that trouble is where the fun is.

Thi Nguyen: Although I think something that Suits says that I find marvelous is that games are efficiencies within inefficiency.

So when you play basketball, you're not being as inefficient as possible, nor are you getting the ball through the net as efficiently as possible, ’cause then you'd use a stepladder. First you take on certain constraints—like dribbling, no stepladders, opponents—and then you try to act within those constraints as efficiently as possible. So it's really, on the one hand, seemingly paradoxical, but I think if you understand that the value of games isn't a particular kind of activity, it's a kind of efficiency, right? But we nudge the constraints to find the efficiency that's most beautiful. I'm a rock climber, and the most efficient way to get to the top of a rock is usually to walk up the back or climb the tree with a lot of footholds. But if you forbid yourself from doing all those and you find a particularly hard line up the rock, then you'll have to do this exquisitely interesting balance task, which is what I wanna do.

So games are a chance for us to not just be involved in interesting activity. It's a chance for us to shape activities for each other. I'm a climber and I go out and it's not just that I'm climbing at random. It's that people have found particular lines on particular rocks that are incredibly lovely and pointed them out so I can find them. And when I play board games, what people have done is carefully shaped particular goals and incentives and particular abilities and rule structures in order to make this fascinating process of negotiating with each other about our incentives in this very specific market simulation.

Scott Black: And those rules, those scoring systems, are the things that give you a kind of portable, what you call a portable agency, that you can share with others in pursuit of this ridiculous activity?

Thi Nguyen: Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is every art form, every communicative medium, is a way to pass something on, right? Recipes are a way to pass on a method of cooking. Stories and words are a way to pass on a set of events, or, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, what narratives really do for us, what fictions really do for us, is they pass on an emotional perspective. You can see a way of looking at human events from a particular set of emotional reactions and a particular framing. And what games pass on is a constructed kind of action. Every art passes on some different part of human life, and games are the part that pass on practical involvement.

Scott Black: And so what else is involved in games? Fun is a key aspect of games. And I think the fun is that Aristotelian, autotelic activity—activity for its own sake—where you enjoy the process of doing something because that's the way we're constructed. It's also a way to form community. It's a way to share activities with other people. It is, of course, a way to compete, which sweetens the activity. But the point isn't simply to win, or let's say not to win by any means necessary.

Thi Nguyen: Although, weirdly, in many games, you do try to win by any means necessary, but winning isn't the point.

Scott Black: Okay. So—

Thi Nguyen: Any legal means.

Scott Black: Any legal means necessary.

Thi Nguyen: Any legal means. So here, it's useful, I think, to distinguish between a goal and a purpose. So the first time I encountered this distinction was from my advisor in grad school, Barbara Herman, where she said— I said something, and she's like, “Oh, you're just confusing a goal and a purpose.” I'm like, “What do you mean? They're the same thing.” And she said, “No. When I invite friends over for a night of cards, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun.”

I think that's very revelatory of the values for which we play games. In some sense, you ask, what are games for? And what I wanna respond is they're for a thousand million things. Games can be for fun, they can be for absorption, they can be for relaxation, they can be for meditation. I fly-fish. And I think what fly-fishing gives me, most of all—it’s not fun in any conventional sense—is that my brain completely blisses out in this absorption state in nature when I have to search through the details of the river. The thing that Suits really taught me is where to look for that value. It's not what the value is in games; it's where it shows up. And I think the thing that's most interesting is that there’s an incorrect assumption, which is that what you're trying to do in the game is the value of the game. A lot of the times, the goal of the game is completely disconnected from the value of the game, right? So goal is what you pursue during the game, and the purpose is why you play it.

