The Score Book Review

“Games suggest the outlines of an alternate self.” – C. Thi Nguyen

C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score is excellent. Nguyen is a philosopher, and he looks at life through the prism of games and play in his books. It’s a useful framework, because it provides excellent juxtaposition with societal frameworks that use the trappings of games but without certain qualities that make them, well, games instead of something else.

The book can be a bit dry at times, and if you don’t know a lot about Nguyen’s specific passions (yo-yo, cooking, rock climbing) the examples can feel a touch oblique. Fortunately, as a rock climber myself, I greatly enjoyed the portions discussing climbing, but it’s easy to feel a bit disconnected when you only know cursory amounts of the subject.

There are a few small blindspots he seems to have for counter-arguments to his points. But the book is excellent for reasons that go deeper than these specific examples. It’s a stunningly insightful look into how much of the world we live in is constructed, how it doesn’t have our personal interests in mind, and how we can fight back against it.

Change the Score, Change Behavior

My girlfriend and I play a lot of card games together, and at one point she tried her hand at a game design. I think she saw the fun I have with design and wanted to try it for herself. Her game is a two player only, standard deck card game. It’s good. I’ve acted as her only playtester, and it’s been a fun way to spend time talking about design and shaping experiences.

Notably, my feedback and suggestions haven’t touched upon the gameplay much. They have, however, touched upon scoring, and I was excited to open her mind into just how much this affects the game.

You see, at first I didn’t suggest any gameplay changes, only ones that affected what various actions were worth. And then we played again, and the lightbulb went on for her. With the original scoring, some actions that were intended by the design were less attractive than others, and so it affected player actions. As she adjusted the scoring more, she began to see how it subtly influenced the entire game.

Scoring incentivizes action. Altering your scoring alters your incentivization structure. This is a lesson every designer has to learn at some point. I had to as well. It’s often not what we think about when we think about games, but it can be the most important single variable in a game system.

This, as you might imagine, has implications far beyond card game design, and the book explores how this phenomenon happens on larger scales, and in contexts less benign than game design.

Goals vs. Purpose

Nguyen isn’t the first to talk about this distinction, but it’s important. Goals are things like “get the most points” and “identify the traitor in your midst” in games. But they aren’t the purpose of gaming.

You play to have fun with family or friends. Or perhaps to explore historical periods through simulationist play. Or to explore aspects of your personality via roleplay. Or perhaps because you value honing your athletic prowess, staying in shape, and the emergent coordination of team-based sports. Or because there’s something calming and cathartic about a sport, activity, video game, or other endeavor that brings you peace, equilibrium and pleasure.

“Winning” provides a focal point for our efforts, but it’s not actually why we play most games.

The problem is when systems manage to convince us that the scoring system – the “goal” in most games – is in fact also the purpose. Nguyen calls this Value Capture.

Take Youtube channels. You might want to create interesting content that provides genuine value to an audience in a specific niche. To measure this, Youtube provides you with subscriber numbers, views, view time, comments, clicks, and so on. But notice that none of those say anything about video quality, nor imparted value for the viewer. Those things are too intangible to link to a quantitative metric.

So then, a year later, you find yourself impersonating Mr. Beast’s channel to optimize for views and subscriptions, and gaming the Youtube algorithm with flashy thumbnails and provocative titles in order to be seen in search results. You pick topics and titles for your videos based on what will perform the best on the platform, not what you’re most passionate about.

The metrics they gave you to measure your purpose became the purpose.

That will sound like an extreme example to some. But we’re all susceptible to this. We all have addiction machines in our pockets or corporate benchmarks in our jobs or standards of health, beauty, financial status and achievement that have been imparted to us by some outside standard, not with the purpose of improving our lives but for some external reason that may or may not actually have our unique, personalized interests in mind.

Standardization isn’t all bad. Metrics aren’t all bad. Nguyen explains why value capture occurs, and it’s because such systems do come with certain benefits. But also occasionally massive personal sacrifices. Or societal sacrifices. Society itself can collapse our possible value-based options down into boxes that reduce your opportunity for personal expression.

A teacher, for instance, might have to focus on keeping test scores high enough to earn state funding and keep their job, instead of crafting more nuanced lessons that actually deepen students’ appreciation for and understanding of the subject material. Other examples abound. I’m sure you can think of several within your areas of expertise.

