C. Thi Nguyen—philosopher, professor, and author of Games: Agency as Art—joins Debbie Millman to discuss his new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing “Somebody Else’s Game,” and how metrics, from grades to likes, quietly reshape what we value and who we become. Together, they explore games as “libraries of agency,” the allure of scoring systems, and the vital question: Is this the game you really want to be playing?
C. Thi Nguyen—philosopher, professor, and author of Games: Agency as Art—joins to discuss his new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, and how metrics, from grades to likes, quietly reshape what we value and who we become. Together, they explore games as “libraries of agency,” the allure of scoring systems, and the vital question: Is this the game you really want to be playing?
C. Thi Nguyen:
The fact that you’re going to say, “I love this game. I want to play it.” Why? Because I don’t know, it’s got weird deep social vibes. I can’t say more, right? That’s permissible and you can modify games.
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective. This is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, a conversation with C. Thi Nguyen about what games teach us about the real world and about ourselves.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Games are designed to make the beauty and the interest emerge in you, the player.
Debbie Millman:
C. Thi Nguyen is a philosopher who has spent much of his life examining the invisible architectures that shape human experience, the systems that tell us what matters, what counts, and how to measure whether we are succeeding. Thi is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and the author of Games: Agency as Art, which has won the American Philosophical Association’s Book Prize, his latest book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, examines how metrics from grades to social media to professional rankings can narrow our understanding of what makes life meaningful. Thi Nguyen, welcome to Design Matters.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Thank you. It’s good to be here. Your introduction also stabbed at the heart of my being. You got the soul and everything I’m interested in exactly right. I actually didn’t understand this for a long time. I had all these weird obsessions I was writing about in philosophy. I was writing about social media and I was writing about games and I was writing about trust structures and I was writing about computing. And people would ask me what brought it all together and I didn’t know, and actually there’s this thing called midterm review when you’re a young professor.
Someone else reviews all your work, and this philosopher, Brandon Cook, read everything and he wrote this letter and he said, “You might think that Thi’s interests are zany and all over the place, but what he cares about is how the outside world, how social structures and technological structures change how we value and think.” And I was like, “Oh my God. Suddenly I make sense to myself.”
Debbie Millman:
Oh good. Well, I’m glad. I’m glad I’ve spent a lot of time with you over the last couple of weeks, whether or not you realized it, and so I love to look for those threads that knit everything together. However, you do have a somewhat surprising origin story. Is it true you were a teenage movie critic-
C. Thi Nguyen:
Oh my God.
Debbie Millman:
… for the San Jose Mercury News?
C. Thi Nguyen:
You looked that up. Amazing. Yeah, that was my … Yeah, so when I was in high school, the San Jose Mercury News was looking for teenage movie critics and they held an essay contest and they got three of us. And I think what they were looking for was it was supposed to be the teenage view, and I think they were looking for kids who would talk about kid action movies. And because they held an essay contest, they got the three most pretentious artsy fartsy, like nothing is good, but late Altman weirdos. And so I ended up writing a bunch of weird movie reviews that I think if we went back to look at them, which I haven’t in years, are probably unbearably pretentious. That was my first writing gig.
Debbie Millman:
What kind of films were you reviewing at that point, adult movies, kids movies?
C. Thi Nguyen:
I was 16 or 17. But I mean, we would have fights because I was an art kid. I always wanted to review arty… They did let me review like Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Red, but they also wanted … The teenage reviewer should review Jurassic Park, so I would do that too, but-
Debbie Millman:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah. And I was much less generous back then than I would’ve been now. I was a much more rigid antsy artist, better kid. I have a more expansive view now.
Debbie Millman:
Your parents came to the U.S. from South Vietnam. What made them decide to settle down in Southern California?
C. Thi Nguyen:
I think when you’re a Vietnamese war refugee, the government just sends you someplace and you end up there. I think they were going through a lot of local churches to place immigrants with families, and so there was a family that just volunteered to open their home to a refugee family and they took in my parents. And it happened to be in San Jose and by an enormous amount of luck … I mean, okay, there are two ways I can tell my story. One way to tell my story is I’m an immigrant’s child. I grew up poor with people that had nothing, and then I fought my way to a fancy college and then I fought my way to a professor gig.
Here’s another way to tell my story. In Vietnam, my dad was a professor of math at the University of Saigon, and then he went and he ended up in San Jose as a person with a math background in the late ’70s, and he figured out about this thing happening called computers and he retrained and he applied his math background and he ended up at Intel doing coding. So he rode the Silicon Valley boom. And surprise of all surprise, a math professor’s kid is a philosophy professor, what wonders there are.
Debbie Millman:
One of the, I think, wonderful things about retrospection is how we can decide which narrative means more to us. I love how your dad’s job at Intel set the stage for so much of what you’re doing now. I read that when you were 10 years old, he brought home a massive early computer. And rather than coding, you used it to play Colossal Cave Adventure.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
How did you even discover that game at that time Thi?
C. Thi Nguyen:
My first computer was the size of a fridge. It was blue. It was obsoleted at Intel, and so Intel would sell off old stock to employees. And so my dad got this thing, massive thing. Floppy disks were a foot wide and I think it just came with a bunch of floppies that already had stuff pre-installed. And one of them was, what I didn’t realize at the time, was the first text adventure game like Colossal Caves and I clumsily dealt with this text parser in a cold garage, which is where we kept it, to play this thing that I was fascinated by.
Debbie Millman:
Please tell me that you still have that computer somewhere.
C. Thi Nguyen:
There’s no way we … That thing is gone decades ago.
Debbie Millman:
Do you remember what you felt the first time you realized that a machine could create an entire inhabitable world?
C. Thi Nguyen:
No, I think I am probably the first gen to not be able to remember clearly that experience because of the way things were. My growing up, I think there wasn’t a transition point. Some of the earliest games I can remember were computer and video, so I think I was right at the breaking point where I was one of the first people for whom that was natural. That was just the way games happened.
Debbie Millman:
But that experience ultimately sparked what is now a lifelong devotion to and fascination with games. What was it about gaming that so intrigued you at that point?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t just the computer stuff. I grew up playing all kinds of games. I grew up playing card games. I grew up playing … My dad taught me to play chess. When I was 12, my sister’s boyfriend taught me to play Go, which is the great Japanese, Chinese, Korean cultural equivalent of chess. And in an alternate life, I just would’ve played that. And I think I don’t know if there’s a way to say what united them. Actually, maybe I should say that when I started writing … I mean, there was such a natural part of my life. I only asked the question you’re asking 30 years down the line when I started writing philosophically about games.
