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The Score: Gamifying the Nature of Metrics with Thi Nguyen
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In this conversation, the discussion with C. Thi Nguyen revolves around the nature of metrics, qualitative knowledge, and the duality of scoring systems, particularly in the context of climbing. The speaker shares personal experiences with climbing as a case study to illustrate how scoring systems can both enhance and detract from the experience. The conversation delves into the beauty of climbing, the subtlety of value in metrics, and the importance of savoring moments in games. It also explores the tension between purpose and game mechanics, the role of enjoyment, and the complexities of scoring systems in both games and life. Ultimately, the conversation highlights the challenges of balancing values in decision-making and the risks associated with the gamification of various aspects of life.
Takeaways
- Metrics can miss the subtlety of qualitative knowledge.
- Scoring systems can enhance or detract from experiences.
- Climbing serves as a unique case study for scoring systems.
- The beauty of climbing lies in its scoring system.
- Values can become obscured when metrics are prioritized.
- Games allow for exploration of different scoring systems.
- Achievement play focuses on winning, while striving play values the process.
- External expectations can pressure individuals to conform to metrics.
- The addictive nature of games can lead to negative experiences.
Chapters
- 00:00 The Intricacies of Portability and Judgment
- 01:12 Introduction and Social Media Presence
- 03:40 The Value of Climbing and Scoring Systems
- 07:16 The Impact of Numbers in Climbing
- 09:42 Savoring the Moment vs. Obsession with Scoring
- 10:59 Goals vs. Purpose in Games
- 12:39 Understanding Value Capture
- 17:53 The Shift in Standards of Success
- 20:33 The Limitations of Metrics
- 21:42 Games as a Reflection of Human Desire
- 24:37 The Purpose Behind Scoring Systems
- 26:07 The Magic Circle of Games
- 29:15 Achievement Play vs. Striving Play
- 34:47 When Games Become Unsafe
- 38:21 The Pitfalls of Portability in Metrics
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Transcript
Hidden Promises in Numbers
00:00:00
Speaker
There's a strange promise hidden inside numbers. We're taught that if we measure something carefully enough, count it, rank it, and track it, then we'll finally understand it.
00:00:11
Speaker
Progress will become visible. Improvement will feel real. Life will make sense, and sometimes that works. But sometimes numbers quietly change the question we're answering.
Climbing and the Elegance of Movement
00:00:24
Speaker
Today's episode starts with a rock climber in a university gym. He's not a superhero climber and not a peak-bagging adrenaline junkie, just a tired person who thought climbing was going to be all about brute force and range, and instead discovered something much stranger.
00:00:44
Speaker
They discovered
Introduction to Ti Nguyen and 'The Score'
00:00:45
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elegance. I'm Autumn Feneff, and on this episode of Breaking Math, we're joined by Ti Nguyen, a professor at the University of Utah. Hi! And we're here to talk about his latest book, The Score, where we explore how discovery opens doors to much larger questions, especially what happens when the score stops being a tool and starts telling us who we are. Now, tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired
Philosophy and Metrics
00:01:16
Speaker
the book. So the book comes from two directions. One of the specialties I've had, the really weird specialty I have in philosophy is philosophy of games. I've been, my first piece of academic work, my first academic book was a book called Games Agency as Art that was trying to explain what games were and what made them special. And part of this was about how point systems sculpted what we did in games, how point systems, like everything from like how we score
00:01:43
Speaker
points in basketball to like what gives you experience points in an indie tabletop role-playing game, how that changes the nature of your action, how that shapes what you do. That's half
Challenges of Metric-Based Evaluation
00:01:53
Speaker
of what I've been doing. And the other half is trying to understand how information flows in a society. I work in a field called social epistemology, which tries to understand how knowledge gets made, how trust gets sculpted, and how information gets transferred socially. And on that side, I've been really interested in the nature of metrics. And i mean, in my at my first job, I was for a long time the learning
00:02:21
Speaker
outcomes liaison for my philosophy department, which meant that I was supposed to report in clear, crisp, quantified form, objectively true metrics for how well we were teaching people philosophy. And I started worrying a lot about the basic dynamic of metrics in an institution and what got captured and what
Joy vs. Institutional Metrics in Games
00:02:40
Speaker
didn't.
00:02:40
Speaker
And where what actually happened was for a while, I realized that out of my game stuff, I had this picture of how clear, explicit scoring systems were like the gateway to play, to joy, to discovering new narratives, to discovering new kinds of action. And then I had another story from the other half of my work. about how institutional scoring systems that were clear and explicit missed everything that was important and sucked the life out of education, art, and community. And then I realized that these two pictures were deeply intentioned. And I had to explain to myself how these two things could be and how how I could square how different scoring systems were in two different parts of my life. I find that to be very interesting. That makes me think of the show Matlock. And it's like, both things can be true. Both things can be true. Both both things can be true. yeah Understanding the fine difference is the important. Absolutely.
Climbing's Personal Scoring System
00:03:41
Speaker
Now, when you start the book, you open it with rock climbing. And it's a moment where you felt not great, right? Yep.
00:03:51
Speaker
It was you were anxious, overworked, kind of at war with yourself. yeah Now, why did you start there and what did you think that climbing was going to give you? And what did it give you instead? Yeah. I mean, climbing is a really interesting case for me as one of the most positive interactions with a scoring system I can think of. the The two places I tried to start were my best and worst experience with a scoring system. So climbing is super interesting because climbing is a case study for me in how much I didn't understand the value of an activity. Like until I found climbing in my mid-20s, I was a disembodied life of the mind intellectual.
00:04:29
Speaker
I like basically destroyed my body for the sake of reading and like being on the computer. I didn't find any value in bodily
Subtlety and Creativity in Climbing
00:04:38
Speaker
movement at all. What i what i I basically thought was I needed to get some exercise. There was some minimum calories I had to burn. And it was this thing that I was supposed to do to meet some external standard. And that was it.