So what's interesting for me is if you ask me why I rock-climb, I don't say to get on top of rocks. I can get on top of rocks in any way I can. I would say I rock-climb—I used to say for exercise, but mostly for the bliss of movement and to clear my mind, right? What's interesting is I cannot get mental clarity without trying really hard to climb rocks. But in the end, if I go to a bouldering area and I climb all day and I totally fail to climb anything, I might still come out with my body feeling good, with a state of meditation, having my mind cleared. And so what's interesting here is that the goal of the game is kind of just a means to an end, in a sense, right? I try to get that goal, but it's to get at something else.

So it's, I think, a way that some people misread games when they dismiss them. They think that if you're trying to win a game, it must be that winning is valuable. And a lot of the times that seems dumb. There's no point to winning. There's no point to beating people. There's no point to getting these arcane points. So what's the point of playing? I think the structure you need to understand is that the goals are just a temporary psychological contrivance for many of us in order to get absorbed in an experience, and what we want is the experience, and that's where the value comes from—often, for me, the mental state of absorption in the technical struggle to get some completely arbitrary and obscure points. Yeah, but if you get yourself to care about the points, then you can have this lovely struggle.

Scott Black: And the game offers you those temporary things to care about so that you can put yourself in that state of mind that is fun, gratifying—I recognize that fun is a very broad category—worthwhile.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah. I mean, I think one way to put it is when you get involved in fictions, you care about the lives of fictional people temporarily. But the point isn't because those fictional beings are important. They don't exist. It's that if you get yourself to care about them, you can have this emotional experience. Similarly, if you get yourself to care about the points, which don't exist and don't matter and are fictional, then you can have this very real experience of a beautiful, fascinating struggle.

Scott Black: And I think for me, fiction is deeply about play. It's about that activity, as you said, of suddenly involving yourself in other situations, other lives. And again, I actually think fiction offers forms of play with agency as well. You are a judge. You are a character. You are someone in this world. As soon as you put the book down, you're back in your own world. You may not ever care about them again, or you may bring them back in some way, but it's all of those, as you said, exercises of experience. It gives you new experiences, and that's the—really, for you, in your book, you discuss this as one of the great values of games, is that it offers you many different kinds of experiences, more than you could possibly have in one life.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah. Although I think it's really important also to think about the differences between traditional fictions and games.

A lot of the frustration I had when I started writing about games was, honestly, people from your field, English, would come and analyze games, and using the tools of fiction, they would focus on the aspects of games that were the most like traditional fictions—the story, the dialogue, the cutscenes, the stable part, the parts that were fixed—and I think that misses out on what's distinctive about games. So I often think about it in terms of a medium, like what is the artist manipulating? And the medium of art is, for, say, a novel, the artist is fixing not just words but particular events, and they are fixing the narrative, they're fixing the order of events, and they are creating an emotional experience by making a stable narrative. A game designer is creating restrictions and obstacles and goals, and then the player, when they interact with those, creates a sequence of events.

It's funny. Some people have tried to cope with this by saying the player is the true author of the narrative. But I just think that, at this stage, you're just straining the terms narrative and author. These are the wrong terms for what you're doing. Games are a different kind of thing. So one of the first thoughts I had when I was writing this stuff was that games are actually less like traditional fictions and they're more like toy governments. They're art governments. They're like rule systems to constrain action and to shape interaction. And a lot of the most interesting things, what governments are trying to do is shape incentives and rules to create safe social interactions. And what we are doing in games is we're shaping incentives and rules to create socialization[s] for fun or fascination, right? We're shaping emergent social interaction and emergent practical action by creating an obstacle space, and that's so different from specifying a fixed sequence of narrative entities. It's a profoundly different art form.

Scott Black: And you know, game studies, or the study of games, if game studies isn't enough, has grown quite a lot since English professors started to try to talk about what they were doing. One of the things that I think is really important about new mediums of play is that they then offer us ways to think about our traditional art forms. So one of the great things about the study of games is to actually think about agency or experience in a way that traditional criticism, at least recently, has ignored. I think we can pull that back and recognize that fiction does offer experiences in ways that our narratology doesn't capture, which is not to say that fiction is a kind of game. It says it’s a parallel kind of play that offers you some of the same pleasures in a very medium-restrictive way.