Games, by contrast, allow creativity, playfulness, and allow us to try on new values, purposes, and modes of existence, but without them overtaking us in the ways that large-scale systems can. Their ephemeral nature is part of their unique power, one which they’d lose if we suddenly all started legitimately caring about collecting wooden cubes or digital experience points in our lives instead of pursuing a well-lived, meaningful life.

Curating playful attitudes, he argues, also allows us to shift our values more easily to experiment with what will work best for us, and to more easily see institutionalized, external values for what they truly are.

Much of the book extrapolates on this core premise, giving it nuance, providing examples, and suggesting some paths forward both as individuals and collectively.

Object Value and Process Value – My Personal, Eternal Struggle

I’m a board game designer. I’m comparatively new to this endeavor, but I’ve put professional amounts of rigour into it over the past few years. It should manifest in some published games in the coming years.

But did you see what I just did there? I framed my endeavor in terms of its financial success.

Want to know what the coolest part of being a designer is for me? The moment in a playtest where some new idea that I’ve implemented just CLICKS and you can feel the game come alive, pushing it tangibly closer to my ideal vision for the experience. I leave this play session energized and excited to put more work into it, because I know I’ve found something worth pursuing.

This usually happens in mid-development, when the components are still crappy, the playtesters are still giving critical feedback, and it’s months away from being pitched to a publisher and years away from sitting on someone’s shelf.

But this isn’t what’s valued by the industry, and as a result it’s not what’s valued by loads of designers, playtesters, people you talk to about your side hobby, other gamers, friends and family, and so on. Commercially viable boxes that you can sell to consumers are what’s valued. And so, to get anyone’s attention (with some extremely limited but notable exceptions), I have to frame my efforts in terms of my progress toward published products.

Nguyen calls this Object Value vs. Process Value. It’s a minor plague in a lot of areas, and I can instantly recognize its influence in my life, not just with game design. I can also see it in the design circles I run in. Designers are as a general rule a jovial, supportive bunch of people. And many do it for the process and what it brings to their life, not just the outcomes. But some of them have been value captured, and their design process becomes one that prioritizes marketability above all else.

I’ve been asked why in the world I’d design trick-takers right now (I have two I’m pitching, and another I’ve released a free-use print-and-play game), because there are a million trick-takers on the market. It’s oversaturated, and many publishers aren’t looking for trick-taking games as a result. My answer is “because I love them, and I have ideas for them that excite me that I want to explore!” But the very fact that they’re asking the question incredulously, as though I’m unaware that these games are unlikely to sell, is indicative of the different values informing our approaches.

And ok, if I need to do the dance of monetizing my designs for them to be taken seriously by anyone, so be it. I don’t mind the chance to reach a larger audience anyway. As long as I continue to personally value the things that drew me to design in the first place – the creativity, the oblique problem-solving it requires, getting to create something that brings joy to others, and learning how to shape playful experiences – as long as I keep these things as the actual reasons I design, I haven’t been value captured.

But it still sucks a little bit. Awareness is the first step to combating such forces, though, and the first step in maintaining one’s values in ways that continue to provide meaning and joy.

Criticism of The Score

The book is relatively new, so I’m not aware of tons of pushback, but did find one critical review of it by David Runciman.

Runciman’s account isn’t without merit. He rightly shines a light on some instances where institutionalized metrics serve valid purposes not imagined in Nguyen’s account, making the lines between metric usages a little blurrier at times. More could be said here.

Runciman also dives more into history to show that supposedly problematic valuation systems as proposed by some of history’s thinkers were in fact reactions to even worse existing systems, and were attempts to reduce the power of particular elites who wielded their power in self-serving ways.

This is excellent perspective. Ideas don’t exist in vacuums but in relation to one another, and usually particular to a specific context. The book would benefit from more of this type of perspective, of what historical ills we may be avoiding in our current systems.

In a small bit of irony, though, I think Runciman is also missing what Nguyen is railing against in modern society. In drawing a line between “good” and “bad” games, Nguyen is writing in large part in reaction to the world we find ourselves increasingly surrounded by. It’s a world in which extracting value from people is the chief purpose of entire wings of our economy, and this is done at the expense of a lot of individualized considerations by codifying metrics intended to capture the audience instead of enrich them. The harm being done as a result of this can’t be overstated.

So is framing the situation as Good vs. Bad games too binary? Perhaps. And are games the only or best contrast to be drawn with such ills? Undoubtedly not.

