In bridge, a heart trick earns 30 points while a club trick earns 20, numbers that mean nothing outside of the game. That's the whole point, argues philosopher C. Thi Nguyen in his book The Score. Good games use an arbitrary scoring system as a means to an end and never pretend the score means anything on its own. Nguyen's slogan: "Games matter because games don't matter."
Bad games do the reverse. Credit scores, university league tables, and the clicks-and-minutes metrics that data harvesters chase all dress their arbitrary numbers up as legitimate, hide the seams, and trap you with the sunk-cost fallacy. A good game is voluntary and lets you walk away. Nguyen calls the chasm between what we can track and what we care about "the Gap."
In the London Review of Books, David Runciman writes that the split between liberating play and oppressive metrics is too binary: "What makes a game liberating to play is also what makes it stifling and oppressive: in both cases it's because the rules are arbitrary." The scores Nguyen distrusts are often the ones that break the insider codes of the "self-serving professors, bishops and dukes" who used to call the shots. University rankings, Runciman says, "are corrupting because they are useful."
Runciman adds that many "monsters of our metricised world — from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel to Reid Hoffman — grew up playing D&D and will tell you it taught them everything they know." Nguyen praises the game's power to let players reinvent themselves. Reinvention, Runciman notes, doesn't only lead toward liberation.
Nguyen ends by urging readers to drop the networking mindset and stay open to anyone's weird obsession — ferns, zoning law, a pet theory about Nicolas Cage's place in the artistic canon. Runciman's reply: "I don't think I want to go to the party at all."
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