Title: The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game
Author: C. Thi Nguyen
Completed: Sept 2026 (Full list of books)
Overview: During our move back to the UK, there were many interactions with large bureaucratic institutions that tried to simplify us to as small a series of data points as possible. Reading this book that discusses (among many other topics) how and why this happens, helped a little. When making a decision, we often want all the inputs to be as simple and similar as possible to help expedite our process. However, we were are having a decision made about us, we want to be able to include all the important nuances that make us and our situation unique. Those two forces are always pulling in different directions.
I’ve also seen this push in education. The state and federal level decision-makers want to have a simple ruler by which to measure schools, administrators, teachers, and students, but every time we create a new test, we further discourage more of the people we’re trying to help by measuring them in ways that don’t work for their situation. None of this is Earth-shattering, but it felt good to have someone explain it so clearly.
This was also another in my long list of books that talks about the benefit of productive struggle and taking on optional challenges. Life becomes far more interesting and fun when we decide to do something the hard way.
As we continue to settle in, I’m now starting to interact with more large institutions as I apply for jobs (“Hi” to any hiring managers who found this while doing the required online name search check). Again, I don’t fit the typical boxes of those applying for a job in the UK, but hope that they will be able to look beyond that to see all that I have to offer… If not, I’ll just keep baking.
Highlights:
- Value capture happens when a restaurant stops caring about making good food and starts caring about maximizing its Yelp ratings. It happens when students stop caring about education and start caring about their GPA. It happens when scientists stop caring about finding truth and start caring about getting the biggest grants. It even happens in religion. A pastor recently told me that his church had become completely obsessed with baptism rates. The higher-ups had established an internal leaderboard in which the pastors competed on monthly baptism rates, and it was starting to dominate everybody’s attention. He’d found himself caring less about the long-term spiritual development of his flock and focusing more on trying to deliver popular sermons that would up his baptism rates and move him up that leaderboard.
- Metrics are shaped by institutional forces. They are subject to demands for fast, efficient data collection at scale, to demands of fitting into spreadsheets and action reports. Institutional metrics are part of a system that abstracts away from personal difference and local detail and identifies some thin, measurable detail. And what’s easily measurable is rarely the same as what’s really valuable.
- Because often in games, the goal isn’t what really matters. We adopt the goal in order to experience the process. The beauty is in the struggle.
- How do I compare the value of spending an hour reading to my toddler with the value of spending an hour lifting weights? How do I calculate the relative value of spending this Saturday morning reading an exciting new sci-fi novel versus hacking away at my email pile? Life is a jumble of different values, all shouting at each other, with no clear centralized method for making sense of it all. But games are different. Games grant us a precious experience of clarity. It is a clarity of purpose—a clarity of value. In a game, for once in our lives, we know exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, and afterward, we know exactly how well we have done.
- I became obsessed with a new question, which seemed for a while to matter only to me: Why is it that mechanical scoring systems are, in games, the site of so much joy and fluidity and play? And why, in the realm of public measures and institutional metrics, do they drain the life out of everything?
- There’s striving play, and then there’s also achievement play. The achievement player is trying to win because they actually value winning. The striving player, on the other hand, doesn’t actually care about the win, deep down. They are only trying to win because they value the struggle. The achievement player cares about the win itself; the striving player cares about the process of trying to win.
- I’m not saying that games are always good and metrics are always bad. You can be value-captured by a game. Plenty of high school athletes get value-captured by the sports they play. I spent years obsessed with grinding my way up for more poker wins, until I realized the whole thing just made me miserable. And it’s possible to be playful with institutional metrics, to find the ones that make your life fun. But it’s unlikely. The basic nature of games encourages—but does not mandate—playful freedom. And the nature of bureaucracies and institutions resists—but does not make impossible—that kind of playful control.
- We’re so used to modern competitions, which usually deliver an official list of winners. But the joy of competition doesn’t always demand that we reach a settled agreement about who won.
- To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to make possible the activity of struggling to overcome them.
- People, she said, think that trust and transparency go together. But in fact, they’re deeply in tension. Transparency, she said, demands that experts explain themselves to nonexperts. But they can’t actually do it, because an expert’s real reasons are often opaque or incomprehensible to nonexperts. The whole reason you go to a doctor is that they understand things you don’t. Nobody has enough mental power to understand everything by themselves. The world is so vast and complicated that we have to divide it up—each of us devoting ourselves to understanding one particular patch of the world. So experts can’t explain themselves fully to the public, because expert reasoning is, by its very nature, specialized.
- Many of us have been trained to think transparency is all good, and the more the better. But we are also intimately familiar with the downsides of transparency. It’s easy to see the insensitivity and inexpertise of metrics when you’re under the gun. When you’re the expert and it’s the rest of the world looking in—watching you, demanding that you justify yourself in clear, accessible, concrete terms—then you can see how much the metrics miss.
- cookbook reviews almost never talk about the joys of cooking—which is funny because I often spend way more time on the cooking part than the eating part. The official culture ignores the beauty of the process, trains us not to pay attention to how it feels to act, to believe that joyous action doesn’t matter.
- In 1977, Nicaragua had no sign language of its own. The government tried a project: They gathered together fifty deaf schoolchildren from around the country and tried to teach them to lip-read. Instead, the children spontaneously invented their own sign language—a rich, fully functional one, which eventually became the official sign language of Nicaragua. It’s a minor human miracle that linguists still study to this day.