00:04:49
Speaker
And then I wandered into climbing. And then climbing, climbing is a really interesting game because it has both a clear restriction, which is you're not supposed to use any tools. You're not supposed to use ropes to go up. You're not supposed to use like spikes or grappling hooks you're just supposed to use your hands and your feet and then it has the scoring system that tells you that you get the the victory is getting to the top and then things are graded by difficulty and so for the first time i was plunged into this activity where the path to victory was being subtler with my body and being more creative with my body and climbing is like very weirdly amplifying right like i i mean before i started climbing i had no idea where my hips were at any moment and climbing
00:05:33
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tells you to climb this really delicate, difficult thing. And if you lose track of where your hips are, you fall off. So it it became this like what it was telling me to do, the scoring system it was giving me and the way it punished me for failing were this feedback loop that like attenuated me to both my body and then to like this new thing I had never experienced before, which was how beautiful it could be to be just like lost in like subtle, interesting movement. That was like, that was a journey into a different kind of value that I got pushed into because of a game with a hyper simple victory condition. Now, you just didn't ever describe that as adrenaline. It's solving these various puzzles.
00:06:18
Speaker
One of the interesting things about climbing was it was exactly this. So before I started climbing, my image of climbing was is either like a strength bro or adrenaline sport or a thrill-thinking sport. And I was completely wrong.
00:06:30
Speaker
Climbing is like delicate puzzle solving. And of the things you find in Errand Climbing is a lot of philosophers love climbing. a lot of mathematicians love climbing. My spouse is a chemist. I took her climbing. Just like any kind of like tiny technical puzzle solving mentality just gloms onto that. But instead of doing it like in my head, I was doing it with my body. i think one of the background thoughts for the entire book is that the value of things is often subtle and not clear on their face. And when you're not in it, you can get it wrong.
00:06:58
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And when you're not in climbing, it looks, it doesn't make sense to you why you would be so clarifying and beautiful. And you have to immerse yourself in it. And then once you do that, you totally see why. You totally see why people, especially people that like games and puzzles, would just be drawn to this thing. Absolutely.
Impact of Numbers and Rankings
00:07:17
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Now, after that, you talk about something very modern that's sneaking in. And it's because even in something physical and joyful as climbing, we start keeping scores, right? So very quickly, climbing introduces grades, numbers, rankings, levels. And at what point did you notice the numbers starting to matter more? It's super interesting. The numbers always matter me for climbing. And for a long time, they actually help. this is like This is why I think climbing is such an interesting example for me. Because there's a certain really simple thing you can say here. Like, scoring systems are bad. Competitiveness is bad. Ranking systems are bad. And that that wasn't my experience with climbing. My experience with climbing was, for a really long time, for years, the kind of clear, simple, external scoring system of climbing that came from other people, actually showed me a new kind of beauty I hadn't experienced before. And it was because the scoring system was built along this kind of arcane difficulty that I was too inexperienced to know about. And that happened for years. And then at some point
Adapting Climbing Metrics for Joy
00:08:23
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it stopped working. So I think I'd been climbing for like five years.
00:08:26
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And then I hit, I think, the wall for both my body and time, you know. Professor, parent, almost no time. And it suddenly turned out at that point that following the standard difficulty ranking stopped giving me the thing he was giving me before. It started becoming grueling. It started becoming miserable. And so I ended up having to basically, i think of it as like reconceiving the scoring system. Like had to step back from the given one and think like, no, I needed to be showing doing something else. So what I've ended up doing is actually โ
00:08:58
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trying to find moderate difficulty climbs and then try to do them as beautifully and elegantly as possible, which is ah ah which is my own version of it's a homebrew scoring system. And I think like the standard scoring system got me into the space, taught me how to be a climber in general. And then at some point when it stopped working for me, had to find my own like peculiar remix of the scoring system that still has some relation to the original. at some point when you're thinking about the score, you just have to savor that moment. And I'm curious, you talk about Shearwood in the book a little bit. why
00:09:40
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did that land so hard for you? when you I mean, it's super, there's there's also this weird paradox. So Sherwood is one of the people I started climbing with. And there was a time where I was obsessed with just like getting the next climb, like ticking it off, like counting as having the next score. And I wasn't savoring the movement. And he was the one that told me, he was like, no, no.
00:10:02
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you got you got You have to not just focus on whether or not you're winning. You have to focus on how your body is feeling. and you have to savor the moment. moment So there's one we there's one important thing, which is that over-obsession with the scoring system can kind of pull you out of this. But I think there's another part of this puzzle, too, which is if you ignore the scoring system completely, you might never have gotten into the situation in the first place.
Purpose and Satisfaction in Games
00:10:29
Speaker
And you might never have guided yourself in the first place in the way that would put you. Like, over-obsession with the scoring system blocks me from that kind of beauty. If I had never encountered it and never tried to win on those terms, I also never would have experienced that kind of beauty. So that essentially changes the way that you think of winning.
00:10:48
Speaker
So get rid of just a score, just a number, take that. And it kind of asks you, what do you want as an outcome? And that changes it for you to essentially win, right? Yeah, I mean, so...
00:11:01
Speaker
i so in a lot of I think the crucial distinction for thinking about games is thinking about the difference between the goal of a game and the purpose of a game. So the goal of a game is the thing you're aiming at doing during the game.
00:11:16
Speaker
And the purpose of the game is why you play it. The larger purpose, like the larger reason, and sometimes they's the same. Some people just want to win because they want to win. Like some people want to win at poker to make money. But I climb, like to climb, the goal of climbing is to get to the top of the climb and to get the top of more difficult climbs. And my purpose for climbing is to clear out my mind and soul and to experience beauty in my body. Or there are party games I play where in order to have fun, you have to try really hard to win. But the reason you're playing is to chill out and have a good time. And even if you lost and had a good time and relaxed and enjoyed yourself with your friends, then you actually...
00:11:58
Speaker
did the thing like you did what you wanted you did what you exactly actually cared about but the weird again the weird puzzle of games is in many cases you can't aim for that purpose directly i can't just go to the rock wall and be like time to relax it's not going to happen i have to focus i can't go to a party and be like let's chill out and relax you know what the weird thing that works is you have to focus on winning at like twister or charades and that's the magic happens via that route But if you over-focus on winning, then you won't have fun. So this weird, it's like this weird mostly but not perfect absorption where you're mostly trying to win, but also kind of step back realizing that winning is not, is the goal but not the purpose. Now, changing topics just a little bit here.
