How Keeping Score Makes Games Fun and Life Worse
A new book contrasts the meditative joy of games with the way metrics capture what we value, and how we judge ourselves.
Illustration: Marine Buffard for Bloomberg
The central line in The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game (Jan. 13, Penguin) appears in its opening chapter: “Games wake us up to a life of play; metrics drive us down into grueling optimization.”
The book follows C. Thi Nguyen’s first, Games: Agency as Art, in which the philosophy professor explored games as a form of communication. In The Score, Nguyen picks up that thread through chapter-alternating narratives that combine an enthusiast’s celebration of games’ inner workings (think Dungeons & Dragons more than basketball) with a lament for the power of metrics to flatten our lives and capture our values.