How the metrics we live by are stealing our joy and how the spirit of play can help us reclaim it
To be in the process of making things, to be in the process of talking to people about what things mean—this is actually, I think, the most meaningful part of life, but it's very hard to measure. It's really funny and amazing to be on a podcast called The Creative Process because I actually want to say that the meaningful part of life is the creative process, but that's very hard to quantify. When we get shoved toward a world that demands easy measurables, it's very hard to optimize away from the creative process and optimize toward things that are more static. A lot of what this book is about is how we lose sight of the value of the process. I've been working a lot on the nature of games and play. To truly understand the value of a game, I think people make a mistake when they try to understand it in terms of its output, in terms of the points we get, or in terms of a static object.
C. Thi Nguyen is a philosopher whose work gets to the heart of the invisible structures that define modern life. He first established himself as a food writer, exploring the sensory world, before turning his intellectual gaze toward the philosophy of games and agency. He’s the author of Games: Agency As Art. His new book is The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. He argues that when we simplify our values for the sake of a leaderboard, something inside the human spirit begins to die.
In it, he explores a concept called "value capture"—the moment we stop caring about the experience and start obsessing over the metric. He joins me now to discuss how we can lead a playful, spontaneous life without getting lost in the scoring systems of the 21st century.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
C. Thi Nguyen, welcome to The Creative Process.
NGUYEN
Thank you. It's great to be here.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So, your books really get to the heart of something I've tried to understand all my life. At the heart of the creative process—something we may only truly understand in the end—is how we hold onto our innocence, our sense of wonder, beauty and joy through maturity. How do we maintain spontaneity, play and freedom despite the social structures, institutions, rules and scoring systems imposed on us by life? How can we lead a playful life without getting lost in the game, keeping our senses open without getting scarred by those bad experiences that leave marks on us, like nail marks on an apple? If you could answer that, what you do in your books, just set it up.
NGUYEN
This is ideal. Your description of what this podcast is about is exactly the thing I care about. I'm so happy to be on this podcast talking about this stuff because a lot of what this book is about is how we lose sight of the value of the process.
I've been working a lot on the nature of games and play. To truly understand the value of a game, I think people make a mistake when they try to understand it in terms of its output, in terms of the points we get, or in terms of a static object. When I started working on games as an art form, everyone was obsessed with proving that games were worthwhile because they looked like movies—that the graphics, dialogue and scripted fixed elements were somehow good.
I thought the heart of what's actually good about games is not that. It's the way the game calls out action, thoughtfulness, movement and elegance from us. Games actually exemplify the beauty of processes and doing things, and we've forgotten that because processes are really hard to capture in clean and simple outcomes.
The modern world of outcomes and metrics is very good at measuring clean, extractable, portable things, whether it's making a book, a record or a screw. Or even if it's just that I can lift more weight. These are clean, measurable extractables. But there's something else, something fuzzy that I also think is the most important thing, which is about the process of figuring things out yourself.
To be in the process of making things and talking to people about what things mean—this is actually the most meaningful part of life, but it's very hard to measure. It's really funny and amazing to be on a podcast called The Creative Process, because I want to say that the meaningful part of life is the creative process, but that's very hard to quantify. When we get shoved toward a world that demands easy measurables, it's very hard to optimize away from the static and toward the creative process.
A lot of this starts for me in my classroom. The thing I care about is this process of students figuring out things with me together—venturing into a place, being open and bouncing ideas around. But again, that's very hard to measure. I've often had conflicts because when people get excited about philosophy, they move more slowly through college. They are more caught in this live process of figuring out what they're doing, and then they start to look worse on simple, measurable metrics.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
No, that's beautiful. I'm going to quote you on that one. The meaning of life is the creative process!But as you say, it is creating life. I also think the meaning of life is life. It's the measure by which we are alive, our spirit and all these things.
What we prize in nature—I know you're a big rock climber and fly fisherman—what you're connecting with is how alive and spontaneous it is, but it doesn't fit into our usual metrics. Before we go on, I believe you selected a passage for our listeners and readers. Just set it up for us.
NGUYEN
This is from the very opening of the book. I've been working for a while on two things: a philosophy of games and a philosophy of metrics. I realized I had come up with completely opposite theories.
One theory was that games and scoring systems wake us up to a life of play, enabling us to dive into completely different ways of seeing the world. You look at the world as something to balance and climb through when you're a rock climber. You look at the world as something to capture in watercolor, or something to go hunting for mushrooms in. Each of these is a different action and goal that creates a kind of life for you.
I was really interested in how scoring systems guided us into new ways of seeing. The book starts with my story of rock climbing. I had never really cared about my body at all; I was a reader and a gamer. Getting stuck in climbing and getting exposed to its scoring system of difficulty forced me to try something I'd never done before: be intensely attentive to my balance and micro-movements. That scoring system called something out of me.