00:12:43
Speaker
At one point in the book, you talk when you're talking about games, you do something really
Value Capture and the Loss of Rich Values
00:12:49
Speaker
important. Now, you give this feeling a name because once something has a name, you can finally see it.
00:12:56
Speaker
You call this value capture. When things are simplified, metrics quietly replace richer values. Now, why is this so hard to notice while it's happening? Right.
00:13:08
Speaker
Great question. So value capture is what happens when, so it's a term I invented for this book. And for me, value capture is what happened happens when your values are rich and subtle or in the process of developing that way. And you get put in a simplified, you you put it in you get put in an institution or a social setting that offers you simplified, typically quantified versions of those values.
00:13:34
Speaker
And then the simplified ones take over. So going to school out of a love of education or learning and coming out obsessed with your GPA or going into academia because you are fascinated by philosophical questions and then coming out obsessed with your citation rates and the status of the journals you're published in or becoming a journalist or a podcaster to communicate something interesting and then becoming obsessed with your subscriber account or your page views or your follower account.
00:14:03
Speaker
Or i mean I think another really clear case is going, starting some fitness program for the sake of feeling better and being more fit, and then coming out obsessed with step counts or your weight or your BMI. So in all of these cases, there's this there's this gap. There's this gap between what actually matters and how we measure it.
00:14:23
Speaker
The way that we measure things in institutions, which is going to be the heart of what we need to talk about to understand value capture is has this basically simplifying force.
Metrics Shifting Academic Values
00:14:32
Speaker
And your question was, why is it hard to notice? And it's really like, i don't know, it's really, in some sense, it is very puzzling, like right? Like, I'm in this for health. I'm in this for fun. I'm in this for love. And then at the end of the day, like, I went into philosophy because the questions were exciting to me and they were thrilling. And by the end of my graduate career, in which I had been fully value captured by the status and ranking system inside my profession, I was working on boring crap that I did not care about because it would get me highly ranked publications. It might me get me more citations and more countable status, right? Yeah. And and you see, and it's also like the dumbest place to do it. Like, why do the most idiotic thing possible, which is devoting your life to philosophy, only to end up doing something boring to advance up some external ranking system? Yeah. I mean, it's kind of, i think, to me, an unsolved puzzle psychologically of why we do this. There's a ton of sociology and a ton of anthropology and a ton of history that has observed the way that human beings just orient so quickly towards these systems. I have a few theories. One is that they just speak louder.
00:15:41
Speaker
Right. It's really when when you have on the one hand something like a measure like weight loss or more citations or greater return on investment. And on the other side, you have something so like weirdly. i mean, actually, let me give you let me give you a more controversial example. This is example I've been really interested in for public health decisions since ah during the COVID pandemic. I think there was a collision between two values. One value is the value of saving lives.
00:16:10
Speaker
which is very, very easy to count publicly. And the other set of values are values having to do with mental health, maintaining community, maintaining various kinds of traditions. And it's not like I'm saying saving lives isn't important.
00:16:22
Speaker
But what I'm saying is there was there was a complex balancing act. And instead of engaging that complex balancing act, a lot of the times it was really easy just to optimize for lives saved and to ignore everything else because one of those things was very clearly accountable. People are going to be mad about me for this example. But i mean does it like I mean, other examples are just like, I mean, another example that's really close is Food and nutrition, it's really easy to say saturated fats are associated with higher heart attack rates. And there's no easy count for like, yes, but they're a delicious part of longstanding, beautiful culinary traditions and they make me happy.
Metrics vs. Nuanced Values
00:17:00
Speaker
And one of these things, there's some effect where the simplicity and clarity of the count, both internally and in external systems of justification, just seems to like speak louder.
00:17:11
Speaker
And that's the thing that just, that's the best explanation I have for it It just seems to ring louder in people's heads and capture our attention. Absolutely. But at one point, that shift almost feels painful. We start it for one reason, that goal, and then you add this additional value capture. I'm just going to throw this example. I even think for marketing, right? Say your goal is like 10,000 ten thousand 10,000 followers on a social media platform. And you get to that.
00:17:43
Speaker
You get to that ranking. And then what? Because now those rankings subtly rewrite what we felt when we were thinking about our outcomes. Yeah, I mean, maybe let me try this way you're putting it. One of the interesting things for me about but value capture is what's changing in you is your standards for evaluating success. And that's why it's so pernicious, right? Like, I think that it would be here's a fine way to interact with clear external metrics. Let's say I guess.
00:18:13
Speaker
take I take a Fitbit. I'm like, this will help me get exercising. it This will help me feel good. And then I use it for a while. And then I check in and I'm like, is this still helping me feel good? And if the answer is yes, I keep doing it. And if the answer is no, right, not just feel good, but like.
00:18:29
Speaker
I actually knew someone whose knees were starting to hurt from walking too much, and they like wore out their knees to hit their step counts. right so So if you have an evaluative stance that's distinct from the simplified metricโ It becomes easier to be like, oh, this isn't doing the thing. The problem is a lot of the times the metric itself is very clear and loud.
00:18:52
Speaker
And then the thing that should be on top, the thing that should be authoritative, our value system, a lot of those signals are really quiet. And a lot of those signals look to me like signals of like feeling happy, feeling satisfied, feeling bored, like noticing that you're disengaged, noticing that you are full of, that doing one kind of activity makes you full of life and doing something else makes you feel dead inside. And if the metrics are particularly loud enough, then it becomes easy to ignore the quiet voice of joy and sorrow. And then you don't have a standpoint to correct a bad metric from. it like if If a bad metric captures the way you evaluate how things are going, then you'll just be like, it doesn't matter if i'm miserable. Look, I've got more numbers. it doesn't matter if what I'm saying is crap. Look, my numbers are higher.
00:19:37
Speaker
Right? I think something like that is more of a standard engineering perspective instead of just something that humanizes your scores. can you see Can you say more about what the standard engineering perspective is? So I would say you hit that goal, you hit that number.
00:19:55
Speaker
You don't have to feel it. It's just looking at like a KPI dashboard. Yeah, exactly. And if you're looking at your metrics of what you want to attain, sometimes we don't even think about the outcomes or the greater picture of something that it's what it's going
Failure of Metrics to Capture Importance
00:20:11
Speaker
to humanize. Yeah, I mean, the...
