C. Thi Nguyen: Prioritizing fun over performance in games, the pitfalls of social media scoring systems, and how metrics can obscure real value

Important takeaways

• Enjoying games should prioritize satisfaction over efficiency and high scores.
• Activities such as fishing can be appreciated as sports focus on experience rather than results.
• Games are defined by willingly engaging in challenges that create struggle.
• Not all of life’s activities fit the definition of play.
• Actions are different from games because they focus on achieving goals successfully.
• Social media use game-like machines, which influence user behavior without being true games.
• Scoring systems in games provide objective measures of success, which influence the power of social media.
• Social media scoring systems simplify complex interactions for easy comparison.
• Metrics can obscure qualitative aspects of success, such as behavioral improvements in students.
• Extrapolating personal values ​​to external metrics can lead to dissatisfaction.
• Financial wealth should be viewed as a resource for pursuing meaningful goals.
• Large scale metrics can limit each agency by promoting a single view of value.

Guest introduction

C. Thi Nguyen is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. He is the author of Games: Agency as Art, winner of the 2021 American Philosophical Association Book Award, and his latest book, Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game, examines how metrics capture and obscure human values. Formerly a food writer for the Los Angeles Times, his work on games, agency, and sport has been published in top philosophy journals.

A balance between fun and competition in sports

• “The fun of games should not be sacrificed for efficiency or high scores.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Games should be played for fun, not just to score points.
• “Fishing can be seen as a sport where the enjoyment of the experience is more important than the quantity of fish caught.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Activities such as fishing highlight the difference between fun and competition.
• “Sports involve willingly taking on unnecessary obstacles to create opportunities for struggle.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Not all work in life should be considered a game.
• “I don’t think everything is a game.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Understanding the balance between fun and competition can enrich the gaming experience.

A philosophical explanation of games

• Games are defined by willingly engaging in challenges that create struggle.
• “The short version is that playing the game is willingly taking on unnecessary obstacles to create career opportunities to struggle to overcome them.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Not all of life’s activities fit the definition of play.
• “I don’t think everything is a game.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Actions are different from games because they focus on achieving goals successfully.
• “The world just quickly splits into what you call normal normal work and game work.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Angling is a sport because it involves engaging with the psychology of fish.
• “What you’re doing is trying to trick the fish into biting your fake lure or lure.” – C. Thi Nguyen

The impact of devices such as social media games

• Social media use game-like machines, which influence user behavior without being true games.
• “Actually I think the most important thing to understand the harm of social media gaming is to understand that it’s not really a game in a deep way.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Scoring systems are an integral part of gamified platforms.
• “The important thing it has is the scoring system… you can have a game without having a scoring system.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Social media scoring systems simplify complex interactions for easy comparison.
• “When you’re on social media, there’s a scoring system and if you look at it, you have a quick and complete way to know how each tweet compares.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Social media tends to complicate people’s reactions to communication.
• “The important thing about being popular on social media is that there is a soft factor that automatically selects whether someone is a professional or a fraud and then they are put together.” – C. Thi Nguyen

Limitations of scoring systems in art assessment

• Rating systems like Rotten Tomatoes can hide the true quality of films.
• “If you’re using rotten tomatoes as a measure of what you’re going to take from the kinds of movies that do well on rotten tomatoes, movies are made or made so that everyone gets and everyone gets equally.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Good movies often get low scores because they are controversial.
• “Most of them stay around 50 or 60% because good films are often controversial … some people are turned off by them.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Too many values ​​in communication can lead to misunderstandings about successful collaboration.
• “That multiplicity of values ​​means that different people can judge the conversation in different ways.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Making judgments about art can lead to a lack of personal development in love.
• “I feel like I can’t think you’re cheating if you just let other people drive you to a painting you like.” – C. Thi Nguyen

The role of metrics in personal and social decision making

• Extrapolating personal values ​​to external metrics can lead to dissatisfaction.
• “It’s very easy for people in finance and crypto to just extract their value to get their value.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• The tension between personal happiness and social status can create inner conflict.
• “I knew that my low position was ranked in this official foreign position… I was very happy there.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• External scoring systems make it easy to determine the complex value in life.
• “One of the things I say in my book about the fun of games is that it reduces the complexity of value. – C. Thi Nguyen
• Financial wealth should be viewed as a resource for pursuing meaningful goals.
• “You have a real question about whether or not a scoring system to continue to grow your financial wealth is worth it to you.” – C. Thi Nguyen

The impact of metrics on education and public health

• Metrics can obscure important aspects of the quality of achievement, such as behavioral improvement in students.
• “If you want to say something like what about making well-behaved and thoughtful students… since I don’t have clear metrics for that like falling off the radar.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Public health decisions often prioritize death rates over public welfare.
• “I think when we make public health decisions we tend to focus too much on things that involve death rates.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Society often simplifies complex concepts into measurable metrics.
• “We’re losing track of it like some of the scattered ideas of health like you know you’re eating food that’s grown and you know more at home near you at the farmers market.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Large scale metrics can limit each agency by promoting a single view of value.
• “The center’s metrics are great even though it looks like the games are spoofing machines.” – C. Thi Nguyen

The impact of technology and systems on human behavior

• The technologies and programs we engage with have their own interests and perspectives.
• “One of the things I really learned from a group of philosophers of technology and historians of technology is a certain way of thinking about the world in which technology and the systems we engage in have their own interest when they have their own perspective.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Maps and scoring systems are neutral; they provide specific interests and guide actions.
• “Maps are not neutral maps as much as they have a point of view and you can see that point in what it shows and what it doesn’t show.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Gaming can help people distance themselves from social scoring systems.
• “Playing is a habit that can help you keep away from goalscoring plans when you play as a hobby.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• The American grading system primarily serves the interests of employers rather than students.
• “The American grading system does not serve the interests of the student’s happiness or even the student’s education. It helps employers who want to quickly hire someone who can do the job right.” – C. Thi Nguyen

The importance of play and creativity in games

• Gaming allows people to navigate and experiment with different rule sets and virtual worlds.
• “Play is the spirit of moving slowly and easily between the rules and ordinary worlds.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Indie tabletop role-playing games emerged as a response to classic games that didn’t meet players’ desires for character-driven narratives.
• “There is a very interesting history of people playing a lot of dungeons and monsters and some people like it and some people find that it doesn’t give them the information they were looking for.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Game mechanics can be designed to encourage character development and narrative depth.
• “In Lady Blackbird, if you run out of points, you get them by having a refreshing scene.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Visual control involves treating metrics in life like game rules that can be changed based on personal values.
• “You treat the metrics the system gives you in your life like the rules of a game that can be changed or modified.” – C. Thi Nguyen

The dual nature of scoring systems

• The scoring systems we engage with can be both limiting and empowering, depending on how we choose to interact with them.
• “If you see it as just an external program, you will say, as we say, play the game to a certain extent but distance yourself from it and control where you can.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Games promote agency by allowing people to test different scoring systems and values.
• “Games I think are machines that encourage people by allowing people to jump between different scoring systems and try different things. – C. Thi Nguyen
• The game Civilization can be both fun and sad depending on the player.
• “Civilization makes some people sad and others happy and that’s okay.” – C. Thi Nguyen
• Players should find games that suit them and improve their enjoyment.
• “If you like civilization play civilization if you don’t… make the games you play better.” – C. Thi Nguyen