They were so natural for me that it wasn’t until I had to explain to an outsider’s eye why the hell someone would love and spend so much time on such weird views that I was forced to produce a unifying story. Before that, I just knew that I loved games, right? They were awesome. That’s what I did in my spare time. Two kinds of games kept me sane in graduate school, one kind of game is during graduate school I discovered with a couple of friends of mine, including my best friend in grad school, the philosopher David Ebrey, after school and work, we would find random European board games. This was when we were getting this huge influx of this massive explosion of really incredibly well-designed games from Germany and the rest of Europe.
And we play these things that were so interesting, so elegant, had such interesting design mechanics and made us interact in weird interesting ways. If you grow up in kind of the American game landscape, a lot of the games are very war gamey, and then a lot of the German games coming at the time are about these intricate auctions and market manipulations. It turns out there’s a history to this. The history that I understand is after World War II, Germany turned away from chess and other direct war games, and there’s also a long tradition of playing family games. I don’t know if it’s still true, but when I was looking into it in the ’90s, there was information that the average German family played more board games together than watch TV, which is wild.
So there’s this huge market and this impulse to discover different kinds of interactions besides direct conflict, so a lot of the German board games were about being in a market or an auction together and subtly manipulating the incentives to try to manipulate other people. And these were just so interesting. So I would do philosophy work and then I would play games with a bunch of people, but especially David Ebrey, and then we would sit around and talk late into the night about what made the game good. And at the time, I had no idea this would be part of my professional career. I thought this would be a waste.
Nobody in philosophy studied games. That’s not a serious topic. And I remember at some point telling somebody, I was like, “I love art and I would’ve loved to have been around as an art critic in the ’50s to talk about jazz as it was happening. Wouldn’t that have been great?” And not really reflecting on the fact that what I was doing at the time was spending all this time playing all these new board games or coming out of this board game revolution in Europe and then going online to BoardGameGeek and trying to write criticism to express what made this game so interesting.
And it took me, again, years to be able to tell myself, “Oh, what I’m trying to do is participate in being part of the critical reception of this glorious explosion of interesting design of what I think is the most exciting new art form, which is designing play and designing interaction by designing rule systems. And yeah, it took me … I was doing it long before I realized what I was doing. I just thought I was writing little capsule reviews of my geeky little community about this game I played last night that I loved.
Debbie Millman:
There was a tiny little self descriptor in The Score that I picked up on and underlined and want to ask you about, you said you were a bit of a smartass growing up.
C. Thi Nguyen:
That’s a lie. Bit is a lie. I was a complete smartass.
Debbie Millman:
So in what way? How you were a smart … How did that manifest?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Now that you asked the question, I realize that it manifested in a form that just became professionalized as philosophy. I was a smartass because I always was looking for the fast quick response, the quick like, “Oh, that’s not true what you said, here’s a quick counter example.” Or, “You said this general thing, but what …” I would love a fast, clever, funny refutation and what I’ve done is entered a profession where that is what you’re supposed to do professionally. And so I only don’t self-describe as a smartass now because it’s been normalized for the job I do.
Debbie Millman:
Your parents wanted you to be a doctor or a lawyer or programmer-
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah, something normal.
Debbie Millman:
… and thought you were throwing away your chance at a safe and productive career even though you were going to Harvard.
C. Thi Nguyen:
I mean, the point was I went to Harvard and then afterwards I started pursuing philosophy and the rest of my family were like, “What are you doing?” I mean, I think in my family there’s like … In my gen, there’s like dozens of computer programmers, three doctors, and then this weirdo that threw away a Harvard education. Even by the time I was an assistant professor of philosophy and had my first job, which is an incredible fight, my mom was still calling me up asking me when I would quit and get a real job and be a programmer.
Debbie Millman:
But a PhD is also a doctor.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Doesn’t count.
Debbie Millman:
I believe that you intended for philosophy to be a part-time backup job for what you considered your real work, which was creative writing and becoming a novelist. So what made you actually choose philosophy?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Wow, you have done your homework. Yes. Yeah. No, I was originally going to be a creative writer and I was interested in philosophy and I started on that. I mean, I had this image of I could teach and that would support and be … And I really did love philosophy, but I thought creative writing was the main thing. I actually have two literary novels and one science fiction novel on my desktop that I wrote during this period. And then at some point, I mean first, I realized I wasn’t going to do well just because of the way the world is if I split my … I didn’t have the time to do well in both. I had to choose one and I didn’t know what to do.
And actually there’s a mentor, Elijah Millgram, a philosopher who shows up a few places in this book, and I gave him a draft of my literary novel and I gave him one of the earliest half-written drafts of my first Games book. and I was like, “I don’t know what to do with my life.” And he read them and he came back and he said, “They’re both very good. The literary novel is very well written, but it is very much like many other literary novels written by many people that went to creative writing programs before. And the Games book is not like anything I have seen before.” And I was like, “Well, okay.”
Debbie Millman:
I actually want to point out that he was rather brutal. He said that your novel, and this is a quote from you, that your novel was well written and artful, but that it was an entirely familiar and very much-
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yes, yes, yes.
Debbie Millman:
… like other nice little literary novels he’d recently read.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And you’re still good friends.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah, no, I mean, like I said, philosophers are professional smartasses. This is the loving treatment we give each other all the time. Though I will say, I spent years in creative writing programs developing what I thought was a writerly voice that was myself. And the professional philosophy mostly said, “No, that’s not professional. You need to sound like a neutral … And so I learned this other voice. I have quietly referred to it as robot voice. In the novels that I was writing, I now realize I kind of had to suppress my desire to be very geeky and philosophical.
And the opportunity to write a public philosophy book was very freeing because that world is a world that really accepts both intellectual interest in complex geeky stuff and narrative. And it let me pursue something that I think I had truly and had never really articulated that I wanted to pursue, which was a format in which I could be emotional and narrative and tell stories and give arguments and give social historical analyses and cut between them and try to have them … I realized I had an aesthetic that I’d never gotten to indulge before, which was having a philosophical argument and then telling a story and having the core idea from the argument and the emotional hit to the story hit together at the same moment.
And I was permitted to chase that and refine that with my amazing editor. And yeah, so it felt very … Until I’d written this new book, I’d always been kind of craving kind of creative outlets because philosophy wasn’t quite creative enough. And now since I’ve been writing this, my craving for other creative outlets is gone. This feels like everything in me that wanted to be a novelist and everything in me that wanted to be a philosopher getting to play together for the first time.