00:20:14
Speaker
The really interesting question for me became, i mean, there's a conversation you can ask about this sometimes where first thing is for me to say, like, look, if you pay attention to these metrics, you'll miss what's really important.
00:20:25
Speaker
And the response is, oh, the problem here is those are just bad metrics. We just need to build better metrics that better capture what's really important. And I think the thing that I've been slowly figuring out with the help of a lot of really interesting scholarship, especially from a field called science and technology studies, is that there is a deep reason why we should expect metrics to fail to reliably capture what's really important and what's humanly important because of the way that metrics and other kinds of data systems are built at institutional scale. That there's some profound tension between the ways that large bureaucracies and large collections of people can keep track of things together and what's really important. Absolutely. Now, let's zoom out on this picture a little bit more. And I love how you just didn't stop at climbing or academia, for examples in the book. You also start noticing patterns everywhere. And that's really when
00:21:26
Speaker
games enter the picture right so when you're scoring systems it doesn't just measure behavior but they tell you kind of what they want in the end why are games so upfront about that
Transparency in Games vs. Real Life
00:21:39
Speaker
while real life pretends not to be That's ah that's a super good question. i mean, there are two things. A scoring system does two things. It tells you what to want, and then it has a reason for being. And I think these are really, really, we have to keep track of these two different novels. One of the inspirations for a lot of my games work was this moment from my favorite European board game designer, Rainer Knitia. It's like gene the Mozart of European board game design. And he was a mathematician and he yeah he said he is a mathematician. He said in in a lecture that the most important thing in his game design toolbox was the scoring system because the point system told the players what to care about. but It tells you what desires you need to take on to play the game.
00:22:26
Speaker
And if you actually look at his games, he's like this extraordinary artist of interesting different scoring systems. So, for example, there's one of his great games, Tigris and Euphrates. You're collecting in four different colors, right? Have you played Tigris? Yes. Okay. So, you know, like, you're collecting in four different colors. And in other games, you would be aiming at whatever you are aiming to collect the most of one thing or to collect the
Critique of Educational Grading Systems
00:22:49
Speaker
most overall. And he tells you that you have to collect four different colors And your score at the end of the game is whichever color you have the least of. And suddenly this completely transforms. You're now trying to maintain a balanced portfolio. Now you're like hyper-focused on your weakness. Now you, instead of just being able to optimize for one good color, you have to be like, okay, what's what's my weakness? Then you have to look at other people. They're like, oh, what's their weakness? They might be strong in everything, but they they don't have much green. God, I can block them in green. And so that little bit of the the scoring system orients...
00:23:19
Speaker
You during the game. So that's level one. The second thing is that I think game designers use scoring systems to get people for some other purpose. And what that purpose is in games, usually that purpose is fun or interestingness, but in other places, it's something different. So I've become really convinced by, especially by a paper called Making the Grade, the history of the A to F marking scheme in American education, that That grades in America, we actually know that clear ranked grading systems tend to decrease student education, right? Students tend to hyper-focus on tests, hyper-focus on grades, stop learning out of curiosity, stop exploring, and stop learning anything that won't get them to the grade. So it's very clear that that scoring system doesn't serve the purpose of happiness or the purpose of education. What purpose does it serve? It seems pretty clear from their analysis that it serves the purpose of employers. And in particular, employers looking to be able to readily hire employees that can be certified to serve some purpose so that they can fire people and hire new people at will.
00:24:25
Speaker
to perform a particular function. So it serves, so there's a scoring system where I think what it's telling students to do is study for the test, but what it's, the true purpose it serves, its real interest is creating an easily employable, interchangeable workforce for large-scale corporate interests. Okay, so your big question was, why is this so clear in games and why is it so hidden in institutions? There's a lot of reasons for this, but I think one of the biggest in games is games surface it because games are temporary and different.
00:25:00
Speaker
mean, part of the center of what a game is. So one of the core ideas from ah the scholarship of games that comes from... um An early 20th century anthropologist named Johann Hoseke is that what games are and what play is, is something that occurs in a magic circle. And what a magic circle is, is that a space and time that's detached from ordinary life. Where you transition into it and you take on different roles and different goals.
00:25:25
Speaker
You know, like my spouse and I are loving and supportive of each other. And then we pick up a board game and now we're murdering each other. Right. Now we're out to destroy each other. And then the game ends and then it's over. It doesn't matter. i mean, whether, you know, she blocked my great move and destroyed my plans. That's isolated to the game. And because they're isolated, we can have so many of them. I think one of the huge differences is that a lot of people have never reflected on what GPA is and what it can do, because of what the grading system can do, because they've never experienced any alternative. If you've lived your entire life inside one pervasive scoring system, I think it's often, it becomes, and the way that some of the science and technology studies people people put it is that when a technology or a way of thinking becomes pervasive, it becomes infrastructure and it goes into the background. You just start to assume that's the only way things could be. But the experience of games is very different.
Impact of Scoring Systems on Gaming
00:26:21
Speaker
You're constantly moving between scoring systems and seeing how little changes radically change the experience. I've been currently like obsessed with indie tabletop role-playing games and just... Yes.
00:26:33
Speaker
Right? is this Okay. It's not just you. It's not just you. Good. to tell Give me the background of that. Yeah. Of course. I'm a competitive Magic the Gathering player. Like, top eight, constantly ranked. I play Magic the Gathering. ah i One of my friends ended up doing, ah it's called Isekai Realms. And they create a scenario and you roleplay as yourself. And this has even gone to DragonCon. Hey, Chris. Yes, I'm putting in a plug for you mid-show, dude. have you Have you played games ahead.