But in a society in need of a shake commensurate to the trillions of dollars being funneled into our collective obsequiousness, planting a flag too far on the other side of the hill of personal expression, experimentation, and playfulness isn’t the worst philosophical stance to take. The Score is this flag, planted firmly.

Board Game Geek and Bastions of Play

Nguyen uses Board Game Geek (BGG) as a prominent example of playful variance in action. This happens to be one of my frequent digital stomping grounds. And while he’s right that the rating and comment system on BoardGameGeek can be a bastion of unique, diversified, non-standardized thought, I’ve also seen a darker trend on the site.

See, even here we see the encroachment of forces that want to codify metrics and scale them in ways that don’t benefit the diversity of opinion and experience that should be at the heart of commentary of any subjective, artistic medium like games.

For instance, publishers will weaponize the ratings system to send fans or crowdfunding backers to the site to rate their new game 10/10, because they know it will spike the game in BGG’s algorithm, help the game to rank higher, and that this correlates to sales. Many gamers happily adopt this practice, value captured by publishers whose goals are not the same as theirs.

Site regulars will use the aggregate site rankings as evidence that one game is better than another, or to argue that recent game design is better than older game design (this is a definite trend in the site’s ratings over the years, but there are complicated reasons for it related to the site’s algorithm and how it’s constructed). But they use this as Truth, placing too much emphasis on an aggregate number that has removed all nuance and context.

And I’ve seen fans and prominent designers call out negative ratings on social media, using their platform to “punch down” and send the message that low ratings are invariably either trolling or missing the point of the game, rather than simply accepting the glorious diversity of opinion that informs such ratings.

So even here, gamers themselves are at risk of being value captured, and some have been. Nguyen misses this in his praise of BGG, but he’s also still right in some important ways.

Because the opposite also exists on BGG, of beautiful, varied values on display. It’s why I’ve strongly advocated for using the site’s Geekbuddy system, since I think it represents the best avenue possible for gamers to get unfiltered opinions from those whose goals more closely resemble your own, particularly compared to larger media outlets in gaming that lose such personalized context by the very nature of what they are.

Surrounded by Values, Devoid of Meaning

I have weekly metrics at work that I have to keep updated, ones that supposedly capture what I’m contributing to the company and its goals. They’re vacuous and incomplete, but they’re what gets pushed up into leadership meetings to ensure I’m doing my job.

I constantly endeavor to be in good shape for my age because I know the vast number of benefits it provides to one’s sleep, wellbeing, cognitive function, and health. I’m bombarded by metrics like body-mass index, body fat percentage, hell, even the times and speeds I run on the treadmill, that supposedly are proxies of health. But they feel like distractions, or excuses to sell me sleep monitors or smart watches or one of a hundred other devices that will codify my fitness into numbers.

Like Nguyen, I’ve found myself frustrated at a lack of progress in climbing, as I plateau in the sport’s difficulty ratings for climbs, and have had to remind myself that these are pointless metrics that don’t speak to anything I actually value about climbs. But their ubiquity allows them to worm into my mindset.

My board gaming circles will proudly post their monthly or yearly play stats, signposts of their hobbyist virtue in exploring tons of new games across hundreds of play sessions each year. I have yet to find a play stat, though, that captures the amount of joy you’ve had, or the depth of relationships formed over the table, or how many transcendent moments you experienced. But hey, I played 75 games in August, so how about you give me some affirming emogis on my social media post?

That last one isn’t even bad, per se…unless we allow it to become part of why we’re playing, and not simply a happy end result of pursuing gaming for more fulfilling purposes. Most of the gamers I know aren’t being value-captured here, but I suspect some are.

More broadly, society homogenizes value into discernible metrics. These can have powerful, positive utility, but can also nullify personal nuance. Recognizing both, retaining the use while fighting against the loss of perspective, is hard. But it’s worth doing.

So while any of my examples above might seem like a minor problems on their own, they are microcosms of forces affecting our daily lives in sweeping ways.

This is a war for what we hold dear. If play and playfulness are antidotes for much of it, and I believe can be, it behooves us to curate such play in our lives.

I’ve had to gloss over concepts from the book, omit numerous individual examples, and have omitted several key supporting ideas for the sake of brevity. But I say that to say in turn that if you think reading this review is a good proxy for reading the book, it’s not. If you think you would benefit from a broader understanding of these forces in your life and society as a whole, and how you can create a bulwark against them, I wholeheartedly recommend picking up The Score.