Debbie Millman:
Despite your parents’ desire to see you as what I guess they would consider to be a real doctor or your desire at the time to be a novelist, you then enrolled in the graduate program in philosophy at UCLA. What made you decide to commit to philosophy at that time rather than fiction or gaming?
C. Thi Nguyen:
I was still trying to write, in the background, stories. But of all the academic disciplines, philosophy had become obviously the one for me. So when I went to college, I thought my interests were either English or evolutionary biology or neuroscience, and I actually was briefly all of those majors and quickly discovered for various reasons again that they did not fit my personality in various ways. And I kept reading things and different things where I was like, “Oh, this is so cool.” And it would always turn out to be a reading from a philosopher. You get them in a little bit neuroscience. And I was just like, “What is this?”
And I wandered over to the philosophy department and I took a class and I had this wild first class from, now I realize I was very lucky to take from a legend in the philosophy of art, Stanley Cavell, and he just took my mind apart. It was a class about how opera and musicals express the spirit of being unable to express yourself. And it was like a class about all these plot lines in opera about how a woman who sings then dies of consumption and trying to understand what the social commentary was in that. And I just was like, “This is it, man. This is what I love.” And yeah.
Debbie Millman:
But while you were in school, you began living a double life. You worked on your PhD during the day and then began working as a food writer for the Los Angeles Times.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Now, is it true that you got that job after drunk posting on Chowhound?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
I love that.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Oh my god, yeah. So you found all the best old stories. Someone was wrong on the internet is what happened. So there’s this incredible chain in LA called Roscoe’s House of Chicken ‘N Waffles where they do Southern style chicken and waffles, waffles covered with maple syrup and butter, fried chicken’s covered with gravy. And obviously to me you eat them together. You wrap it in the soft waffle. And then someone on Chowhound, the food board I used to hang out on, complained and said, “These waffles are supposed to be Belgian waffles, but they’re not. They’re soft in instead of crispy so they failed.”
And I was incredibly angry, and part of the reason I was angry was because it seemed to me like a kind of thing I particularly couldn’t stand, which actually maybe is in the background of my new book, it was very category-based reasoning like, “This is called the Belgian waffle, therefore it must be crispy. Inflexibly, all Belgian waffles must be crispy.” And I thought that is complete … I mean, that is completely wrong for this context, right? What makes chicken and waffles good is this relationship of salt. And so I was super pissed off. I was only three blocks to the original House of Chicken ‘N Waffles, so I was like, “I need to write a response post.”
Then I was like, I need to do more on-the ground research first because Roscoe’s is open until four in the morning. And I was like, “Okay, I need to take three shots and go to Roscoe’s Chicken ‘N Waffles and eat some.” And I was eating it and it was like there’s this soft chicken and then the sweetness of the maple syrup and the richness of the gravy and then the crispiness. And I was like, “Oh, I know this pattern. This is Peking duck. It’s the same like something soft, right? Okay, that sounds [inaudible 00:20:46].
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
It’s soft and sweet and then something rich and then fatty and then crispiness. And so I went home and drunk posted at 3 in the morning this elaborate post about Joseph Campbell and the convergence of food myths and how different food cultures had the same idea. And then I went to sleep, and then when I woke up, the phone was ringing and it was the LA Times food editor wanting to offer me a job because he’d been following my posts. But then that one he said put them over the edge. It was Russ Parsons. Thank you, Russ. And yeah. So yeah, I got a-
Debbie Millman:
And you did that for years. You did that for years.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah. It took me 11 years to get through grad school, partially because I was food writing for half the time, for five or six years.
Debbie Millman:
Ultimately you had to choose between academia and food writing. And you’ve described that decision as painful. What made it so painful for you?
C. Thi Nguyen:
I mean, they’re completely different forms of life. And here’s a case where I love both of them. Food writing is wandering through the world with your senses alive noticing things and trying to describe beauty. Academic philosophy is this intellectual, abstract, argumentative, incredibly painfully rigorous, fascinating thing. And they were two different parts of myself. And the decision was tough. Actually, part of the decision was just people, the LA Times being like, “Newspapers are dying, we’re firing people. Get out while you can.” But I also told myself that if I was going to go into academia, I was going to let myself do weird philosophy of art.
And part of it was that in the end, food writing for me, and this is very me specific, I think, after five years started feeling a little bit repetitive, because you have the same kind of relationship. It’s always like, “Here. Here’s something. Describe how good it is, find it.” And that’s really thrilling but it’s also kind of confining. And the stuff I did afterwards about the philosophy of games was kind of that impulse. I want to describe the live interestingness of games, but then especially in the new book, I have the freedom to do it both in the criticky way to talk about it on the ground and then to step back and be much more philosophical about what the meaning of games is in general. And so I mean, yeah, I love food writing, but I was hoping to be able to keep writing about weird beautiful things.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you referred to that as weird aesthetics, and I’m wondering if you can define what weird aesthetics are, is?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Aesthetics is the broader term. So art is the narrower term. Art is what humans make to be beautiful and other things like that. And aesthetics is bigger because there’s stuff in nature that’s also beautiful. So aesthetics is a study of all of that. Beauty and thrill and horror and comedy in art and in nature. And I think some of it is very well recognized. We are very used to studying the beauty of film and the beauty of sunset and the beauty … And then there are other things that I think are as incredibly important and beautiful and elegant and thrilling that kind of get pushed to the side.
Debbie Millman:
Like what?
C. Thi Nguyen:
So games is one. Another is like I’ve gotten really interested in social food rituals like hot pot. Because I think that it’s actually quite game-like. What’s going on with social food with hot pots and fondues is that part of what it’s sculpting is not just the food, but the social interaction, like the way you bump into each other and negotiate and laugh because you [inaudible 00:24:08], right? I’m super interested in improv. I mean, tabletop role playing in particular is like a collision between games and improv theater, but a lot of this stuff is on the margins of what people will conventionally call art.
And I’ve been calling it weird aesthetics just because it seems weird for most people to take it seriously. But I’ve lately, in the process of writing this new book, talked myself into a new position. I guess the best way to put it is I’ve started to notice that all the arts that we normally consider high, novels, movies, paintings, are ones where the majority of people sit on their asses and appreciate the very real fine genius of some very distant person. And all the arts where the ability to be creative is distributed over a whole community, role-playing games, fan fiction, cosplay, these are denigrated as low and geeky.