00:27:07
Speaker
Do you know games like Apocalypse World and Fate and Lady Blackbird and Plays of the Dark? Yes, I have. Okay. A little bit. I'm not, like, always playing it, but I am familiar. I mean, these are suchโI mean, if you want to talk about whyโthis is such a good question. Why has it become surfaced, I think? I mean, you can actually have thisโI think I had a mirrorโa lot of us had a mirror of this experience with Dungeons & Dragons. So I played Dungeons & Dragons for much of my childhood. And it was fine. It was good. We had some good times. We had a lot of slow times. But you kind assume if that's the only system you've ever played, that's the only way things could be. And then I become fascinated with this set of indie designers who started screwing with the point and rule systems. So one of my favorites, so one of the problems I had growing up that these people helped me articulate with Dungeons & Dragons is you may have a low intelligence score, but nothing motivates you to play dumb, right? You just have low roles. On the other hand, fate gives you these characteristics. You might be stubborn, you might be a drunkard, you might be impetuous, and it gives you points for screwing up in character.
00:28:17
Speaker
And then you can use those points to activate those same characteristics to get bonuses on rolls. Right. Of course. Or ah Lady Blackbird, the rule where you get back your stamina points by inventing shared backstory and character. Once you experience rule sets like this, you can you start to see how finally tiny, tiny little rules changes can completely change your experience of the game.
00:28:41
Speaker
And tiny little scoring system changes can completely change your experience of the game. And it's hard to be complacent when you realize how much variety there is and how much the specific detail of the scoring system matters for your experience. Of course.
00:28:56
Speaker
I'm just thinking about also at one point when you're talking about these different experiences, you have something called achievement play versus striving play. Yeah.
00:29:08
Speaker
Now, I'm curious, why do striving players care intensely about the moment, but not afterwards? Okay. So I think, so the definition of games I'm using comes from a philosopher named Bernard Suits. And he says that what a game is, is to play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of struggling against them. One way to put it is that in games, obstacles are a central part of the value, right? So he thinks in non-game life,
00:29:38
Speaker
We just have some thing we're trying to do. Like I'm trying to get to this particular point in space and I just do it as efficiently as possible by any means necessary. But in a game, we get a restriction. So if you're running a marathon, you're supposed to get to a particular point, but you have to do it under a lot of restrictions. No shortcuts, no cars, no bicycles, right? But the point is it doesn't count as crossing the finish line of a marathon unless you did it under certain restrictions. So this shows you that the struggle is central to the value.
00:30:07
Speaker
So what you're talking about, this difference between achievement in striving play, is something that it's the center of my first book on games. And what i what I was trying to say was that there was that if you read suits, one of the things you can see is that even within games, there are two different motivational postures. You can be an achievement player or a striving player.
00:30:27
Speaker
So an achievement player is someone who cares about a game for the sake of the win. The reason they play is they want to win. They have to win a certain way. Like if you're competitive in marathon running, you want to win at marathons, right? You want to win by running, but what you want is to win at running.
00:30:42
Speaker
A striving player is someone whose main goal, who's sorry, whose main purpose, whose main value is to be immersed in the process, in the
Striving for Process vs. Winning
00:30:52
Speaker
struggle itself. And they don't actually care about the wind. But in order to have that immersion, they have to temporarily care about the wind, right? So me rock climbing, I don't actually care about getting the top. I just need to clear my head and relax and chill down. But I can't do that unless I actually focus with all my might and want to like, I can't relax unless I get absorbed. And I can't get absorbed unless I really want to get to the top. And so I have to get myself to want to get to the top properly. But that's just temporary. right One way to put it is that in ordinary life, we take the means for the sake of the end. But in game life, we take the ends for the sake of the means, if that makes sense. Yes. We try to win to have a struggle. So that's just some of us.
00:31:36
Speaker
So you asked, like, what is it? Why is it temporary? This is just like... This is just like the... I don't think you have to be this way. No one has to be a striving player. But a mark of a striving player is that your interest in winning is only temporary. So I think like here's an example of a place where I'm a striving player.
00:31:55
Speaker
So my spouse and I play a lot of board games and we're very, very differently skilled. So she is a chemist and she is incredibly good at spatial manipulation, precise math and geometric work. And I...
00:32:07
Speaker
I'm an asshole and I am good at manipulation and deceit and screw and like making moves that confuse people. Like I remember playing one time against a person in chess and they were like, I sometimes feel like you're just playing to exhaust like the logical space for me. I'm like, yes, actually, that's what I'm doing. I know what makes you uncomfortable and I'm making moves to make you uncomfortable, to attack your resources of like energy, right? That that is how I play. um And you're shaking your head at me. Like, I would never want to play Magic with you.
00:32:38
Speaker
I don't like Magic. You don't like Magic the Gathering? i I mean, i have specific my I prefer Richard Garfield's game that he made right after Magic, Netrunner. Okay, we can have that. Okay.
00:32:50
Speaker
Okay. Okay. I have โ there's also this thing, though, where magic is a game. There are some games โ so I was a Go player for a long time. And there are some games that want to take over your entire life. And you get that you get the most out of them if you devote everything to them. And if I were to do that, I would do that with Go.
00:33:06
Speaker
But since I'm not doing that, then I don't โ like, as a dilettante, there are many other games that I โ And anyway, so so with my so in most games, either my spouse or I are naturally better.
00:33:20
Speaker
But once in a while, we find a game where we're evenly matched because the game permits both deceit and geometrical thinking. And then we'll have delicious games. And then I will find a strategy guide.
00:33:31
Speaker
And my spouse will never read strategy guides. So here's the choice I have. Either read the strategy guide and win or don't. So here here here's my observation. If I was an achievement player, there's only one rational thing to do.
00:33:43
Speaker
Read the strategy guide and win. I do not read the strategy guide because i want to have interesting fights. So this is, to me, what this shows me is that my interest in winning is not galactic. I don't actually deeply want to win because there's an easy way to do that. Read the strategy guide, right?
00:34:00
Speaker
My sauce is not going to do it. But what I actually do is avoid moves that would make me more likely to win in the long term. But to play so that in the game, I can absorb myself in an interest in winning in the short term to have a cool struggle. But that fact, the fact that I avoid reading the strategy guide, I think reveals to me that winning for me is a short term interest that I use to have an interest interesting struggle and not like a galactic life spanning interest.
00:34:27
Speaker
It's not a real value. Absolutely. Now, I'm curious, when do games stop being
Game Attitudes in Real Life
00:34:34
Speaker
safe? Because I know at one point you end up talking about when you have ah scoring systems, these sometimes will escape the board game and things get really weird.