Thi Nguyen: So I, one interesting thought—when I was talking about this stuff, someone asked me if an experience of a mystery novel would be a game. And I'm like, yeah, actually. And it's funny, sometimes I read a mystery novel and I don't try to solve it. I just go on for the ride. And I feel like I'm experiencing it purely as a narrative, traditional narrative. But sometimes I'm doing both. And sometimes I'm simultaneously playing a puzzle game on top of experiencing a fictional narrative. And there's some kinds of mystery novels that I primarily experience as trying to solve the puzzle, and I'm not very interested in the kind of fictional absorption of the emotional reality, right? But I think there are definitely cases where traditional fictional narratives and game stuff interplay in complex, hybridized ways. One form is video games with partially fixed narratives, maybe with branching trees that offer some action possibilities. But old-school mystery novels are clearly another. There's a puzzle in there. Yep. People try to solve the puzzle. It satisfies some people in this—some people love crossword puzzles and mystery novels, and there's a [connection]. Right.

Scott Black: And one thing I'll say in defense of my version of my field is that genre fiction actually can be a version of this. Not that you're solving a mystery, but you know the set of rules and you wait for the author to bring you to a place that seems impossible to solve generically, and then you try to anticipate, as a reader or as a critic, how they're gonna get you out of this mess.

Thi Nguyen: Oh yes. One way to put it is I think there's a lot of similarity in the kind of psychological muscles between players and readers. I think the thing that's really profoundly different is actually easier to see on the artist side. A game designer is thinking very differently about the way that narrative will emerge from a novelist. One way that I put it in my first book is there’s a philosopher of art, Stein—sorry, Heim—who has this neat view. He thinks one way to think about different artistic media is to think about their characteristic recalcitrants. What's hard about them? So what's hard about oil painting is the layering of the oils, the creation of the image through slow moments. That's not what's hard about photography. Photography, a lot like old-school photography, what [it] taught us about [was] being there in the moment, finding and capturing a thing that's happening in front of you. The recalcitrant is totally different. A philosopher of art has an interesting argument that old-school film, what the recalcitrant of normal film is, is actually managing to get the image at all. But the recalcitrant in digital animated films, actually, there's so much to choose from, it's narrowing down. So the basic negotiation of the medium is really different.

I think the recalcitrant of the gaming medium is actually the freedom of the player. The thing that you have to negotiate with the most is the fact that once you create the system, a free player's gonna run in and do all kinds of weird stuff you didn't expect, and that they wanna make their own choices, but still you need to guide them towards interesting [things] while still leaving the player room to act for themselves. And I think that's such a fascinatingly different space to move in. The other nearest comparison for me to a lot of games is architecture, right? Not as a kind of visual art, but as an art of creating spaces for people to move through and inhabit. Games strike me as very architectural, and this is something that a lot of game designers have noticed. One thing that happened very early on in the literature is a lot of academic scholars tried to use the literature of narratology and fiction and film to talk about games, but game designers themselves were borrowing from architecture theory about space design and about scaffolding freedom and about creating interesting social interactions, about where you put the blockades and where you put the openings. I think that's very telling.

Scott Black: That's fantastic. And I especially like the idea of inhabitation, which of course is one of the things—you’re inhabiting a space of a game and you're inhabiting a different form of agency.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah. You're inhabiting a different self.

Scott Black: Mm-hmm.