And what I’ve started to think is that a lot of our notion of high art is more generated by what we can easily sell and transfer on an art market, and things that are incredibly beautiful and incredibly live and involve a community deeply interacting and everyone gets to create for each other, those are discarded. And when I say weird aesthetics, I mean, it’s that, the stuff that I think is as important or even more important that has been trashed to the side because it’s hard to capture, hard to count, hard to stabilize, hard to sell, but it’s important, might be more important.
Debbie Millman:
After you received your PhD, you began teaching and you are currently a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. And that gaming manuscript, your mentor told you was startling that you started in grad school, became your first book, Games: Agency As Art. And I learned a lot from that book. You state that art asks us to see and observe. Games ask us to participate. I do know the answer to this, but I want you to elaborate a bit. Would you say that games are a distinct artistic medium?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I should say that in that bit that you quoted, I mean like art in quotation marks, what most people think art normally is.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
C. Thi Nguyen:
I mean, I really do think games are an art form. But I think they’re misunderstood because we have a lot of language to talk about the arts that are fixed and stable, where the important part is external, and so we can kind of point to the same features. And games are really weird. And I think what’s happening with games is that games are designed to make the beauty and the interest emerge in you, the player. A well-designed rock climb at the gym gets me to be elegant, it forces me to be elegant. It calls forth an interesting new elegance. My favorite puzzle game like Baba is You, when you play this, the primary thing that’s beautiful is actually my mind.
The way it suddenly moves at the moment it solves the puzzle is beautiful, but also the game design pulled that out of me. It’s kind of second stagey, right? And I think a lot of the stuff that got me angry enough to write this first book was people that wanted to praise games by pointing to their movie-like features. And I was also seeing this in game design. More and more games would trade away freedom of the player to make them look more like movies with fixed cut scenes like good cinematography and good dialogue and good script and all the features that were ripped from what we already knew from movies.
Now I was trying to explain what games did that was so special. And I think the lightning rod point for me was this moment from Reiner Knizia, who’s my favorite German board game designer, and his lecture that he gave the game developers conference where he says that the most important tool in his game designer’s toolkit is the scoring system, because it tells players what to care about. It sets their motivation in the game. And I as a game player was like, “That’s such a cool expression of what is totally obvious in games.” And as a philosopher I was like, “Oh my god, this is completely weird because most philosophy and most theory about people assumes that our desires are really static.”
And yet here’s this really obvious thing, which is that something is right now in a scoring system and you can just blend into it and completely change what you care about, what you’re trying to do. And you can flip on a dime in one night, you can play cooperative … We’ll often warm up by playing a cooperative game and then we’re working together and then we put that one away and then we play a game where we’re trying to kill each other and you just transfer really quickly.
So what I wanted to end up saying was game designers tell you what to want and they give you abilities and they give you obstacles and they design all of those in an interaction to give you beautiful action or beautiful thought or funny action or to build interesting or socializations or social relationships, they’re sculpting our actions and interactions from one step back. And I think that’s really crucial. In movies, they make something and you’re looking at the thing and the thing that’s beautiful is the thing they made. And the game designer, I mean, I was actually even kind of thinking that there’s actually a lot of similarities in game design and good teaching.
In good teaching, if I just tell you what to think and you think it, I failed as a philosophy teacher. I need to set the conditions for you to figure it out freely yourself and find the option space to yourself. And game designers are doing something really similar. Because they’re pushing around rules in order to guide you to a kind of action, but not force you, to let you freely find actions such that you’re acting and you’re finding the action. It’s interesting, fun, beautiful, thrilling, funny. And that’s an extraordinarily interesting art form.
One weird thought I had at the very beginning of this was I was complaining to people again drunk. I was at a bar and I was like, “Look, they keep saying games are like movies, but they’re sort of like that. But you know what they are? They’re really art governments. They’re rule sets to guide people’s action, not to keep them from killing each other, but for the sake of beauty and interestingness.”
Debbie Millman:
You’ve described games as a kind of library of agencies. And I’m wondering if you can talk about what you mean by that.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah. Each game offers you a different way of looking and thinking about the world. It’s a very different angle. It’s easiest to see sometimes I think in physical games like soccer says, don’t use your hands. And so you have to discover everything you can do with your feet. I think rock climbing interestingly says, don’t use tools to climb. You can use tools to keep yourself safe, but to go up, don’t use tools. And so instead of using rocks and spikes and ladders and grappling hooks and helicopters, you’re suddenly forced to see how much you can get just out of balance and precision. Some games, I mean, chess forces you into the mindset and the style of hyper focusing on geometrical possibilities and geometrical possible interactions.
And then other games like my favorite tabletop role-playing games I’m playing right now, they give you points for having interesting character flashbacks and screwing up and generating narrative tension in character. And suddenly you’re in this position where you’re looking around the world and you’re like, “Oh my God, what an opportunity to get myself in trouble for my character motivations.” And suddenly you’re in the posture of a certain kind of storyteller. And so games are these pre-packaged agencies. They’re different mindsets and goal sets pushed together. At its best, the world of games is a world where you can dance between these pre-packaged mindsets.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written that games don’t just give us goals, they give us new capacities for action that allow us to temporarily become different versions of ourselves.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
How does that happen, Thi?
C. Thi Nguyen:
How? That’s a very challenging question, how does that happen? The easiest examples are some of the sports examples because they’re just removals, right? I think soccer is the easy example. It’s just like, look, how much can you do with your feet? So suddenly you have to attend … It’s kind of natural. It’s a thing we’ve always done, but we normally use other capacities. So for by hyper-focusing on that capacity, we plunge into it. So Bernard Suits, the philosopher of games, really inspired a lot of my work, one of his interesting thoughts is that games through rules create new possibilities for action. What he means is there was no such thing as a checkmate without the rules of chess. There’s no such thing as a layup without the rules of basketball.
Rules are these weird paradoxes that give us constraints, and through those constraints create new possibilities. There’s this really I think standard but simple theory that the fewer constraints, the more free you are. That’s something that’s really false and you can see it in two ways. The simplest way to think about it is just think of an empty field, you can move in any direction. Now, put a room with a door you can lock in it. In a sense, you’ve removed some freedom of movement. What you’ve actually done is created a richer possibility. You can be inside or outside. And a lot of political philosophers, this is a thought from Rousseau, what a lot of political philosophy has thought is that rights are new possibilities that you create through restrictions, right?