00:34:47
Speaker
Yeah. i mean when Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. So there are two things that can escape. One is scoring systems and the other is attitudes. And it's related. So one of the things that makes, i mean, I think here's an easy to answer it. I can tell you what makes games really safe. So one of the things that makes games safe is that the points of a game are detached from ordinary life. Who gets more points in a board game does not usually, in a normal context, have consequences outside of it, which is why it's okay for me to completely rip apart my spouse's or friend's position in the game and just, like, end their, like, resource machine with a brutal blow. Because it nothing hangs on that, Right. And that, I mean, that's that between that and the fact that we're in the game voluntarily.
00:35:36
Speaker
So in the ideal case, we have volunteered to be in a game because we enjoy we all enjoy the struggle. And we've agreed to have this particular struggle over essentially meaningless points for the sake of fun. And the interesting thing is we can all have fun even if some us lose terribly.
00:35:52
Speaker
That is completely different from a case where a scoring system is tied to real world financial security or real world goods. And then somebody, i don't know, let's call them Jeff, tries to maximize all out their score, their financial score. And as a consequence, this alters the landscape of financial security for people in the real world. So the answer is what makes games safe is that there are these little artificial environments. and And not all games are like this, right? Some games are tied to real world things and this makes them less safe. The safety comes from their artificiality and their disposability. But if you take that attitude, the most unsafe possible thing is to take the attitude that's permitted in games of being all out, destroy everything, like
00:36:39
Speaker
Get ah as many points as in any way I can and then take that into, I don't know, the world of finance and screw with the world financial markets and do anything and everything out of hyper focus on rank pumping up your financial score. That is actually, yes. The other example that I would use is also gambling, right?
00:37:01
Speaker
It's the addictive abilities that this has and you can lose it all. Yeah. I mean, gambling is a great example because it shows us another, there's another way the games can be unsafe in a very different way, which is what seems to make games good is that we can, we have the will and the freedom to navigate between them and pick the ones that suit us and make us feel good. And we can be trapped in a game. Some games were bad games. Sometimes we're trapped in bad games because the world forces us to play them. This is why I hate the gamification of education, You don't want to force students to play games on which their careers depend. but But another way to do it is to addict people. I mean, one of the big mysteries to me is that you can be wrong about whether you're having a good time.
00:37:44
Speaker
And my experience of this was with a computer game, Civilization, which I spent years, months of my life at least, possibly years, convinced I was having a good time, horribly addicted. And then afterwards thinking to myself, no, that I regret that. I have no memory of that. There is nothing but micro-optimization misery for me. And... I thought I was having fun, but I was wrong.
00:38:06
Speaker
i think that's- But you're just in the game and just whatever you're doing, it's like hyper fixating on it. Yep. Yep. Yep. yep Now, I think that brings it to the point that sometimes data travels well, but judgment doesn't. Yes.
Data vs. Judgment Across Contexts
00:38:21
Speaker
Now, are there some kinds of values that simply disappear when portability becomes a top priority? yeah Yeah. Yeah. So this is this is ah this is this is, I think, when I was starting to write this book, it started out of an instinct. People were like, oh, you love games. You must love the gamification of work and education. And I was like, no. If you actually understand the joy of games and play, you know that's the death.
00:38:46
Speaker
And then I started to explain why. And I started thinking in terms of this this gap, right, this gap between what's important and what's really valuable. And the worry that when you say things like this, people are always like, oh, that's just bad metrics. Let's let's fix fix the metrics. And what I was really interested in was the possibility that metrics inherently miss what's important. And i think I found a really good explanation why metrics, institutional metrics and institutional data collection systems will invariably miss what is really important in human life. So you have this idea that data travels well, but judgment doesn't.
00:39:25
Speaker
Now, what kinds of values simply disappear when portability becomes a top priority? yeah that's That is, I think, the most important question. So one way to think about this whole mess is to think about that what metrics are doing is they are coordinating us.
Quantitative Methods vs. Qualitative Experience
00:39:46
Speaker
And the way they coordinate us they coordinate us is by ensuring that we're counting the same way together. they're making They're putting us on the kind of like same standardized way of counting, which when we're talking about values is the same standardized way of evaluating. When I was trying to figure out this whole mess and to figure out what was so weird about metrics, about why gamification seemed to miss something, I kept giving these examples of bad metrics. And the responses would always be like, oh,
00:40:15
Speaker
These are bad metrics in particular, but we can fix them. We can make it better, right? We just need to we need to close the gap. And like what I'm really interested in is the possibility that there is some intrinsic tension between much of what's valuable in our lives and the way that institutions count together. And the the thing that taught me the most about this was...
00:40:37
Speaker
Two particular scholars. One is Theodore Porter. The other is Lorraine Dastin. Both of them are from a field called science and technology studies. And they're really, they're both historians, actually. And they're both really interested in the social origin of the idea of objectivity. Theodore Porter puts it this way. He says, look, so in his book, Trust in Numbers, he's trying to figure out why politicians and administrators so often reach for quantified justification, even when we know that the metrics are bad?
00:41:05
Speaker
And his answer was to think about the basic different nature of qualitative and quantitative ways of knowing. He doesn't think that either is inherently better or worse. He thinks they're good at different things. And the problem comes when we compulsively reach for the quantitative, even when situations where qualitative knowledge might be more... ah appropriate So he puts it this way.
00:41:26
Speaker
qualitative ways of knowing writing things out in words is very open-ended context sensitiveive very reactive very dynamic but it travels badly between contexts because it requires a lot of shared background knowledge to understand So if I write, you know, commentary on my student's paper that responds to what they're trying to do, thinks about their relative creativity versus rigor versus scholarship about the text, that is really meaningful to us in our class context, but it won't travel easily to like the business dean. It certainly won't...
00:41:58
Speaker
travel easily to, say, a Silicon Valley hirering hiring person. Because of the open-endedness, all these qualitative reports don't aggregate easily, right? ands And that's part of what's going on, right? Because each of us is writing along different dimensions and we've selected the dimensions of importance tailor-made to the particular context, we can't add them up easily because they're not measuring the same thing. In quantitative ways of knowing, and I want to especially since I know this is a math podcast, and to be really clear, I'm not talking about quantification in principle. I'm talking about quantification as it occurs inside institutions and bureaucracies, right? This is this is what we're analyzing. He says the way that quantification works in large-scale institutions is that we identify a stable context invariant kernel, something that can be understood by everyone, no matter their background, from different contexts, from different parts of the bureaucracy, from different parts of the world. We fix it, and then we all collect into the same kernel.