Thi Nguyen: That has different goals and different [capacities]. So yeah, part of this is I think the game designer doesn't just create a world and obstacles. They create a different self for you and they give you different abilities. So that's how they shape a practical interaction. And sometimes it's really hard—how do you deal with the freedom of the player? But in some sense, their powers are great. They can design both the world and the thing that is the agent that moves through the world. They don't have control over every event like a fiction writer does, but they have, in some ways, finer-grained control of the self that interacts, right? A novelist doesn't tell you who you are, but a game designer, in an interesting way, tells you who you are in the game. They tell you what you're trying to do, and they can set what you're trying to do very narrowly and specifically. That's an extraordinarily [distinctive], interesting art medium that I think—a lot of my interest in this was I thought game design was so revolutionary and fascinatingly internal. It shaped our desire state, and that made it incredibly distinctive in the space of arts.

Scott Black: You just called that intrusive, and it is. You're letting someone in. You're letting someone rewire, for a moment or for the space of a couple hours, your fundamental structure of desire, understanding of yourself, your goals, your intentions. And you give that up willingly for the space of a game. All of that is based on the rule system, which is the portability or the portable mechanism by which you can adopt this new form of agency for the space of a game. And that's intensely pleasurable, for all the reasons we're talking about. So you would think, okay, so let's gamify real life. Let's gamify our university. Let's gamify our athletics or whatever. However, at that point, when it becomes real life, suddenly something goes drastically wrong. Gamifying turns out to be the opposite of fun, and it turns out to be the opposite of the things we go to games for, and it becomes a very stifling activity, or a stifling way to think about activity.

Thi Nguyen: So this is, for me, the core puzzle of this book, was why scoring systems are so fun in games and so devastating in institutions. I came up with a first explanation. The first explanation has to do with the way institutional metrics value. So there's an account from Theodore Porter, historian of [science], interested in where the difference between qualitative reasoning and quantitative metrics is that qualitative reasoning is often context-rich and subtle, but it travels badly between contexts, and institutional metrics are mechanical and decontextualized so that anyone can understand them, right?

They're designed to be portable, so they, by design, exclude specific contextual information. The problem for me is that that explanation is really interesting and it explains why metrics typically miss richer targets, right? The reason why educational metrics miss richer targets is because they have to point to the kinds of things that everyone can see and measure. So that's why educational metrics often aim for things like graduation rate or employment rate, and not for, in my case, philosophy-specific things like critical reasoning or developing intellectual virtue or reflectiveness. But one problem for me is that games also are thin in that way. The scoring systems of games are not specified with deep richness and sensitivity, but they're specified as you get one point per cow you collect and two points per gold piece. That's very mechanical and very decontextualized. The vast difference—this is gonna sound really dumb—is that you can stop playing a game.

Scott Black: Right? That doesn't sound dumb at all.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah. And you can switch games.

Scott Black: Yeah.

Thi Nguyen: So the basic nature of games [is] that they're very intrusive specifications of value systems that you have ultimate higher-level control over, usually, right? You get to choose which game you wanna play. You get to try it out and see if it meets your larger values. You get to see if it's enjoyable or interesting, and if it's not, you get to shift between them because, in kind of pure play—which is not true of all games—winning in a particular game isn't tied to any particular incentive structure, and you're free, right? If you don't like poker, don't play poker. Go play chess or go play Mario or go play tennis.

Institutional metrics are not like this. They're pervasive in an area and typically inescapable. And so one way to put it is that games, although they use clear and simplified scoring systems, they do so in highly limited, highly local, controlled environments with a high ability for us to move between them. And none of those are true of institutional metrics. A student cannot opt out of GPA.

Scott Black: And that's—I mean, that's true of all play. Play is necessarily temporary. It's necessarily transient, and it's something that offers you literally an escape from the exigencies, the urgencies, of your own life. If you spent your life playing, it would not be a life of play.

Thi Nguyen: At the end of The Grasshopper, to test this funky argument, he says, imagine utopia where we solve all our practical problems with technology. What would we do with our time? We would play games or be bored out of our minds. So play must be the purpose of life.

So I think one answer to your question is that I think the thing that we're calling work is something fixed, where what you're doing is fixed by something external, and play is the thing that's unfixed. So I think the idea of voluntariness is more important than the idea of temporariness for play, ’cause someone could choose and devote themselves to a game that they loved for their whole life. That's fine, but they get to choose it.