The other part of the book talks about why I went into philosophy. I went into it because there were certain big questions I really cared about. Then I got exposed to an internal ranking system that said certain journals are very prestigious, and you should publish things that get you into them. It turns out those things are fairly technical, narrow questions, not the things about meaning or rich, mysterious questions that I loved.
The book is about this struggle to understand why scoring systems are so beautiful in some contexts and so life-draining in others. Here is the passage:
GAMES WAKE US UP TO A LIFE OF PLAY; METRICS DRIVE US DOWN into grueling optimization. And sometimes, we let some external, institutional systems— rankings, metrics, and measures— set our desires and goals. Let’s give this phenomenon a name. Call it value capture. Value capture happens when:
Your values are rich and subtle or developing that way.
You enter some social, typically institutional setting that offers you simplified, often quantified renditions of your values.
The simplified versions take over.
If you want a portable version, try this: Value capture occurs when you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them.
Value capture happens when a restaurant stops caring about making good food and starts caring about maximizing its Yelp ratings. It happens when students stop caring about education and start caring about their GPA. It even happens in religion. A pastor recently told me his church had become completely obsessed with baptism rates because higher-ups established an internal leaderboard. He found himself caring less about long-term spiritual development and focusing more on delivering popular sermons to move up that leaderboard.
In value capture, you're outsourcing your values to an institution. Instead of setting your values in light of your own particular experiences, you're letting distant bureaucratic forces set them for you.
Maybe this wouldn't matter if institutional metrics truly captured what is valuable in the world, but that almost never happens. Metrics are shaped by institutional forces; they're subject to demands for fast, efficient data collection at scale. What's easily measurable is rarely the same as what's really valuable.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
There are so many invisible spots where we don't even realize we are keeping score. These systems invisibly put stresses upon us, leading to this increased sense of anxiety and isolation, stealing our time and our attention.
NGUYEN
What do you think the invisible ones are?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Oh, I went through your book and I counted like a hundred of them. You asked for it, so I decided to write them down in a kind of free verse about the metrics these platforms make us live by. It’s called
What’s the Score
They've got you numbered before you even get a name
Tracking your inventory
SAT scores, Tinder matches, followers, likes, Amazon ratings
Scrolling, scanning, scamming
Screen time
The platforms know what you've bought,
what street you're on and where you're going next
You are here
The thing is, where are they?
Living rent-free in your head, that's where!
Even while you're sleeping.
Sleep score. Watching your
REM, your heart rate HRV, stress score, mindfulness minutes
Hacking into our biorhythms so they can sell you things
while you're literally too tired to say no
They've got a tab on your soul and a tag on your toe
They're watching you, clocking you until you check out
Where you see a person, they see a product
They've got you branded and boxed
You're either a product or a consumer
Sometimes you can be both!
And then you become a human resource
If you're not, you're a liability
an economic dead weight
They’re watching the poll numbers and approval ratings while they’re checking
the stock market, the GDP, the S&P, and the FTSE 100
All those big, shiny numbers that go up while you’re going down!
They’re interested in how much you’re worth and how much revenue they can squeeze out of you.
Data sets, credit scores
Net worth, debt-to-income ratio
Housing prices, Zillow estimates
And then—the best part—they turn your free time into a performance review.
You’re not just living; you’re “optimizing." You’re "tracking."
You’re a human calculator in a pair of sneakers!
You’re not "walking," you’re "closing rings."
You’re not "reading," you’re "optimizing retention."
You’re a consumer slave in a tracksuit!
When they tell you they value your privacy, they’re not lying
cause that’s what they’re selling to the highest bidders
Fitbit steps, Gym leaderboards
Marathon times, Golf handicaps, Duolingo streaks
And those are the fun parts!
They’ve even managed to make when you’re not working feel like work.
Now here’s the hard parts, the rat race:
Billable hours, Revenue per employee
Retail conversion, Smile ratings?
Whatever that means
Uber star ratings
Academic citations
Michelin stars, Box office returns
Crime statistics, Recidivism rates
Defense budgets
And finally? The big finish. The end of the road. When the machine starts to break down, they don't look at you—they look at the dashboard. They measure the decline until the battery hits zero.
Blood pressure, Calorie counting
Body mass index
Sleep scores, Lifespan
Survival rates, Quality of life score
Doomsday Clock Minutes
They count the salt, they count the fat, they count the minutes you spend unconscious until the only number left is the one on the headstone.
YOU’RE LIVING IN A BOX, LOOKING AT A BOX
WAITING TO CLIMB INTO A BOX
Welcome to the never-ending future
They spent eighty years measuring the container and never once looked at what was inside.
So you asked for it. That's my little free verse inspired by the metrics we live in. The invisible ones... we know we are not always aware of the cookies and social media. It's not just on the individual level, it's a societal level. It's really hard to opt out. They're redefining our core sense of what is important even before we've opted into the game. Time itself is a metric the moment we're tagged.