00:42:53
Speaker
So in education, this is letter grades. This is GPA, right? So we fix a really simple set of meanings, A, B, C, D. We all roughly know what they mean.
00:43:04
Speaker
And so when I translate my complex multidimensional thing into a B or a C, someone else can understand it immediately. And because we've stabilized and standardized those meanings, that means we can auto-aggregate, right? We don't have to do any work. Once you enter A and I enter a B, that stuff can sum up. So here is Porter's view.
00:43:23
Speaker
He thinks the heart of quantification as it occurs an institution is that it's designed to travel. It is engineered to be portable in cross contexts. And the way that we engineer data to cross context is we remove any nuance or high context sensitivity and thus we prepare to travel easily. So what Porter taught me, which I think is like...
00:43:47
Speaker
It's funny. When I was a young philosopher, was like, existentialism, the meaning of life is what horrified me. And now it's like this theory of data, which says that the reason that information, that data, that institutional numbers have social power and are so comprehensible is they've been engineered to be highly comprehensible at scale. And that engineering process essentially involves removing any high context, high nuance, high sensitivity information, anything that requires rich immersion and a particular context to understand.
00:44:19
Speaker
So their power is exactly bound up with their price. It's not like an accident. Right. And I think this shows us what what's easy to count at scale is exactly those things that are highly portable. And this isn't to say that quantitative ways of knowing screw things up. I think a better way to put it is they're very deadly accurate at getting masses of information about certain kinds of things, which are the kinds of things that everyone can count. So this is why this is one of the reasons why, i like, mortality rates.
00:44:48
Speaker
Right. Antibiotics, measuring antibiotics. These are really good uses for large scale data approaches because everyone like dead or alive is something that people count pretty much the same. Whether bacteria have left your system or not is and you've you know, you're just had a horrible infection. Like whether that infection is there or gone away, that's something that's. fairly easy to measure at scale. Whether or not something enriched you or is beautiful or made you happy, that is so context sensitive and so variable that it's exactly the kind of thing that large scale data methods will miss. I mean, one way to put it is that my worry is not about any particular metric. It's about the metrified world, which is only willing to pay attention to things that we can capture in metrics. And one way to put it is, I mean, I know a lot of people right now are worried about algorithmic bias. And I think there's some very important algorithmic biases that are based on one particular error, right? We screwed up in how we set this up. We excluded women. We excluded people of color. But I think there's a deeper inescapable one. And that's the bias of the metrified world, towards what's easy to measure at scale.
00:45:54
Speaker
The metrified world will be hyper-attentive to things that are sufficiently simple and stable that we can all count them together, and it will tend to systematically sideline, distance dismiss, and ignore anything that requires high sensitivity or context. You just spoke about beauty as well. Now, if we're looking at beauty or process beauty in our work, ah oftentimes modern culture struggles with that.
00:46:19
Speaker
Why? Yeah, that's, I mean, let me... This is, I think, one of the most interesting and hard questions. Let me take a really quick, fast version of this. That's okay. Here's a fast pass.
00:46:33
Speaker
i' been really One of the reasons that games are so interesting to me is they're an example of process beauty, of beauties that emerge inside your own actions and that aren't in an object, right?
Process Beauty in Games
00:46:44
Speaker
And one quick way, very fast gloss, is that object beauty and the kind of stable beauty in objects is easy to sell. It's like, if you think this beauty is in this movie and we can copy the movie, then that's very saleable. But if you think that we have this complex role-playing game,
00:47:02
Speaker
And a lot of the beauty emerges from our, the game stimulates it, but a lot of the thing comes from us. And there's no guarantee. You can buy the same same role-playing game and you won't get the same experience because the game is really a design prod to pull something out of you. That's less marketable because there's less of a stable guarantee that you'll get the thing. I think that summarized that well, because usually when we're thinking about connection and beauty and process beauty, right, we're so quick to dismiss something, especially when we have outputs that pile up uselessly. Oh my God. Okay. So here's here's a thought I've been obsessed with lately, which is it is seemed to me more and more clear lately that a thing that connects so many of the high arts, the things that we were painting, movies, is a stability. And part of that stability means that most of our experience of it
00:47:55
Speaker
is reading is not completely passive, but essentially we are reading somebody else's work or watching somebody else's work. And then there are these other realms, the realms that normally get labeled low, fan fiction, cosplay, tabletop role-playing.
00:48:09
Speaker
And the common feature of all these things that are despised as lowly geek or awful culture is that they're ones where creativity and the process of creation are distributed evenly across a community. Instead of concentrated in a small number of people and then packaged outwards. And the thing that really helps me understand this is, so Langdon Winner, this philosopher of technology that I find super interesting, he's really interested in the ways that particular technologies kind of transform the social landscape.
00:48:39
Speaker
He's really interested, for example, in how printing presses, no matter whether or not you intended to use them democratically or not, one thing that printing presses do against oral communication is they concentrate the power of communication in whoever is rich enough to own a printing press. yes And he has this analysis of factories. And he says, OK, there's an essential political nature to a factory.
00:49:01
Speaker
To understand that, think, well, Imagine that we are all, we're we are in a artisanal village of shoemakers and each of us makes shoes by hand. It's very slow, very inefficient compared to modern standards. But each of us can experiment freely. We can make shoes for our own standard. We can change the way we make shoes each day. I can custom shoes, tailor shoes to you easily, right? I can experiment and adapt to my experimentation. Now, let's say that we take our village of artisanal shoemakers and replace us with a factory and then hire us all back into this factory. I mean, it's going to be much more efficient. We're going to make 10 times as many shoes. But the way that factories work, what makes them more efficient is precisely that people are forced to specialize.
00:49:44
Speaker
And to make the specialization work, the specialization has to be highly coordinated. So if I'm going to make all eyelets and you're going to make all soles and someone else is going to make all the shoelaces, we have to make sure the eyelets match the holes punched in the shoe. and We have to make sure that whoever's making the upper, that that will fit precisely with the sole, which means that suddenly people have to make things in precisely the same way to certain external standards in order to make the factory work.