Scott Black: That's true. But so if you're a professional chess player, right, or a professional baseball player, one thing that's always said about the great baseball players is they're still playing it as if they were kids on the street. Yeah. And most—implying that most people don't. They've shifted their values to the professional values of being successful, which means losing the pleasure of the play.

Thi Nguyen: But you're talking about professional sports. So the thing—

Scott Black: I'm talking about some— I mean, so I do professional reading.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah.

Scott Black: And I'm required to read for my work. And I'm required, I'm required by my institution to be evaluated on how successfully I do that. That can bleed the pleasure out of it. When I read for fun, it's a different kind of activity, I'm told, but of course what might make someone a great professor, what might make someone a great philosophy professor, is you still care about the things that philosophy's about rather than the metrics that you're given.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah, yeah. I think part of the reason I immediately worry about professional sports as a metaphor for play here is that if you think what play is is something that is self-motivated and not specified by external constraints, then it is possible, in many professional cases, for someone to be tied to incentives. But I suspect that what's happened with people like you and me is that we've had the luck, the privilege, and the power to wander through the system of possible incentive systems and find the one that fits us. I could have also been a lawyer, right? And so there's a sense in which right now I'm in an incentive system, but also I had some relative choice over those incentive systems. Mm-hmm. So some parts of our lives—maybe one way to put it is that work looks more like play the more voluntary it is and the more control—

Scott Black: Right.

Thi Nguyen: —you have over it. And the less control you have over it, the less [it does]. This is not to say there's some obvious, clear binary distinction between work and play and games and non-game. It's to say that what's really creating the pressure is the degree to which you have lack of control over the kind of action you have. So if you are in an area where the only way out of poverty is basketball, or the only way to social status is football, it's a game, but you're locked into it.

Scott Black: Yep.

Thi Nguyen: By external pressures. The thing that's really interesting about games—it’s not true of every game, but in the ecosystems of play that we have, they support fast movement and easy movement between different modes of play. And maybe that's a model for how, in a better world, we could build work to look more like play, which is not the same as taking the jobs we already have and slapping gamifications on them, right, and using the technology to further intrude into people's souls when they have no choice about the matter.

Scott Black: I want to pursue the possibility of getting outside of our current work environment, but first I think we have to sort of talk about the current work environment, which you talk about in terms of value capture. That's the internalization of an institutional, really intrusive value system, internalizing that and making that your chief value. So yeah. Your goal in life is to make money in the most metric-oriented way, something that can be immediately counted. Yeah. And you are successful inasmuch as you've achieved a lot of money because winning in that way is what counts. Yeah. And of course, that seems like a really thin and narrow way to think about a full human life.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah. Value capture, the concept I introduced in the book, is the phenomenon where your values are rich and subtle, and then you get put in an institution or in a social setting that presents you with simplified versions, and then the simplified versions take over. You internalize them.

So I just wanna distinguish between value capture and incentives for the moment. So if I work a job and I care about all other kinds of things—art and family and community—but I need to work a job to get money, and I want money in order to support my other values, that's not value capture. That's a case of incentives. It might be rough already, but that's not value capture. Value capture is the case where I transition to only caring about money, or I transition to only caring about grades or clicks, right? And the big difference in this case, I think, is that if you are not captured but merely incentivized, you have a standpoint from which to stand back and assess the incentives and see how much you want to dive in.

I think there's a huge difference between, say, adopting, wearing a watch—a Fitbit—and having your steps measured and thinking, “Oh, I'm gonna try this out to see if it makes me healthier,” and controlling whether or not you use it in light of some larger value in health. And you can judge, “Oh yeah, no, this is helping me.” And then later you might judge, “Oh no, this isn't helping anymore.” But if you just adopt steps as your goal, then you don't have that reflective standpoint.

