Games, Metrics and the Meaning of Life

C. Thi Nguyen is serious about yo-yo. He has several: a “sweet floaty” round one, an “aggressive hyper-stable” one for difficult tricks, even an old-school “fixie” made of wood. He can tell you all about the types of tricks each one can do, the way they feel on the string, and the state of mind that a difficult trick can induce.

There are yo-yo competitions, but Nguyen is ambivalent about them. Competitions are all about doing visibly difficult tricks. “The demand for public judgment in relatively objective terms drags the entire process away from inner fine-tuning and toward a shared scoring system,” he complains. A system like that doesn’t have room for more subtle artistic creations like those of Tsukasa Takatsu—a “minor saint,” in Nguyen’s words—who devotes himself to inventing elegant “repeaters,” tricks that begin and end at the same point and can be done on infinite loop.

So when are objective scoring systems good, and when are they bad? Nguyen doesn’t have simple answers to that question. After all, scoring systems are a central component of the elaborate European board games that he loves. But on the other hand, scoring systems are also responsible for the way that “student success” in his first job as a philosophy professor was “officially defined as a weighted average of graduation rate and graduation speed.”

This tension between fun targets and dead metrics forms the main alternation of The Score, a delightfully odd book that has a great deal going on beneath the surface. The subtitle is How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game, which makes it sound like corporate self-help that will teach you how to be a better sociopath. In fact, this book is both aesthetic and analytical, combining a beguiling invitation into the beauty of the specific with a careful investigation into how large, impersonal systems can take over our lives even when we don’t mean them to.

This is a vibrantly liberal book that embraces federalism and individual differences and value plurality. Yet it is also a book that places itself against many of the same things that post-liberals rail against when they complain about “liberal modernity.” It has a strong focus on the dangers of managerialism. There’s a whole chapter on how to resist “objectivity laundering.” And it wants us all to think more carefully about what happens when we passively accept the values promoted by technocratic systems.

The book’s central bogeyman is value capture—a phenomenon whereby people can be lulled into thinking that numerical metrics are genuinely measuring what is important or valuable, even when the metric does no such thing. This is a much deeper problem than the mere “perverse incentives” that can arise when metrics force people, at least partly, to optimize the wrong things. You can get “value captured” by a metric even when you’re not being forced. You don’t have to use weight as your sole measure of health; in fact, you probably shouldn’t. You don’t have to judge how good your social media post was by how many likes or shares it got. Yet, people do.

When a metric is reductive or misaligned, people have to make trade-offs between satisfying the metric and satisfying what the metric was actually supposed to measure. When a person is value-captured by a metric, they stop making that trade-off. They lose sight of the deeper and more subtle aims that the metric can’t measure.

This problem sits uneasily with the liberal individualist view that we have to let people “choose their values” without questioning them. A value-captured person is choosing, at least in the sense that they are not being forced. If we want to say that it is bad for people to constantly value crude metrics over more subtle goods, then we have to be prepared to suggest that they have chosen wrongly. This is exactly what Nguyen does suggest!

It’s not that Nguyen wants us all to be the same, mind you. If anything, he’d like us all to become more individual, by way of a deeper examination of what we are doing. A more accurate subtitle might be, Is This The Game You Want To Be Playing?

The Score contains plenty of serious social critique, but mere frustration at the system is not enough to help us build good things. In between its discussions of structural limitations and institutional blind spots, this book considers how more recreational scoring systems can serve as an impetus to develop new skills and make meaningful human connections. The contrast is effective, and not just because it complicates the narrative. When taking on deep, entrenched societal problems, one of the most important motivations we can have is the sense of something wonderful.

Truly, I was unprepared for the sheer joy in this book. Whether he is writing about climbing, or fly fishing, or skateboarding, or yoga, Nguyen has a real gift for conveying what is beautiful and interesting about the things he loves. His descriptions of cooking made me want to rush to the kitchen. Above all else, however, it is the humble subject of games that supplies the book’s most important aesthetic insight.

The nature of a game—whether it’s a board game, a video game, or something more esoteric—is that players step into externally-imposed goals, leading them into new and often uncharacteristic actions. There is a special kind of beauty, here, one that is experienced by inhabiting the game. Nguyen calls this process beauty, because it is beauty inherent in the process of doing something, rather than in an object that we sense from the outside.

Games are a central example of process beauty, but they are not the only example. Why, Nguyen asks, do we not consider process beauty more often in other pursuits? Why do cookbooks always sell themselves on how good the food will be instead of on how much fun you might have making it? Why do we not evaluate a dance on how it must have felt to do it?

I did a lot of social partner dancing as an undergraduate: salsa, swing, some ballroom. I made sure to learn at least a little bit about how to lead, but it was following that really caught me. It had such flow to it, that subtle process of reading signals and acting on them in the moment. I loved it, and I loved getting better at it. Yet, confusingly, I found there was generally a limit to how advanced I wanted my classes to be.

Certainly, competitive ballroom dancing was too scripted. It didn’t help that, the one time I tried it, I was with a partner who was positively gleeful about the discomfort and artificiality of a “proper” basic hold. I dropped it, and him, like a hot potato. Even with a social dance like salsa, as soon as the lessons I was taking stopped being about generic “salsa” and started being about conforming to a particular style—usually the sharp flair and strong lines of LA salsa—I started to enjoy it less. Something about it just wasn’t quite what I wanted.

Then one time, in the social dance space after a lesson, a guy asked me, almost apologetically, if he could lead me through some Cuban salsa. All I knew about Cuban salsa was that it was less “linear” (like LA salsa) and more “circular.” But I can follow! I told him yes.

