C Thi Nguyen is a gamer. Many people are gamers—artists, technologists, business leaders, even certain journalists—but many others still hold their noses at the term, as though there’s something overwhelmingly noxious about the biggest and, at times, most exciting form of entertainment on the planet. So let us use Nguyen to prove a point.
Firstly, with his very person. Nguyen also happens to be an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. And it’s clear, even through the flattening medium of a Zoom call, that he is both very clever and very cool. Not James Dean cool, mind, but the sort of cool you wish you’d had in your life when you were young and struggling to learn. His interests are broad—from the possibilities of Super Mario to the provocations of Michel Foucault—and he communicates them with such head-bobbing enthusiasm that it’s hard not to feel interested in them too. His mouth, framed by a moustache and small goatee, seems permanently on the verge of a smile. His eyes shine from behind glasses. He is also—and we shall return to this later, because it is important—trying to master the yo-yo.
Secondly, with his latest book. The Score, which came out in January, is many things, though it is largely a paean to games—and not just video games, nor even tabletop games, but games as broader, joyous human activity. There is another book, the philosopher Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (1978), that means a lot to Nguyen and that defines the playing of games similarly broadly as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. “I teach [Suits] as part of a unit on the meaning of life,” he explains in our videocall. “Instead of starting at this kind of high level, with Aristotle, you instead start by asking the question: are games a waste of time? And, by the time you’ve worked through Suits’s account, you end up with an Aristotelian story of the meaning of life.”
Which is to say, games open the door to everything. They are all around us, and we are all involved in them, whether we feel like gamers or not. They have meaning in our lives.
Except that meaning is not necessarily always good. Another large part of The Score is a lament for how games have been misinterpreted in the 21st century and used not to enrich our lives, but to cheapen them. Think of that word “gamification”, which describes the addition of game-like features—scores, rankings, goals—to settings that aren’t traditionally game-like in themselves. Popular apps such as Duolingo and Strava use gamification to help people learn a language or go running. So, too, do social media platforms, to quantify your popularity and influence. But does there come a point when the numbers replace the pleasure of language or of exercise? When you’re not actually socialising, but just having another go on Mark Zuckerberg’s and Elon Musk’s slot machines?
Of course there does. In The Score, and in our conversation, Nguyen freely uses examples from his own life. The book starts with his experience of rock climbing, another of his pursuits, which he claims “saved” him. Climbs are graded according to their difficulty, and Nguyen kept wanting to complete a particular climb that would represent “the next level up” from anything he’d done before. But, he writes, “the more desperately I wanted it, the grosser my climbing got,” worse and worse, until a fellow climber offered him some advice: “Man, you gotta just savor the moment.” This changed Nguyen’s entire relationship with the sport. “I started to pay more attention to the sweet joy of the movement—to lavish attention on the microscopic adjustments, the explosive hip twists,” he continues. “At night, I would dream about how it felt.” The numbers had finally given way to the true prize, the wondrous pursuit itself.
Anyone who has encountered Nguyen before will not be surprised by this distinction between games and gamification. He surveyed the territory in a more academic book for the Oxford University Press, Games: Agency as Art, in 2020 and has discussed it on numerous podcasts, including the New York Times’s hyper-successful The Ezra Klein Show in 2022.
But The Score is also different, not least because it’s a popular book put out by one of the most popular presses in the world, Penguin (under its Allen Lane imprint in the UK). It’s here, in a text that manages to be both conversational and poetic, where you can see Nguyen’s skills as a former food journalist—another interest!—come to the fore. “Academic writing is freeing in a certain way and limiting in a certain way,” says Nguyen, considering his earlier book. “It’s freeing because you can get really technical. And I actually think that if my first book had been a popular book, then I couldn’t have figured out games like I did.
“But academic writing doesn’t let you get into narrative,” he adds. “I used to be a creative writer and there are unpublished novels on my desktop still”—yet another interest!—“and my normal mode of argument is, here’s a thing, then here’s a story that makes the point. The trade-book context [of The Score] was deeply freeing because it let me move back and forth between the narrative, the emotional and the philosophical, and unify them in a way that, to me, feels natural. It’s the way I want to write.”