One of the worries I have about things like this—a lot of this work came from me being frustrated with educational metrics—and it's not that a metric like how fast are students graduating is useless. It does track something important and of some value, but we can approach it either by thinking that it's a simplified proxy, which we might try on and which might help our institution, but which we should be attentive to not being overmotivated by it, and you can't do that if you've adopted that as your definition of what's important.

One of the things I found out while writing this book I found most interesting is that Thomas Hobbes, the political philosopher who most people know as the person who says that morality comes down to political power, also defined political power. He said that the ultimate political power was the power over language—not military might, not strength, not economic power, but the power over language—’cause if you managed to define what success and failure meant for people, you could control them from the inside. And I think that's one way to think about the problem here, is that value capture is full control over the language of success and failure, of goodness and badness.

Scott Black: That's weirdly like James Scott's argument that politics wants you to be fully legible so that you can be properly controlled.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah, yeah. I think one way to put Scott's view is that governments can only see what governments could easily process, which is what's easily quantifiable and classifiable. And so they want the world to be more legible. And Scott's arguments were put in terms of the reconstruction of agriculture and cities and property laws. He was mostly talking about externalities. A lot of what I'm doing in this book is trying to extend Scott's argument into the soul, to say that the instrument of state legibility for values is gamification and metrics. That is how states make our values more legible and controllable to a large-scale bureaucratic institution.

Scott Black: Hey, that's a beautiful nightmare scenario, which leads me to—

Thi Nguyen: Wait, nightmare? You're saying that's not what's going on right now?

Scott Black: Oh, I think it's what's going on right now. I'm not saying that this—it’s a beautiful account of our nightmare reality right now. Yeah, no, it's horrifying, and I think many of us feel that, especially, you know? All right. We're both professors at the University of Utah, and without getting too personal, I think a lot of us at this school, as across the country—this is not unique to our institution—are frustrated by the sense of those kinds of very simplified metrics. And recognizing that metrics are important—I recognize that GPA, I need to know if your student did well in your class, and the institution needs to know that, and they're not gonna be able to spend the time knowing what you know in order to figure that out, so that's helpful. However, as those metrics get closer and closer to classroom practice and we start to teach in those ways, it becomes dangerous.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah.

Scott Black: It becomes limiting of what our actual fields are about.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah. One lesson from Theodore Porter is that metrics are very useful as a fast communication mechanism between very distant people, and the way they function is that they remove from the communication mechanism anything that is specific to a context and requires high expertise in a domain. So I think this is a useful image, ’cause it tells us exactly what metrics are valuable for and it tells us exactly what they'll miss. And so it gives us a very clear view of what happens if we go past using metrics as a quick, simplifying coordination mechanism and start treating them as complete renditions of human value and meaning.

Scott Black: And if then we adopt those as our own, we have an impoverished life. Okay. There's the nightmare.

Thi Nguyen: Yep.

Scott Black: Exactly. We have impoverished lives. We have one way to think about our experience, and it's based on a quest, based on portability rather than rich depth of context. What do we do? We are here now. As you said, this is not a nightmare scenario. This is where we're heading in lots of different domains in our culture. You have two endings to your book. You have an optimistic one and a pessimistic one. And I will just say upfront, your optimistic one isn't very optimistic.

Thi Nguyen: I would say it's the medium-pessimistic and the extremely pessimistic—the glimmer-of-hope version, I think I called it, and then the utterly despairing version.