- John Harper’s extraordinary design Lady Blackbird shows off many of these innovations. The primary rule set is only one page long, and it comes with a prepackaged set of characters and a scenario. Just like in D&D, the game rewards you with XP that you can use to improve your character. But unlike in D&D, there are no automatic XP for killing monsters, or even for completing quests. Instead, your character comes with a set of “Keys,” which are their core motivations or character traits. And you get XP for hitting your Keys—for acting in character.
- Principles and models both require careful judgment to apply. Whether such a rule applies to this particular case will always be open to interpretation and up for debate. The third kind of rule is completely different. This is a rule as an algorithm, an explicit directive meant to be applied mechanically—without discretion or judgment, exactly as it is written, with no exceptions. And it is this algorithmic conception of a rule that has become dominant in the past century, says Daston. It is so dominant, in fact, that people can have a hard time wrapping their heads around these older conceptions of rules—to see what they’re for and why we might ever prefer the fuzzier, more open-ended principles and models to the more precise, complete algorithms.
- There are lots of different kinds of objectivity, and those different kinds often run at cross purposes. Sometimes, by “objectivity,” we mean that something is bias-free. But as we’ve seen, mechanical procedures can be deeply biased toward what’s mechanically countable. Sometimes, objectivity means a process is accurate. But mechanical values often fail to capture what we originally cared about.
- When we create procedures with mechanical rules, we make workers fungible. We no longer need to depend on a particular person with a particular long-developed sensitivity. We no longer need to spend years having an expert gradually train their apprentice to be able to do the job. We no longer need to court some small set of specialists. We can look for an easy signal, like having a high school diploma, or a bachelor’s degree in the relevant field, and swap out one worker for another with high confidence that they’ll do the job the same way,
- saying that something is a social invention doesn’t mean we’re denying its reality. Money, time, dates, and medical degrees are all social inventions. These things are real. They affect the world; we live and die by them. But we should also remember that we invented them; we brought them into being. And we could still decide to make them differently if we wanted. When we remember that we drew the lines in the first place, it reminds us that we could choose to redraw them to better suit our purposes.
- States, says Scott, can only “see” the parts of the world that they can process through bureaucratic systems. They can only see the parts of the world they can classify, measure, and summarize. That is what is legible to the state. The rest of the world—all the stuff that’s too mushy and variable and weird to be well tracked by state tools—is illegible to the state. States have a hard time tracking and managing the irregular parts of the world.
- In between the rules dogmatist and the rules skeptic is the playful person. To be playful with the rules is to try them on, but lightly—to slip in and out of worlds. A playful person is willing to try on different rules for a while and see how it goes. But they’re not stuck there. A playful person is exploratory. And part of that is trying on new goals and values. The playful person, as Lugones puts it, occupies a world creatively. They are willing to rewrite the rules if they need to.
- Once the state has created these centralized, easy-to-follow rules, they have eliminated the need for highly skilled local specialists. The state can now employ almost anybody to follow these rules. Monocropping de-skills workers. It takes a highly autonomous, highly skilled farmer and replaces them with a more mechanical rule-follower.
- So here is a recipe for a seductive clarity trap: First, build a belief system that offers a satisfyingly clear, coherent explanation of the world. Second, make sure the belief system conceals any evidence of its own error. In conspiracy theories, the error-concealment device is usually an add-on—a separate set of beliefs about those lying, cheating scientists and journalists. Conspiracy theories build echo chambers by getting their believers to dismiss any nonbelievers as untrustworthy. A good echo chamber will block their followers from receiving any evidence of error.
- Organized social systems will tend to give power to those who game the system, rather than those who pursue what’s really valuable.
- Process beauty is everywhere. But a lot of the time, we ignore it. It seems less important, less meaningful than object beauty. All the high arts, the really respectable ones, seem to be the ones where a singular genius broadcasts their art out to us lowly masses, and we just soak it up in relative passivity. And what gets mocked as low geek culture—tabletop role-playing, fan fiction, cosplay—are exactly those communities where everybody gets to be creative, and actively participate in the process of making art. But why is object art so much better? Why is it better for beauty to be in external, separate objects than to reside in us? Why is it better to concentrate the power to make art in a few geniuses? Why do we seem to look down on those lifestyles that disperse the right to creativity across an entire community?
- Suppose Aristotle and Suits are right, and what makes our lives good and fulfilling is rich, meaningful activity. The meaning of life is in the process and not the outcome. Meaning lies in doing: in thinking interesting thoughts, having interesting conversations, playing fascinating games. Meaning lies in the process of making things, in moving your body in thrilling and elegant ways, in loving people.
- My grading system does not exist in isolation. A college class is not a game. It does not exist in a magic circle; its scores are not disconnected from the rest of the world. Class grades lead directly to aggregate grade averages, which lead directly to scholarship and job opportunities. And what matters to most of my students, at least for the very next stage, is not what they learned, but what grade they got—because that is how the world will evaluate them. The scoring system in my class is part of a larger scoring system, a world-spanning one, that is out of my control. And if I try to detach myself from this large-scale scoring system, I render my class irrelevant to the powers of the large-scale system. I’ve done what I can—little moves, like offering students their choice of the most interesting question from a long list on exams, or offering them the chance to pitch wildly different alternate final projects. It restores a little bit of room for exploration. But it isn’t much, and I haven’t figured out anything better to do. The sweep and power of the large-scale scoring system mostly beats out my little efforts.
- What’s meaningful is impossible to capture in metrics, but easy to find in games. And this is because metrics are designed from the top down and enforce a centralized view of the world. They presume a kind of sameness to life. And games, at their best, offer the possibility of a splintered, decentralized, hyper-tailored form of life. The meaning of life, whatever the hell that is, defies centralized approaches.