It was a revelation. The sheer momentum of it! No posing, no pausing. Every touch-communicated cue felt like a soft alteration in a movement I had already been making. I’ve danced with plenty of good leaders. I had never felt this.

In hindsight, I should have tried to learn more. At the time, I wasn’t sure if what I had liked about Cuban salsa would be robust. Getting too advanced in any other kind of dance had always made it less fun. Why should this style be any different?

What was it that I even liked about it, anyway?

As a dancer, I was happiest when responding in the moment with motion that felt natural, even if a lot of learning had gone into it. I hadn’t liked more “advanced” dancing when it was asking me to sacrifice the experiential in favour of optimizing how cool I might look to an observer. But it was never about wanting to be sloppy, or less skilled. There was an exacting, excellent beauty that I had wanted to improve, in my dancing, all along. Process beauty. Maybe if I’d known what to call it, I’d have looked more confidently at Cuban salsa, knowing how to judge if I wanted to learn more of it or not.

This book has made me consciously aware of a kind of beauty that I’ve always known but couldn’t always see how to aim for.

When this book leaves the personal and turns to the political, it continues to be reflective and insightful. One response to the disadvantages of metrics is to anathematise all calculation as a cold farce that is unworthy of the complexity of humanity. Another is to become locked into the technocratic search for a better system. Nguyen’s view is more nuanced. The disadvantages of metrics will not always be able to be solved by a better metric. On the other hand, we wouldn’t use metrics if we weren’t getting something from them.

One of the first advantages of metrics that Nguyen points out is transparency. We want to be able to check that people are doing their jobs. One way to do this is to publish numbers that measure something about their competence or efficiency. On the other hand, this can undercut expertise. An expert in a particular subject often has a much more nuanced sense of what is important about it, in a way that could never be boiled down to a few numbers. Holding everyone to publicly available metrics can make it harder for a practitioner to bring that expertise to bear. But of course, in order to allow people to avoid this problem we have to trust those experts.

Who is an expert, anyway? If we’re talking about people whose more-detailed knowledge can get over-written by a crude metric then the category is broader than you think, says Nguyen.

I don’t just mean formal expertise, like having a medical degree or a scientific PhD. We are all experts in the particular terrain of our lives: our jobs, our family, our local community, our weird hobbies. …

Collectively, as a public, we’re inexpert about everything. And public transparency metrics puts us—the collective inexpert public—in charge.

Placing local knowledge and domain expertise into the same category is an artful move. So often, in public policy debates, these two types of expertise are played off against each other, with one group playing the role of the cold, meaningless metric—global elite control or ignorant public pressure—and the other group vainly trying to bring the nuanced understanding, whether professional or local. With a single twist, we suddenly see that the professionals and the public are, in a sense, facing the same problem.

Some of my professional knowledge is about metrics. I’m a data scientist at a large public research organisation in my home country of New Zealand, with a focus on environmental science and disaster mitigation. There are a lot of new and powerful data science techniques, these days. Unfortunately, spending even a small amount of time exploring a new research direction requires me to get permission by way of two or possibly three layers of management.

In discussing that problem with said third level of management, recently, I found myself drawing on this book. “I get that you’re under pressure to show that you’re responsive to government priorities,” I said, “and that you want us to be guided by that central sense of direction. But I think you also want us to be guided by the field itself, by the expert knowledge that can perceive science opportunities as they arise. You want both, right?”

I got immediate agreement: “Yes, we want both.”

Did I instantly succeed in making any changes to the system as a whole? Alas, no. Was this an effective way to get an ear for my own desired research direction? Yes, actually.

As a colleague who overheard our conversation put it: “Well, that was interesting.”

This book does not want you to live your life solely or even mostly in pursuit of professional success. But it does think large systems are here to stay, and it treats the problems arising from centralised control as a fact of life, with which its finer concerns must often engage. I said it wasn’t corporate self-help, and I stand by that. However, if you picked it up because you wanted it to be corporate self-help, you probably wouldn’t be disappointed.

You also might get more than you bargained for. I laughed, at first, when I got to the end:

It’s Choose Your Own Adventure time. Pick one ending and tear out the other one, unread. Read both and let them bang around in your head for a little while. Or read them, then cut and paste the bits you like and add some more. Write yourself a better ending. Or stop right here, stand up, say, “Fuck you, you dumb-ass philosopher,” and go play some games instead.

When I was done laughing, I read both endings, and let them bang around in my head for a little while. And now, in my head, I am tearing up the entire preceding book, cutting and pasting it into a whole different story. This book is serious about play. It’s not trying to hide that. But I didn’t fully have a read on how serious it was, until I got to the end.

There is something very powerful about being willing to be silly. You can read Nguyen in tragic style as the carelessly frivolous philosopher of games, turning to children’s toys because we’ve forgotten how to be meaningful with anything else. But with all his cheeky games, Nguyen has a deep sense of the fine grain. He encourages his readers to play with the rules, putting them on and taking them off, seeing how they shape you and thinking about who you want to be. How do you work elegantly within the rules of any given game? Does the game work better when you add a new constraint? Or remove one?

I know the move that I would make, from here. We are all, always, constrained by the whole world. How do you work elegantly with that? If you think this sounds like a fairly innocuous line of thought, well, so did I, once upon a time.

The Score does not make this move, at least not on the surface. Instead, it sends us all out, anarchically, to explore our own weird little details of the world. “I am, to be honest, very good at games of deception and manipulation,” Nguyen tells us, describing his taste in board games.

What game is he playing, with this book?

Many thanks to Laura Moore for helping me edit this piece! Any remaining awkward turns of phrase are my own fault.