Scott Black: Let's talk about the glimmer-of-hope version, right? Because in a sense, games are one of the ways to answer this. Yeah. It's not gonna be a complete panacea, but it is part of the arsenal of ways we can reclaim our lives.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah. In some sense, I think people who think about gamification have learned the wrong lesson from games. What they took from games was the mechanism of scoring and experience points and leveling, which was very motivating. But that's actually, deployed in the context of institutions, an authoritarian tool for emotion control that's not freeing in the way that it was for games. What makes games freeing is high choice over activity level and measurement level. The thing that makes games freeing is the fact that we can pick which scoring system we want for ourselves. If we don't like the ones on offer, we can reformulate them. We can house-rule them. So I think the actual lesson to take from games is that there's a deep value to permitting highly local and contextual control over evaluation methods and permitting people and encouraging people to reflect on whether particular evaluation methods that have been produced somewhere else are useful for them. Of course, large-scale states and bureaucracy don't want that. That's actually the thing that actually captures what I think many of us find beautiful about games.

Scott Black: That depends on the variety and the putting on and taking off of these rules.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah, I mean, the question is like, what is your social system scaffolding? Metrics are a system that help large-scale states control what people value. Games are a system that help people try on different ways of life and experiment to find out what new and weird kinds of value they may want. And the core of that is variety, flexibility, and the ability to be mobile between very different systems, the ability to sample between a diversity of value conceptions. And that, I think, is the opposite of how most institutions deploy the weapons of gamification.

Scott Black: One of the things I love most about your book is that in talking about the importance of games, the pleasure of games, the way games work, you write as a very enthusiastic participant and fan. So if at the core of your book is a central question, what kind of person do you want to be? Do you want to be a person who's thoughtful, who makes choices, who has the opportunity to be enthusiastic about whatever they happen to be enthusiastic about? Or do you want to be someone who's outsourced their agency, their selfhood, to a state system or some kind of large, metric-wielding organization? Your book actually exemplifies, and I think makes very attractive, the form of possibility that you could lead a rich, exciting, and excited life. Your prose captures this. Your enthusiasm through your book, talking to you today, is all part of that selling of an alternative vision of how one could lead a human life.

Thi Nguyen: Thank you. I mean, it is. I'm very gratified to hear this. There's also a sense in which I feel that it is a terrible thing that this is something that even needs to be said, which is like, fun is good, excitement is good. And one thing that I'm sometimes worried about is our sense of reality has been rewritten to the degree that we only will accept things as real or important if they're measurable in large scales. I was on another podcast with a doctor, and he was saying something like, “Joy is so important. I mean, it's so—we have lots of scientific evidence that joy helps you lower your blood pressure.” And I was like, hold on a sec. Why do you need to justify joy in terms of some—like, isn't the point of a long life to have joy in it? Not that joy is an instrumental quality ’cause it'll help you have a long life, right? So I'm very pleased about this, but I'm also kind of sad that we need to be locked in a war where I need to write a book where people are like, “Oh my God, it's so exciting that you've made fun sound appealing.”

Scott Black: Yeah, I think that's fair. However, fun is appealing, and we're in a culture where what's most appealing is often not fun. We think that serious things are serious and we think that goofy things are not serious, but goofy things matter. They're not serious, and they matter because they're not serious. And that's something that needs to be said all the time, especially in our hyper-capitalist, Protestant world.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah, I think one way [to think] about it is my worry is that our sense of reality has been captured by a sense in which countable outcomes are easy to justify and peculiar, profound pleasures, joys, and fascinations are hard to quantify. And it's very weird that we're in a world where someone that makes themselves stressed out and miserable and inflicts evil upon the world in order to maximize their stock portfolio doesn't need to justify their actions. Their actions make sense and seem adult. But another person who takes profound joy in building a community of, I don't know, something like fanfiction writers—they're the silly ones. And the fact that it makes them happy and it makes other people happy and they get to be creative in an environment with other creative people, that's the thing that we see as needing some kind of radical justification. That's insane.

Scott Black: I completely agree. It's insane. But it's also—we are both in a privileged position to be able to make that argument in our own terms. That's what the humanities are. That's why we're doing this podcast. Thi, it's been really, really great. And now that you told me about your doctor interlocutor, I can leave you with Spock: “Live long and prosper,” which is in the correct order. Thank you. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thanks.