Games, Gamification
Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen analyzes the effects of games and scoring systems on human values and behavior. In his new book published by Penguin, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game, Nguyen shows how different forms of games and play—from video games and sports to cooking or gardening—can enhance human development and meaning. He contrasts this potential with the growing role of metrics and rankings in workplaces, schools, governments, and everyday decision-making. These systems, he argues, can make us outsource our values and interests to external authorities. In developing ideas like value capture and the gamification of modern life, he invites audiences to consider when scores and metrics can be rewarding, or alienating.
Finite and Infinite Games
There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
If a finite game is to be won by someone it must come to a definitive end. It will come to an end when someone has won.
We know that someone has won the game when all the players have agreed who among them is the winner. No other condition than the agreement of the players is absolutely required in determining who has won the game.
It may appear that the approval of the spectators, or the referees, is also required in the determination of the winner. However, it is simply the case that if the players do not agree on a winner, the game has not come to a decisive conclusion—and the players have not satisfied the original purpose of playing. Even if they are carried from the field and forcibly blocked from further play, they will not consider the game ended.
Suppose the players all agree, but the spectators and the referees do not. Unless the players can be persuaded that their agreement was mistaken, they will not resume the play—indeed, they cannot resume the play. We cannot imagine players returning to the field and truly playing if they are convinced the game is over.
There is no finite game unless the players freely choose to play it. No one can play who is forced to play.
It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.
C Thi Nguyen's The Score: a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life
Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points – a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress.
But something odd happened. Over time, my focus shifted. As I climbed the weekly leaderboards, I found myself favouring lessons that offered the most points for the least effort. Things came to a head when I passed an entire holiday glued to my phone, repeating the same 30-second Kanji lesson over and over like a pigeon pecking a lever, ignoring my family and learning nothing.
Philosopher C Thi Nguyen's new book tackles precisely this kind of perverse behaviour. He argues that mistaking points for the point is a pervasive error that leads us to build our lives and societies around things we don't want. Value capture
, as Nguyen calls it, happens when the lines between what you care about and how you measure your progress, begin to blur. You internalise the metric – in some sense it supplants your original goal – until it has redefined your core sense of what's important
.
He gives the example of American law school league tables, introduced to offer an ostensibly objective yardstick for candidates who had previously relied on promotional material and insider gossip. The new, supposedly hard, data focused on a few, narrow metrics.
Where previously law schools would distinguish themselves with mission statements outlining their unique philosophy and emphasis, league tables collapsed these nuanced, hard-to-quantify values into a single number – and forced schools to either chase that number, or lose out on funding and students. The result, Nguyen tells us, is that huge shares of university resources have been diverted away from genuine pedagogical activity and toward efforts designed only to game the rankings
.
Part of that ranking is calculated by how many applicants a school rejects each year. The logic goes: the higher the rejection rate, the more elite and desirable the school. This, Nguyen says, encourages many law schools to spend money soliciting applications from students with almost no chance of getting in, simply so they'll have more people to reject
.
And at the level of society, value capture makes us fixate on metrics such as GDP, employment figures and exam grades. Quantitative data promises to turn hugely complex cross-sections of our world into portable summaries. It's a seductive bargain: delicious clarity
in the form of a simple score, at the expense of context and nuance. This is the thought that actually keeps me awake at night,
says Nguyen, the grim truth about the heart of data
.
Our uncritical reverence for metrics allows for what Nguyen calls objectivity laundering
– bureaucrats disguising their agency in decisions regarding our schools, hospitals and wellbeing, by evoking the numbers
as impartial arbiters. Those in power choose which metrics to champion, then claim actions driven by those metrics somehow transcend ideology.
The Score is a compelling read, urgent but never alarmist. For Nguyen, wonder, absorption and play are central to human flourishing. Metrics are a kind of invasive species threatening to replace our weird, delicate joys with the dumbed-down epistemic fundamentalism of league tables and graphs.