The restriction don’t kill each other, it creates a new right and a new way of being. You can now safely walk down the street. Rousseau has this idea that if we were totally free, we could just take stuff from each other all the time. But the rule of not stealing creates the possibility of having property that you can put down and walk away from. And so games, I mean, again, this is the thing where games are an elaboration of governments. Games are things that create new possible kinds of actions that we never had before. That new interactions, some of them are variants on old ones and some of them are just completely bizarre and novel.
I mean, if you know the computer game Portal, you’re given a gun that can shoot ends of a wormhole that warps space. That’s not a thing I do in normal life. And you get new puzzles out of it. The game Baba is You, the one I talked about before, creates an action space where you’re in a physics model and there are words inside the world with you that are the rules of the physics. And when you move those words around, you change the rules of physics. And that’s not a thing that is in this world. And someone has just created a new kind of action. That’s fascinating.
Debbie Millman:
You introduced me to the work of Bernard Suits just through reading your work. And one of the things that I came upon through your writing was his idea that playing a game means voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of struggling against them. And I’m wondering if you think that human beings might actually need obstacles, not just to endure them, but to find meaning.
C. Thi Nguyen:
This is 100% what Suits thinks. I mean, that definition is one of my favorite things in the world. I mean, obviously since I’ve sent two books figuring out all the implications of that definition, that games are voluntary obstacles, I think what Suits is saying is that if what you’re trying to do in a game is defined in part by the obstacles, right? This is what he’s saying. If you cross the finish line of a marathon and you took a taxi, you didn’t cross the finish line.
Debbie Millman:
Right.
C. Thi Nguyen:
What you do is intrinsically connected to that constraint, then the constraints have to matter. And what that means is if the constraints matter, then that means that the way you do things matter. You run a marathon because you want to be running and not sitting in a car. Behind this is Aristotle. Suits is very explicit about it. So the end of the book, The Grasshopper, is this unbelievable argument. The argument is imagine utopia where technology has solved all our practical problems. What would we do with our time? We would play games or we would be bored out of our minds. So if games are what we play in utopia, then they must be the meaning of life.
Debbie Millman:
But what about art?
C. Thi Nguyen:
He thinks art is a game. I think art is a game.
Debbie Millman:
Okay.
C. Thi Nguyen:
I’ll give you a fast argument for art being a game. What a game is is something where it’s important you do it yourself in a particular way instead of just taking any available shortcut to get to it quickly. Hey, here’s a shortcut. Ask AI to make it. The reason you don’t do that is because what we actually care about is making it ourself. I mean, you could automate the whole procedure, have AI make it, and then have AI judge it. Then you’d have a lot of art and a lot of judgments about art. What we actually care about is making it ourselves and then appreciating it ourselves and talking to each other and being in that process.
Debbie Millman:
So when we talk about when artists or designers or writers are pushing back against AI, are what they really pushing back against is cheating?
C. Thi Nguyen:
I think so. And I think what Suits is saying is that the cheat is robbing themselves because what they’re mistaking is the real point is to be doing the thing and they’ve mistaken the goal for the purpose, right? So one of the crucial distinctions of the book that I learned from my advisor, Robert Herman, is that you can distinguish the goal and the purpose of a game. A goal is what you pursue during the game and the purpose is why you play it, right? The goal of charades is to win, but the purpose is to have fun. And if you try to win and fail, you still had fun. You still had a great time.
And I think in many games, the mistake of the cheat is to isolate that goal and think that’s all that really matters, and not to realize that the goal is just there to get you through a particular rich activity. I mean, Suits was an Aristotle scholar. This is what Aristotle said. Aristotle said that human meaning came from exercising our capacities richly, for being engaged in interesting action and interesting thought, that it was the doing that was important and not the thing that was done. And sometimes the stuff you made could help you do more things, but the importance in life came from actual doing.
Debbie Millman:
You deconstruct the various aspects of games, of gaming in your new book. I want to talk about that. Your new book is called The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. And it explores how metrics, rankings and incentives can narrow our ambitions and redirect our attention toward goals we may never have consciously chosen. Is it true that you wrote this book because of an email from a student?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah. Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Tell us more. Tell us more.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah. So I was not sure if I wanted to write this book and I was thinking about a pop book just about games or a pop book just about metrics or maybe just being tired of writing … I’d been writing some popular stuff and maybe I just wanted to go back and write geeky, arcane, technical stuff on the weird little details of games. But I gave this talk. It was during pandemic, it was a Zoom talk and there was a talk where I was just … I didn’t really understand the connection why it was so important to talk about games and metrics in the same place. And so I gave my theory by games and I tried to explain why metrics were not good kind of separately. It went online.
And then a few weeks later, I got an email from an undergraduate, never met, just someone who saw the thing online and she wrote me and she said that the talk had pulled her out of five years of depression because she said she had been a lot like me. Immigrant’s kid, Asian American, pushed to get straight A’s, a varsity athlete, but that’s not like me, I was not a varsity athlete, and anorexic, and in all these sectors obsessed with upping the score in ways that were making her miserable. And she said she had not realized that she was playing so many bad games that she didn’t want to be playing, that she was stuck in bad games.
And hearing me talk about games and metrics made her realize that she had some degree of choice. So she said she reprogrammed her phone screen to remind her constantly, and she sent me a picture and what it said was, “Is this the game you really want to be playing?” And I mean, I cried. I was like, “Oh my God, what more impact do you want to have on another human being as a human being?” And then I was like, “I guess I got to write the book then.” And the first chapter of the book is called Is This the Game You Really Want to be Playing? because of her and her comment.
Debbie Millman:
Thi, before we get into the specifics of the book, I want to share with our listeners what I consider to be the most beautiful paragraph in the book. So I just want to make sure you’re okay with that. It’s not that long.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah, that’s fine. I’m excited to see what your pick was.
Debbie Millman:
Okay. What’s magical about games, what’s different from so many other art forms is that in games you act. You analyze the information, you make decisions, you try to enact your will upon the game world. And well-designed games make beautiful action more likely. They call it forth. Good games don’t tell you what to do exactly. They don’t puppet you into beauty. They leave space for your freedom, for you to choose and decide and act and react, but they create the background conditions that make it likely that your own actions will be elegant, fascinating and thrilling. The beauty is in the process, in what it feels like to be doing the thing. And games help steer you toward finding beauty in your own actions, in finding the answer yourself, figuring out the right move yourself, instinctively reaching out of your own trained skill. How good is that?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Thank you. I’m glad that you’re pleased by that.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I think it’s beautiful. And you go on to state games play around with who you are, what you care about, and the basic shape of your relationship to other people. Games reach into you and give you a new form of agency, and you can for a while become completely absorbed in that new agency. And what enables that in crucial part is the clarity, the simplicity and the unambiguity of the scoring system. So how does a scoring system have so much power?