00:50:11
Speaker
So what Winner ends up saying is that factories are essentially authoritarian. Because there requires some authority to push out a standardized rule set and get everyone to follow it in order to get all this efficiency. And one thing to think is, maybe this is a stretch. I can't tell.
00:50:26
Speaker
But factory logic, the thing that makes factories the most important thing for the factory is that the inputs and outputs match up in numbers, right? That one side make the same number of soles and the next side make the same number of uppers. And the people that make the eyelets make 10 times, they have to make the right number, right? Or they won't match up and the factory will fall apart.
00:50:47
Speaker
And I kind of think that there's something in that factory logic which might be responsible for us being so obsessed with measurable outcomes that are clear and portable and stable and so disinterested in the weird, non-packageable joys and values
Reflective Control in Games and Life
00:51:04
Speaker
of the process. When you're playing a game,
00:51:06
Speaker
A lot of people want to reclaim agency and it doesn't, we don't always talk about reject metrics or games entirely in the book, right? yeah So instead it really asks us to become something else.
00:51:23
Speaker
You talk about something called reflect control, and that's the ability to step back and ask, what is this game about? Why did we want to play it Why is that question so hard when systems start feeling less official? I mean, I think there's something natural that you can do with games, but it doesn't always happen with games. have this experience. I fly fish a lot, and fly fishing is delightful, but there are different methods for fly fishing. Some of them catch you more fish. Some of them catch you less. One of my favorite methods is dry fly fishing, which is just beautiful, but incredibly hard, and you catch very few fish, but it's intense. Yep. And i I was on the river and I ran into this other guy and he was using a different kind of fly fishing. It's very efficient. It's called neuronymphing. And some people love it. This guy was complaining. Do you fly fish? Do you know these? oh yeah
00:52:13
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Okay. Of course. Of course you fly fish. course. Of course, she says. So. What weight pole? that That really says it. That tells me everything. What? Because the lighter the weight of the pole, the more accurate you have to be. So the lighter, the the dry fly casting is so lovely and so requires so much out of you.
00:52:36
Speaker
But it's, you know, especially dry fly casting to a fish you can see. Hero nymphing, which I, let me say again, some people love, but I don't like. And this guy i ran into was but he was, he was like miserable and he was sweating bullets and he was like,
00:52:49
Speaker
I'm just not catching as many fish as I need to be. And like, you know, this Euro-nymphing is just so like painful. And i was like, well, you don't have to neuro-mimph. You can just, you can fish in a different way. And he said, but you got to you're a Euro-nymph because you catch more fish. It's more efficient. You have to do it.
00:53:04
Speaker
And I was like, what are we even, what is the point? We are catch and release fishing. It does not matter how many fish we catch. The reason we're doing it is for the pleasure And here, and I think this is not, this is true in so many areas where we're doing, we're engaged in activity for pleasure or joy or interest or community. And then we chase some score out of joy and out of community and out of interestingness just because it's the score. So that's possible even in games. But but I think games make it easier because like ah like we were talking about before, since there's so many different games and since games kind of,
00:53:45
Speaker
invite you to modify them it's very easy to think oh i i don't like this game of poker let's house rule it you know i don't like i don't i don't this game mario is boring to me let's invent a new speed run method for it right games invite tinkering and if you tinker with them or you try different games what you're automatically doing is reflecting you're trying scoring systems being this one doesn't work this one's gross this one's great this one's awesome what if we change it that way oh that works better for me Then we go to the world. And part of the problem is that the scoring systems in the world are tied to incentives. So it's really hard to step back from them, right, when our careers are on the line. But even then, there are a lot of them that aren't. There aren't, you know, when I was stuck in this hole trying to lose weight, there were no incentives tied to me losing weight.
00:54:32
Speaker
Right. When I was like on. Right. but There are so many systems where we don't necessarily get anything. We're not incentivized to track them, but we are going to plunge ourselves into a nasty scoring system because I think a lot of the times one of the answers is there's not variety and the world doesn't invite us to try on different scoring systems. Games are there being like, here's a hundred thousand different ways you could play this or score this or think about it or do this.
00:54:59
Speaker
And, you know, the university is there being like, here's GPA. That's all there is. There's no other choice. And the kind of pervasiveness of it truly, I wouldn't say disinvites us, makes us forget that there's a possibility of choice and a possibility of modification. And then it's just hard. Like you like you're talking about, like if you you try to ungrade your class and you refuse to give grades to your students, given that the external, the rest of the world demands communication and grades, your students will be disadvantaged by your class or by being at a university that doesn't offer grades.
Choosing Personal Judgment Systems
00:55:35
Speaker
Yeah. Now, as we're wrapping up, is there anything that you want folks to take away from this conversation or from your book? Yeah.
00:55:43
Speaker
What's like the number one thing? have not perfect, but maybe a lot of control over how you judge yourself. And sometimes the world will force on you a way of it judging you or it giving you a reward, but you don't have to take it inside. And yeah it's very easy to adopt. The world has so many ready-made forms of judgment from Fitbit to social media likes to weight loss programs. And each of these things is a ready-made way of judging yourself. And it's so easy to just like hop on board and just accept an external system as the center of your judgment. And I think the only thing I'm saying is games in the spirit of play is a different tendency. And it's the tendency of thinking and constantly asking yourself, If a particular mode of judgment or a way of scoring yourself actually is working for you and actually getting you to what you really want, where really want what you really want might be outside the grasp of a pre-specified scoring system. Okay.
00:56:53
Speaker
Wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. And after today's episode, I want to leave you with this thought.
00:57:04
Speaker
You may spend years trapped in bad games, perfect GPAs, rankings, body metrics, and systems you never consciously choose. And seeing them as a game may give you something that you hadn't before. Choice.
00:57:19
Speaker
So I'll leave you with the same question that the book leaves us. Is this the game you really want to be playing? Because once you see the score, you don't have to keep obeying it.
00:57:31
Speaker
So thank you for joining us on today's episode of Breaking Map. I'm Autumn Feneff. And until next time, keep playing games and stay curious.