Crucially, though, The Score isn’t just clearer and more engaging than Nguyen’s previous work—it’s also more expansive. He has clearly spent time ruminating on his subject, on games and gamification, such that it’s now much bigger than he realised before. In fact, look back on that rock-climbing anecdote: you might already have noticed that it wasn’t really about gamification, certainly not in the Duolingo sense of the word, but about metrics more generally. Nobody was imposing game-like elements on Nguyen’s climbs; there was simply a difficulty scale, and his psyche did the rest. “I tried not to lean on the term ‘gamification’ for two reasons,” he reveals—and it’s true, the word appears strikingly few times in The Score. “One is because it’s contested. Two is because I realised the effect I’m talking about is much larger than the intentional version of gamification.
Gamification is just one head of the hydra, which is the bureaucracy
“I came into this book wanting to explain the narrow effect of algorithms and gamification over the past 20 years,” he continues. “Then I read all the science and technology stuff that’s in the book, and I was like, oh, I see this is just the next step in a 400-year-long march towards the datafication of every aspect of human life and the capture of our motivation by large-scale bureaucratic engines. The core concept has become bureaucratisation, because gamification is just one head of the hydra, which is the bureaucracy.”
This is the real insight of The Score, and the battleline where Nguyen has entrenched himself. Although he can now see that he’s been fighting against bureaucratisation—and losing some of those fights—for decades.
Nguyen’s passion for games took hold when he was 10. His father, a Vietnamese refugee, was a programmer at Intel in the 1980s and brought home a computer for work. “It was a primitive thing,” writes Nguyen in The Score, “the size of a refrigerator.” But it also played games—including one of the earliest computer games of all, Colossal Cave Adventure (1976–7). The young Nguyen became a devotee.
Many more games followed. Video games, European board games, fantasy role-playing games. Some of the titles featured in The Score include the Civilization series (1991–), Magic: The Gathering (1993–), Hyper Light Drifter (2016) and Super Mario Odyssey (2017). And with them—because of them?—came a curious mind. Nguyen eventually enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying philosophy at graduate level, though the formal environment almost squeezed what love he had for the subject out of him. “My interests are weirder than mainstream philosophy,” he tells me, “and I tried to write about them in grad school, but I had to couch them in uncomfortable ways. I ended up writing something that I was disconnected from and really didn’t like. I almost washed out of philosophy out of boredom.”
Why did Nguyen feel he had to “couch” his enthusiasms? This is where another of the examples from the book comes in, specifically what he calls “the scoring systems of philosophy”. One of these is “a single list of all the major philosophy departments, ranked by prestige”. Another is a “list of all the philosophy journals you could publish in, also ranked by prestige”. Nguyen writes of how, much like with the climbing, he was so captured by these rankings that they corrupted his work. “I stopped chasing the questions I care about. I spent all my energy trying to climb those rankings.”
Thankfully—for him and for us—the situation changed. “I was going to quit,” he tells me during our call, “but I thought: before I quit, I’m just going to have one last go.” So Nguyen started reading and thinking more extensively about games, and it was during this period that he first encountered Suits’s The Grasshopper. “It was just so interesting. I got gripped by it. And I was like, ‘I’m just going to write one little article.’ Then, each thing I wrote, it just got more and more interesting—and I started publishing these writings.”
Not that the academy was immediately open to Nguyen’s change of focus. “At first,” he remembers, “no one would listen. I would even go to philosophy of art conferences to give talks on games and, right before my talks, the majority of the room would just leave.” But breakthroughs were to follow. One of his articles, an exploration of echo chambers, undertaken in the early days of Donald Trump’s first term as president, went as viral as any philosophical article can hope to go. Millions read it; Joe Rogan mentioned it on his blockbusting podcast. “I still get fan mail about it today,” says Nguyen.
Then, in 2019, came an article about games in what Nguyen calls “philosophy’s number one journal”, the Philosophical Review (to describe the incongruity, he tells me to “imagine if I got a piece of Star Trek fanfic published in the New Yorker”). And, although people “freaked out” at first, that became a popular and influential piece of writing too. His Games: Agency as Art subsequently won the American Philosophical Association’s book prize for 2021. You can’t help but observe in hindsight that, by not playing according to everyone else’s rules, Nguyen had started to win.