C. Thi Nguyen:
That’s the crucial question. I mean, I’m obsessed with the question of why scoring systems are so delightful in games and so draining elsewhere, but they’re so similar in their heart. What’s similar about the scoring system is the clarity of the expectations, the clarity of the specification of what matters. Scoring systems tell you exactly how to count what matters. In normal life, you think, “I’m going to try to make my child have a happy childhood.” But what counts? Does letting them stay up late count? Does letting them watch this slightly weird, scary horror anime that they want to watch count? Or the direct connection between what you’re doing and what you’re trying to achieve is so difficult often because it’s not just about what will make things happen.
It’s like if you get a particular result, is that result good or not, right? It’s really hard to judge. So if my child suddenly starts being like, “I don’t trust my teachers anymore,” have I made someone disobedient or have I made someone independent and free willed? It’s so hard to tell. And games on the other hand just say two points per cows, four points per sheep, go. And you know exactly, exactly how well you’ve done and you know exactly how to compare yourself to everybody else, and it’s inarguable. I think that’s part of the background. And that inarguability is achieved in a very specific way. It’s achieved by changing the thing that we’re counting from something subtle and dynamic and open-ended to something that’s clear and inarguable.
And I think one of the important things is I think a lot of people want to say, they want to say that the inarguable stuff is the only objective thing. It’s the only real thing. And what I want to say is there’s so many things that are real and important that are not easy to count. And here is maybe the geekiest way to put what this book is about. This book is about all the mysterious things that are hard to count, and to understand, you have to understand how we count things together, that the process of counting together is a very specific social process and that some things are really easy to count together and some things are really hard to count together.
Since you’ve read both of these books next to each other, let me point out a mistake in my first book. In my first book, I assumed that every game has a scoring system because I was thinking about board games. In between thinking about them, I realized there are so many games that don’t have scoring systems, and that’s crucial. My favorite example is skateboarding. Skateboarding is a game, and you can even have a skateboarding competition where you all go out to skate and sometimes you don’t even need to specify the goal. You can just skate and try to skate better. And each person can pursue their own version of better, and each person can come up with their own judgment. And it’s okay not only that one person was going for style and the other person was going for speed and someone else was going for athleticism.
It’s okay if each of you judges on a different basis. Our judgments aren’t forced to converge and we don’t need a single judgment. When skateboarding moves to an official context like ESPNX and the Olympics, in order to make it more readily countable, they change what it’s about. Skateboarding becomes less about style and flow and more about height and number of flips because those are easier to count in public together. So the demand for easy objective countability systematically changes the topic towards the kind of things that are easy and quick to recognize and that are verifiable through a mechanical procedure. And I think that’s a vast title shift in what we’re paying attention to.
Debbie Millman:
You have stated that a game can tell whether you’re selfish or part of a larger collective.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
How so?
C. Thi Nguyen:
I mean, it can instruct you, right? It can tell you what to do. It can tell you … What you care about is the same, it’s winning. But games just tell you what count as winning in a particular case. But actually games tell you what winning means in a really basic way, in that sometimes I open up a game and it’s a cooperative game and all the people at the table are trying to win together. And sometimes we open up a game and it says that half of us are achieving victory together. It doesn’t matter whether you get the point or I get the point. We’re on the same team, they’re one point, but we’re trying to beat this other team. And sometimes we open up a game and it tells us you’re all in it for yourselves. Everybody else is the enemy. The only victory that matters is yours.
And the game can just tell you and we can just do that. And one of the worries I have is that that’s safe in games because games are separated. But in the real world, when we’re drawn in that way, we have the same fluid capacity, we have the same ability to just be told what to want and to want it on a dime. But in the world, we are not temporarily changing some plastic unimportant points for fun. We’re changing how we’re pursuing our education or our workplace or our health or our creative endeavors. We are vastly redirecting our creative and sole outputs in the direction of what’s easily countable by everybody in unison.
Debbie Millman:
Can you talk about the difference between achievement play and striving play?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah. One of the crucial ideas that I drew from Suits, I’m trying to think about games, is that there are two different kinds of play. So there’s achievement play, which is playing in order to win, and striving play, which is taking an interest in winning on temporarily in order to experience the process. So one way to put it is in achievement play, you actually care about winning, but in striving play, you just get yourself to care about winning for a little bit to get absorbed in the struggle. One way to put it is that normal life, we take the means for the sake of the ends, but in striving play, you take the ends for the sake of the means.
And I think that’s crucial. I see exactly why you’re asking this here because a big difference between metrified life and games and striving play is the points actually don’t matter in striving play. You just cared about them temporarily to have the process and you can just throw them away again. I can try to get more points in this German board game than my wife and she can try to get more than me, and one of us will beat the other, and one of us might disrupt the other person’s railway network and one of us won and one of us lost. But since the points aren’t attached to anything real, we can just throw them away.
We can actually both get what we really wanted, our true purpose, which is an interesting struggle. But that’s not true when someone is aiming all out at maxing out their investment portfolio at the expense of everyone else’s retirement accounts. And it’s not true when someone is trying to get the most likes through outrage bait on Twitter, right? Those are substantially connected to real world resources, and so we are essentially in a terrain that’s unlike striving play. And so when you simplify people’s activities towards real targets, then you’re screwing with the fundamental features of our social world.
Debbie Millman:
Well, this is one of the reasons I was so fascinated by your earlier work and was so interested in talking to you about The Score because quite, I guess confessionally, my wife describes me as both a sore loser and a sore winner. Because what happens when I start playing a game is that I see the end result as a declaration on who I fundamentally am. So I become either a winner or a loser. Loser, big L. But then if I win, I feel guilty because I am making the other person feel bad.
So this is a real big conundrum for me in game playing. It becomes really hard to be around me when playing a game, which is hard for her because she loves board games. She has a whole closet full of board games. And so one of the games I love playing most is Scrabble. It is my number one favorite game to play, but I also don’t like to lose. She’s also really smart and I lose a lot. So how do I deal with this?
C. Thi Nguyen:
I think striving play is partially a cultivated psychological skill. I was taught by people that taught me to play games and to reflect in ways that were super useful. And a lot of the times the reflection is like, was that game interesting? Was that a fascinating game? And it’s completely different from whether you played well. To have someone be like, “Well, you won, but that was a cheap shot. You didn’t play interestingly.” Or, “Oh, you lost, but whoa, did you enjoy that? Was that interesting play?” That really I think cultivates an attitude of distance, of being able to distance yourself from the victory and an attitude that asks you to focus on the thing that really I think should matter in striving play, which is your experience of the process.
