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Gaming, Metrics, and The Value of Ignoring Recipes: C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score
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Gaming, Metrics, and The Value of Ignoring Recipes: C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score
A deep dive into scoring systems, gamification, and what’s truly important in life.
By Ruthanna Emrys
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Published on May 19, 2026
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Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there.
This week, I cover C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Nguyen is a gaming philosopher, and writes here about why scoring systems in games work so much better than scoring systems in real life. Along the way he talks about rock climbing, cooking, and how to hold onto important values in the face of simplified metrics.
What It’s About
Game design is a strange discipline: you set up goals, and then you design barriers and constraints that make reaching that goal harder. Why? To make the game more fun. Why is it more fun to reach the goal through those barriers than without them? Because for all our drives toward efficiency, often we find enjoyment and satisfaction in the difficult-but-doable action. And if the goal only matters because we said so, we don’t have to stress about how long it’ll take to get there.
This raises a paradox when we use game design to go after real goals. At its best, “gamification” gives people motivation for something they already wanted to do, but found boring. At its worst, it can replace the things you want to do with the things that make a number go up.
Parallel to gamification, our societies have also become obsessed with quantifiable metrics for everything. These metrics may represent something important, like whether students are learning. But they are not identical to those big, amorphous goals—that’s the whole point—and all too often people find ways to game them. When organizations optimize for metrics, they focus on only those activities that affect the score, and neglect harder-to-measure aspects of their original goals. This can lead to results that are not merely incomplete but horrifyingly counterproductive. There was a point, for example, where some U.S. schools met requirements for improving test scores by pushing out their worst-performing students.
Says Nguyen, in studying these causes and effects, “I realized at some point that I had an entire theory about games, in which clear and simple scoring systems were the magic ingredient that opened up the door to a whole world of delightful play. And I had an entire theory about metrics, in which clear and simple scoring systems killed what really mattered.” Real games encourage us to approach activities playfully, utilizing the score merely as a tool to create a desired experience. This is striving play, where the value is in the struggle. On the other hand, achievement play—which values winning above all—makes us vulnerable to value capture: “We can let scoring systems dictate our goals and targets to us, even when those goals fit poorly with our lives.”
Nguyen offers many examples of these styles, and of systems that encourage striving or achievement. Some apps, even ones that are ostensibly games, do the latter: they push us to spend more time on platform, watch more ads, or get as many clicks as possible. The end result is not always in line with our larger goals or even with having a good time.
From his own life, Nguyen shares experiences with cooking and rock climbing. Rock climbing is an activity for which he had to actively develop a more playful approach. The standard goal of climbing more and more difficult faces wasn’t giving him the experience he wanted. Instead, working to improve his agility on repeated courses made him feel more in touch with his body—something hard to quantify, but that mattered deeply to him. In cooking, he talks about the pleasure of departing from recipes, focusing on smell and taste, and getting to know all the variations possible in a single dish.
Another, negative example: Even before the failure modes we encountered a few weeks ago, early effective altruists came up with a widely-used metric for deciding where to donate. This overhead ratio measures how much an organization spends externally versus internally, following the logic that more money spent in the world does more good. But this not only discourages non-profits from paying their employees a fair wage (that’s overhead!), but from paying experts to come up with more effective impact plans, work well on the ground, or measure the impact of that work. In general, The Score suggests, purely quantitative metrics tend to discourage any activity involving the application of complex expertise, particularly when trained intuition is involved.
Nguyen identifies Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy, each with a gift and a sacrifice. The Horseman of Scale is familiar from Seeing Like a State: he offers broad comprehensibility, but takes away local nuance. The Horseman of Rules offers consistency, provided we work only on things that involve trainable, repeatable procedures. Adaptability is lost. The Horseman of Replaceable Parts gives us a different type of adaptability—making people, organizations, etc., fungible, at the cost of accessing deep and particular experience. The Fourth Horseman, Control, provides a more stable and more predictable world, at the cost of autonomy and customization.
These tradeoffs are valuable, but we’ve lost sight of the values lost, and the possibility of more balanced choices between the extremes. And so, Nguyen says, we need to think more mindfully about the metrics that we allow to capture us, to acknowledge what they don’t cover, and to bring game-like playfulness to exploring alternatives.
Buy the Book
The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game
C. Thi Nguyen
Buy Book
The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game
C. Thi Nguyen
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I am a nerd. I am, in fact, this kind of nerd: I’ve spent a lot of time developing metrics for things that the government never had to measure before, to figure out whether new technologies actually did what claimed they claimed to do. This kind of independent check is important, because otherwise things get bought based entirely on BS sales pitches. (Please note that I am no longer doing this kind of work, and know a lot of other people who are also no longer doing it. No word on how the U.S. government is now making procurement decisions.) The limitations of quantitative metrics are also a perennial frustration—I was involved in at least one project where we never managed a solid measurement, but where I’m pretty sure one of the products eventually saved a lot of lives anyway.