Though his career may have taken, in his words, “a really weird path”, in many respects Nguyen is not alone. One of the great underpinnings of The Score is that we all know the feeling, the nagging emptiness that comes when our former enthusiasms turn into something unhealthy. When play becomes obligation.
What the book does—and what truly makes it a work of philosophy rather than, say, a self-help manual—is provide a theoretical framework for understanding this dread process and its implications. Among its concepts is value capture: “When your values are subtle, rich, dynamic,” says Nguyen by way of a definition, “and a social institution offers you a simplified, typically quantified, version of those values, and then this simplified version takes over in your reasoning and decisions.” There is also the gap: “Basically, the slippage between what’s important and what’s easy for bureaucracies to track.”
But while many of the individual concepts in The Score sound bifurcated—on one side, the wonderful, freewheeling, meaningful world of play; on the other, the terrible, deadening, meaningless intrusions of bureaucracy—the book as a whole makes it clear that everything exists on a spectrum. “A lot of philosophers and humanists are really uncomfortable with trade-off logic,” says Nguyen. “They want it to be all bad or good. It’s funny because, a lot of times, the people that get this first are engineers. Because engineers are constantly dealing with trade-offs—costs, reliability—right?”
Nowhere is this trade-off logic clearer than the book’s chapter on transparency. In modern democratic politics, transparency is considered an unalloyed good, a check on incompetence and corruption, and is the reason for an ever-growing number of databases and reviews. On Nguyen’s account, however, it is something more complicated. “Public transparency metrics,” he writes, “are designed to be comprehensible to nonexperts”—and that means they can gloss over the subtle choices made by experts in their field or, even worse, cause those experts to act in ways that are all about the metrics rather than good judgement.
“I wrote about this in an earlier article that became the chapter on transparency,” explains Nguyen. “Some people were like: transparency is all good; the more, the better. Others were all: no, transparency is terrible! The place I ended up is that transparency and trust trade off against each other. Whenever you go far in one direction, you pay the price in the other.”
This isn’t meant to be a comforting analysis. Although Nguyen describes himself as “extremely lefty”, he realises that parts of The Score will make uncomfortable reading for those who share his general political views—or for anyone, really. “Some of its worries about large-scale intrusion are very political,” he says, “but they don’t occur along the same axis that current political debates do.” He pauses, before adding: “I had responses, when I published my original transparency paper, from people saying that this is so unsettling. And I can’t find a way out of it being unsettling.”
Can anything be done? As if to reaffirm the complexity of his thesis, Nguyen concludes The Score with two, choose-your-own endings. The first is “The Cynical Sad One”—and involves us jettisoning play and submitting entirely to metrics. The second is “The One with a Little Measure of Hope”—and relies on us to make the right choices.
For his part, Nguyem has decided to learn the yo-yo. Some of the most enjoyable and—yes—most inspiring passages of The Score involve his attempts to learn trick after trick on this spinning toy. “It is intentional that the book starts on rock climbing,” admits Nguyen, “which is something that people think is cool. I know everyone’s response to the yo-yo stuff at the end is, ‘You fucking idiot!’—but that is the point. It’s the test case. Because if you really believe Bernard Suits and all the stuff on play, then you should be able to accept this.”
And it’s such a test case that even Nguyen, an inveterate player of games, found it hard to take seriously at first. But he came around. “As you get better at the yo-yo,” he says, “you get really interested in [the mathematical field of] string topology. A lot of the tricks are beautiful precisely because you’re making these weird Möbius shapes in real time.” He marvels at expert yo-yoers, such as Tsukasa Takatsu and Yuuki Spencer, who devote themselves to so pure a pursuit. “Oh, these are existential heroes!”
Though perhaps it is enough for the rest of us, in lieu of a yo-yo, to consider the words that a student put on her phone screen, as a constant reminder, after attending one of Nguyen’s talks: “Is this the game you really want to be playing?” Well, is it?