Debbie Millman:
You write at length about a phenomenon you call value capture, and that is one of the central tenets of the book. And you named value capture after regulatory capture, which is a problem in which government regulators go astray. Can you define what value capture means?
C. Thi Nguyen:
So value capture is what happens when your values are rich and subtle or developing in that direction. And then you get put in a social setting next to a simple, typically quantified rendition of those values. And then the simple one takes over. So examples are you go on Twitter to communicate to people and connect and you get obsessed with likes and follows. You start exercising for health, but you get obsessed with Fitbit or lowering your weight or increasing your total weight or your mileage. Or you go to philosophy because you love cool ideas, and then you get obsessed with where your publications are in the status ranking of possible publication venues.
And I just want to be super clear about something. Value capture is not the same as bad incentives. So a lot of people study something called perverse incentives, which are incentives that undercut a system, and it’s really important to understand perverse incentives. But when something is just an incentive, when someone’s just offering you incentives and they’re not in your soul, you can still trade off between the incentives and what you really care about. You can be like, “Well, I’ll work some for extra money, but I also care about my family, so I’m not going to do all those extra hours.” Value capture is when the external incentives or measures transfer into your core values and what you lose is an external standpoint to reflect on that particular metric.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
We’ve said enough to say the thing that I find really crucial in interactions with games is that you take on the scoring system and then you reflect from a standpoint outside the scoring system about whether it was a good game, a fun game, a valuable one, whether it pulled something out of you. And from an unscored standpoint, you ask yourself if that scoring system is good for you or not. A value capture is the case where you don’t do that anymore because the metrics have intruded into your core value and so taken over the standpoint from which you might have reflected on the scoring system. The scoring system becomes your value. So where is the place you’re going to stand to ask yourself whether that’s really actually good for you or not?
Debbie Millman:
This happened to me with Duolingo. So I started Duolingo a little over two years ago and quickly started learning French and was very proud of myself for learning French. And then something happened probably when I got up to the Diamond League because there was nowhere else to achieve upward too that I started to become obsessed with staying in the Diamond League and suddenly was looking for ways in which to make lots and lots of points as opposed to learn. And it took about six or seven months before I realized I don’t think I’m learning French anymore. So that was a reckoning.
C. Thi Nguyen:
There’s so many stories that look like this, and I mean, again, I’m not saying don’t use gamified apps, one way I put it is that value capture involves outsourcing your values. Another way to put it is that when you buy a gamified app, you’re buying a prefabricated extension to your will, and it does amp you up. It does increase your willpower, but for a fixed target. And that fixed target is never going to fully track what values, partially because the mechanical measuring systems are blunt and partially because they’re made by someone who’s not you, who’s very distant, and it can’t be tailored to your fine experience.
And I find that a lot of people’s interactions with this are like when you’re completely outside of space, when you’re just beginning, when I was just starting rock climbing, when someone’s just beginning to exercise, something like Fitbit or the rock climbing scoring system really does help get us in the right direction. And then once you’ve gotten that as a kickstart, often you start to get a more refined sense of what’s important and what’s important to you. And that’s usually going to veer away from that simplified scoring system. I think a lot of people start a thing and they glom onto the scoring system. That’s actually really good because like a game, it’s a good guide to get into the activity.
But the healthy lifecycle often looks like using it, and then at some point, backing away from it and being like, “This doesn’t quite work for me. Let me do this other version. Let me mod it.” I mean, the thing I’m describing of starting to do this thing, starting to be on Fitbit and then being like, “This worked for me for a while, but now it’s really just kind of annoying and it’s not helping me be healthy.” That’s not value capture because you’re seeing that the scoring system is not helping you achieve your real goal, which is health or mental health.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You’re gaming your own system.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah, yeah. Say what you mean by that.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you’re getting the benefit of feeling like you’re winning something without actually winning anything.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Playing against yourself and really losing while you’re winning.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yes, yes. Oh my God. Oh, I love that phrase. Do you know what that reminds me of? So Natasha Dow Schull is a scholar of designed addiction. She studies addictive video games and addictive video game poker, and there’s this thing that she describes that she found out about where video poker … One of the reasons you have these games that let you play 10 or 100 games at once for each poll is that you’ll lose most of them and win a few, and then the game can justify giving you tons of fireworks for the one penny you won, and the technical term for this is losses disguised as wins.
And I think you’ve just described something like that. To me, it’s very similar because many of the cases I’m thinking about are cases where you have become miserable or you’ve lost the sense of meaning, but you don’t notice because the scoring system is so loud that it overrides it. And so your boredom is disguised as a win because there’s this little thing that’s saying your number is going up and so you ignore the fact that you’re miserable.
Debbie Millman:
How can people avoid perverse incentives?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Perverse incentives are hard to avoid. So when you’re talking about incentives as in what the external system is doing, unless you’re a systems designer and maybe some people here are, maybe some of you are CEOs or VPs or superintendents of schools, then you should think about how you’re incentivizing your students or incentivizing employees. As people who are caught inside the system, we often don’t have a power over the incentives that are pushed at us, but we do at least have the power to pull back from value capture and leave the incentives as external incentives and not internalize them. We can hold them at arm’s length. We can just use them as much as we have to to get the resources in the world, but we can back away from them.
Debbie Millman:
Can you talk a little bit about the difference between imposed metrics and the ones we willingly embrace?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah. Willingly embrace here is really tricky.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Because I think a lot of the worst cases for me are very willing. When I started thinking about value capture, my first story was like, look, this is bad because it’s non-voluntary. But a lot of the cases like Duolingo and Fitbit are totally voluntary, and the problem isn’t that no one chose. This is why I’ve been using this outsourcing metaphor because outsourcing is often voluntary, but the problem is the weird fixity of the measure. And so the real problem is, I don’t know, something about not being reflectively careful about what you choose. This is why I think it helped me so much to think about this by comparing games and metrics constantly, because I think this is the clearest version of the vision.
In the worst case, the world presents you with something and it’s an institutional metric. And an institutional metric has certain design features. So a lot of my book draws on the work of Theodore Porter and Lorraine Dastin, who are two historians, who I think really explained what’s going on in institutional metrics. Porter’s way of putting it is that metrics are designed to be comprehensible across contexts, that qualitative justification, justification in written language is complex and open-end and dynamic, but it requires a lot of shared background context, and so it doesn’t travel well then it doesn’t aggregate easily.