Nguyen gets at both the utility and limits of quantitative measurement very well, and I spent a lot of time bouncing and going, “YES, that’s why I hate Pokémon Go!” and running to the kitchen to not-follow recipes. I also feel that, as with Seeing Like a State, The Score is a bit dismissive of just how much power we do get from standardization. This particularly shows up when he talks about the politics of technology, and suggest that the printing press was primarily a force for “centralizing the power of official speech.” It may have done that sometimes, but it also made it more possible for revolutionaries and heretics to spread ideas and start movements. The street really does find its own uses.
But I’ve seen what he’s talking about, even in places where people are trying very hard to take the non-quantifiable seriously.
I’m also a gaming nerd, and a big fan of Nguyen’s previous book, Games: Agency As Art, about how games play with choice. At one point here he describes games as yoga for stretching our agency. That seems like something we desperately need, in a world that encourages learned helplessness in the face of corporate futures. Admittedly, he’s preaching to the choir. I am the most thoroughly striving player who ever strove, and have been known to lecture my somewhat achievement-oriented kids on game balance and why you should never trust a “game” that lets you pay to win more easily.
I’ve seen gamification work very well—when the players value both the end goal and the process set up to get them there. But most projects focus entirely on badges and points, resulting in a limited kind of motivation and a lot of gaming the game. Nguyen says: “In games, the value of the outcome is inseparable from the value of the process.” This, I think, is missing from not only most gamification efforts, but most efforts to quantify success at all. Scores that fail, that replace deep value with shallow, legible numbers, tend to miss this consideration of process. They don’t think about what experience they want people to have, only what they want spit out at the end. Such reductions to a number are, as Nguyen says, “moral bleach.”
This is why I’ve always felt the need to balance quantitative research with writing. Thinking about how lab-measured phenomena affect characters, about how possibilities play out in a complex world, keeps me from losing track of the qualitative, the valuable, the experiential.
I remember, one time, attending a workshop on “measuring ecosystem services”—translating plants and rivers into dollar values, so that the pleasure of an afternoon in a rowboat could be placed in a spreadsheet opposite the economic advantages of pollution. The people doing this love nature and mean well, and yet it felt nauseating. But it seems like a fundamental problem that we’ve set up systems where everything must be reduced to money. I don’t think it’s ultimately possible to reconcile monetary figures with breathing the fresh air of a pine forest, or running across a fawn hidden in the brush. Nguyen’s book gets at that core conflict and acknowledges—argues at length—that, yes, there are real and important things that can’t and shouldn’t be quantified. They may, in fact, be the most real and important things we have, and we need to reject the idea that it’s irrational or un-serious to take them into account.
The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories
Speculative Gamification. Too much of modern gamification has spiraled down a hole of site badges and app points, but there are other possible directions. Not only are games for changing the world possible, but people playing games are fun to write about! What games, sports, and contests will shape our lives in the future, and what might we accomplish through the process of playing them? And what conflicts might arise between those who enjoy the struggle, and those playing to win? There’s all sorts of crunchy plot in people trying to game games, people trying to play by the rules, and designers trying to develop something that really supports their goals.
Fighting the Horsemen. There are reasons that we give in to Scale, Rules, Parts, and Control—but also reasons people push back. If you’re writing about people trying to undermine an authoritarian bureaucracy, this is a guide to both its strengths and weaknesses—and some of the tools people might use to fight.
Measurement Can Be Dramatic, I Swear. I spent a good portion of Sarah Pinsker’s terrific We Are Satellites grumbling that none of these terrible things would have happened if the government had just hired a decent Independent Test and Evaluation team. Which would, of course, have completely undermined her plot—but if we can have stories of intrepid reporters publishing the truth that no one wants to hear, why not intrepid researchers sharing the evidence that no sales rep wants to hear? Right? Anyone? Bueller?
I may need to write this one myself.
New Growth: What Else to Read
This fits in a constellation with Seeing Like a State and The Unaccountability Machine. Still to read and/or cover on the “Problems With Measurement” shelf: Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology, Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy’s The Ordinal Society, and Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences.
Games For Change remains a central organization in the serious games world, a place where people go well beyond slapping a score on a chore. Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World is a classic of the field. Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design is a good reminder of what makes games fun and how much thought can go into those details. My favorite book in this overlap, though is Marcus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern’s Pervasive Games: Theory & Design, although I will warn you that it does for LARPs what really good food journalism does for appetite—you will come out of it wanting to play several games that finished up years ago.
Karl Schroeder’s Stealing Worlds involves live action role-playing games that change the world—don’t you want to join one? L.X. Beckett’s Gamechanger involves a less comfortable, but still pro-social, gamification of human interaction. John M. Ford’s The Final Reflection is one of the best of the old Star Trek novelizations, centering Klingon society around metaphors from their equivalent of chess.
Where do you care most about scores in your life—or try to avoid them? Share in the comments![end-mark]
The post Gaming, Metrics, and The Value of Ignoring Recipes: C. Thi Nguyen’s <i>The Score</i> appeared first on Reactor.
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