The Score by C. Thi Nguyen #
The Score by C. Thi Nguyen (half print, half audio).
This is the kind of book that I can’t stop telling people about. You should stop reading this review and just go read the book instead. You won’t regret it.
But if you do want to hear a little bit more: I’ve known of Nguyen’s work for awhile nowIt’s from him that I learned about the lovely book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (link to my review). and have heard him discuss it in several venues, but never got around to reading his first book Games: Agency as Art. That book, as far as I understand, argues that games are an art form where agency is the medium: games enable us to occupy new worlds and try on new action typesa and the like. Crucially, he introduces a distinction between striving play and achievement play: whereas with the latter, winning is the point, with the former, the goal of winning has a life that is almost entirely game-internal and is more of a means to rich play than an end in itself.
With The Score, Nguyen uses a contrast between between unlikely bedfellows—games and bureaucracy—to diagnose an important phenomenon: value capture. What unites these two strange companions? Scoring systems and, in particular, mechanical ones. A fascinating history of scoring systems, which takes a characteristically surprising-but-interesting detour through the standardization of things like sugar, reveals their blessings and curses: they simultaneously enable fair comparison while also ironing out individual differences.
Games largely reveal the good of mechanical scoring systems, while bureaucracies (including things like grades and standardized tests in school) largely reveal the harms of mechanical scoring systems. In games, scoring systems can be invented and crafted to reflect whatever values the game players (and/or designers) want to maximize. They are a source of creative freedom and artistic expression. In bureaucracies, scoring systems are imposed as a way of comparing many things/peopleHere, you can see some of the dehumanization at play with large mechanical scoring systems. across widely varying contexts. They cause people to bend their behavior to maximize a score imposed from the outside.Nguyen uses “Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy” to illustrate many of the issues: Scale, Rules, Parts, Control.
Whence value capture: when a standardized metric from a mechanical scoring system that purports to reflect an agent’s values comes to actually replace them. A rich and variegated desire—e.g. for complex movement and puzzle solving in beautiful natural environments (rock climbing)—gets replaced by something easily quantified and shared—e.g. your hardest-graded climb or your “tick list”. Whence the book’s subtitle: “Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game”. Don’t let your values be captured. After all: “Metrics are a technology that centralizes the process of meaning-making” (p. 243).
Nguyen, through analyzing first games and then bureaucracies through the lens of mechanical scoring systems, then uses this concept of value capture to diagnose the dark side of gamification in life. Along the way, you will learn about the history of recipes, climbing and yo-yo-ing, table board game design, and much more. He writesAnd reads; his narration of the audiobook is also excellent. with the kind of enthusiasm and excitement that comes from uniting personal passion with ethical and social timeliness. Once you understand the phenomena and dynamics that Nguyen has distilled in this book, you will see them absolutely everywhere. And maybe, just maybe, with these diagnoses, we can all begin to resist having our values captured.
Grade: A