And so to make an institutional metric, we strip away all the nuance, we cut out all the sensitivity, and we cut out everything that requires high context and we create a context invariant nugget that can travel easily, like letter grades, right? Very little information, very easy to travel. So the thing that Porter exposes for me is that the thing that makes metrics so powerful and so all-consuming, the fact that they’re comprehensible by everyone and they can integrate everyone, is precisely made by the process of removing context and sensitivity.
It’s not an accident. That is the design feature and the design bug in one, that is the design trade-off. So with a metric, if you’re value captured by an institutional metric, you have tied your values to something that’s constrained by that decontextualization. You’re targeting page views, you’re targeting publication rates, you’re targeting-
Debbie Millman:
Likes and followers.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Likes and followers. The end of the justification chain is something that is constrained by this decontextual demand. In the game ecosystem, what’s interesting is individual scoring systems are still constrained by this kind of hyper-clarity, right? Like the specification of every cow counts as one point, or that’s something that anyone can use that’s a decontextualized set of directions. But then your reason for adopting them is not bound by the scoring system. The fact that in the world of games you can move between games and choose games and that your reason for doing though is not constrained by the demand for instant decontextualization. The fact that they’re going to say, “I love this game, I want to play it. Why? Because, I don’t know, it’s got weird deep social vibes. I can’t say more.” Right?
That’s permissible and you can modify games. For me, some of the richest heroes are moral heroes, are indie game designers or people that mod and hack games or house rule them or change them, guided by their own weird, rich, illegible purposes. It’s not that games guarantee one and metrics guarantee the other. It is possible for a game to be socially all-consuming. I mean, if you’re in a small town and football is the only game in town and everybody has to play it, you don’t have that degree of freedom. It’s possible to try to cultivate a more careful attitude toward metrics to invent your own little personal one. But the background social structure really encourages reflection, change, exploration and modification in games because games are disconnected from each other.
And the fact that metrics are powerful precisely because they’re stable at scale is the thing that violently discourages us from tailoring them. Because what makes them powerful is precisely that they’ve been decontextualized. And then in that decontextualized form, I just have this image of a butterfly, a dead butterfly nailed to the wall. The fact that they’re rigid and ossified at scale is central to their design function.
Debbie Millman:
If someone listening senses that they’ve been organizing their life around the wrong score, what would be some of the questions you would consider they ask themselves as a way to begin to pivot?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Right. This is the simplest and dumbest one, but is this interesting? Does this make me happy in the long run? Am I better? That’s one version. It’s also, is this system doing what really matters? I mean, a lot of the times I think about this as a person under these systems, but a lot of the times I have to think about this as a person with power, moderate power over the systems. I design classrooms with grades, and I suspect a lot of listeners here are designing metrics and performance metrics and KPIs and reviewing systems for employees or people they manage. And in each of these cases, you have to articulate what actually matters and then ask as a question whether the metric captures it without presupposing that the thing that’s easily measured automatically is what’s important, presumptively.
And so I think asking that question is super important. And often one way to articulate it is just to think … To separately ask what really matters, and then when you look at a measure, ask yourself why that measure is where it is. I was looking for a good example of this for my book, and then I realized I’d been staring at the correct example for a year and a half in my life and I hadn’t realized it, which is screen time, right? I’ve got a six-year old and a nine-year old, and it’s really easy to become obsessed with, oh, technology’s bad, let’s reduce their screen time. And then if you actually look at the kid, screen time sometimes means dumb YouTube shorts that are awful. And sometimes it means he’s building interesting architecture in Minecraft and building logic gates for it.
And sometimes it means the dumbest possible clicker game. And sometimes it means that he’s animating his imagination on a stop-motion animation program. And I think what we should actually be asking is, which of these are creative? Which of these are interesting? Which of these are challenging? But that would actually require a conversation. And there’s no tracker that tracks that. And I think when you look at that, if you actually look at why we talk about screen time, it’s because we have a device that measures it automatically. It’s completely disattached from anything that actually matters, but it’s mechanically simple.
And I think when you start seeing the gap between the rationale for why we have a particular measurement system and what actually matters when you keep looking for that. I mean, I think I’ve created an attitude of hostility and suspicion towards metrics, although I also recognize that they’re sometimes very useful and valuable and you need them. But when you admit that they are simplified litmus tests that are useful in some circumstances for very specific interactions, but profoundly limited, and you make yourself very attentive to their limitations, then that becomes over time easy to back away from them.
Debbie Millman:
I have one last question for you. You referenced it before, the game Go.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And you share in The Score that the game Go is possibly the most beautiful of all games. Why do you feel that way?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Oh God. I think the part of the difficulty is with many games, you have to be involved in the intricacies of the game to see the beauty. And that’s actually one of the big lessons. One of the most interesting things I’ve learned is for all of these things, rock climbing, gardening, you got to spend a huge amount of time in it to see the special revelation. But I’ll take a stab. Here’s something interesting about Go that’s different from chess. Chess is one fight. Go is about 10 different fights that interrelate to each other, but they’re separate. And a big mistake you can make in Go is being stuck in one small fight and missing something important happening on the other part of the board.
So to play Go well, you have to cultivate in yourself an emotional outlook of constantly asking whether this fight is worthwhile. And you have to constantly be willing to step back from a fight you spent a lot of resources in because it’s not as valuable as a move somewhere else. And I think it’s also interestingly a game that cultivates reflectiveness and stepping back because you, every move, have to ask yourself whether this little fight you’re focusing on is actually worth it.
Debbie Millman:
I’ve spent my entire career thinking about brands as constructs, and your book allowed me to understand how that extends into the way that we organize the rules of our lives. And it has been an absolute privilege to learn in this way and to see the world in an entirely new way. And I just want to thank you for that. It’s been remarkable. I have to say that I rarely come across books that fundamentally change how I think about something and this has done that.
C. Thi Nguyen:
I am about to cry. I’m in my basement right now. As you probably know, this little patch of books behind me is my carefully constructed zoom window. This is the cold buggy disgusting basement that I spent three years alone in writing this book, mostly convinced that no one would ever give a crap. And so to hear you react like that is unbelievably gratifying and moving. So thank you.
Debbie Millman:
C. Thi Nguyen, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Thank you so much. It’s been amazing.
Debbie Millman:
C. Thi Nguyen’s latest book is The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game. You can read more about Thi at objectionable.net. This is the 21st year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.