NGUYEN
I want to distinguish between two things: evaluative systems that are external to you that affect you, and the separate process of internalizing one of those metrics and taking it on as the thing you care about.
The thing I'm worried about is a transition point where something in the world is keeping track of a very thin thing that's easy to measure, and because that measurement is so prominent, it starts to dominate what we target. My favorite example is screen time.
Screen time is something that's very easy to track and recognize. I immediately got into this goal of decreasing my children's screen time because there's an easy, measurable quality and a built-in mechanical system to track it. It took me a while to realize that number was so far from what I actually cared about. Sometimes screen time is my kid playing awful, addictive clicker games. Sometimes it's building logic gates and castles in Minecraft. Sometimes it's learning chess, or making frame-by-frame animations of what he's dreaming.
These are not the same thing. Some of this is maximally creative art-making; some of this is nothingness. Automatic tracking systems have a very hard time distinguishing between those two things because they require judgment, whereas mechanical tracking systems orient toward the easy measure. In between the worry of good parenting and the complex value of a good life, we've interposed this quality that is extremely easy to measure at scale, and it starts to dominate our attention…
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Historian Theodore Porter explains that qualitative and quantitative thinking are essentially different kinds of thinking, good at different things. Qualitative thinking is rich and subtle, but it travels really badly between contexts because it requires a lot of shared background information. Quantitative information travels well between contexts because it has been engineered to do so by having high-context information stripped out of it.
Metrics are good at crossing contexts and getting everybody to aggregate information quickly. But where metrics really fall apart is when what's important is subtle, variable or hard to detect. What is meaningful to me changes from mood to mood, and that's exactly the kind of thing we shouldn't expect large-scale database procedures to pick up well.
The ideal of gameplay is that we are free to enter and exit, and it is disattached from the world. The philosopher Bernard Suits characterized games as taking on unnecessary obstacles to create a process of struggle. We take on a temporary goal because the struggle is beautiful. We're allowed to be so absolute and destroy everything in a game world precisely because the goals in the game are disattached from the real world.
The biggest danger is exporting that attitude to the world. When you play that game with money, votes or Twitter likes, you are adopting a hyper-simplified attitude for the pleasure of gameplay in a context where what actually matters isn't simple, is incredibly complicated and is related to real people's lives.
Striving play is deeply denigrated. People always try to justify play because it makes you smarter, stronger or builds grit. The value of play always has to be grounded back into the value of work and production. Suits argued that games were the meaning of life. Imagine a utopia where we've solved all our practical problems; what would we do with our time? We would play games or we would be bored.
Aristotle thought that the meaning of human life lay in the exercise of our capacities, to be in the process of acting and doing. We have become convinced that actions are only valuable when they lead to clean, measurable outputs.
I see art as a game, but it's more like for an individual artist, you're inventing your own game. It's not like the rules are handed to you.
The philosopher R.G. Collingwood said the difference between art and craft is that in craft, we know exactly what we're trying to do before we do it. Art is the thing where we go into it not knowing what we want, not knowing what's valuable and not knowing what we're trying to express. We figure out what it wants to be as we're doing it.
Art is when you do something and you find out what it wants to be. Part of the creativity is figuring out what you're doing in the first place.
I also keep quoting the paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak. He talked about how Neanderthals apparently made tools where each one was unique, in tune with the natural. When Homo sapiens came along, they were already pre-industrialized. What happens is that when we see something that's more efficient, we sacrifice our humanity for that new thing, but we have to hold onto our humanity.
The factory is much more efficient, but the way it achieves efficiency is by locking everyone into a standardized procedure. Winner says that factories are essentially authoritarian. To have a factory, you have to impose a particular standard on everybody. The divide you're talking about is the divide of adaptable responsiveness to the particular thing versus obedience to a standard thing in the name of efficiency.
Obviously, AI is a big question. Sam Altman suggests we are going to soon have the one-person billion-dollar company, with virtually no human workers. What are those billions of people going to do? How can they support the economic system?
But art history often turns out to be a history of optimism. A new technology comes up, like photography or film, and people think it's going to ruin art. Instead, people figure out how to use it as an artistic tool for creative expression. Dilla Time is a history of drum machines that tells a similar story. Drum machines showed up and people thought they would replace drummers, but instead, you get a whole cadre of new artists finding new ways to make beats and express themselves.
I have met indie game developers who are using AI in fascinating ways, training language models to function as characters and fine-tuning them for some creative effect. This is the use of a tool under human creative control for expressive purposes. I have incredible trust in human artists finding potential for creativity in any tool, and I have incredible trust in large-scale institutions to take any powerful new tool and use it to further degrade humanity. Both of these things are true.
Talking about the score and how we measure things... how do you measure consciousness in relation to AI? What are those unique human qualities we're trying to protect?
The idea of IQ is political. The philosopher Leonardo Fiolep points out that even the idea that intelligence is a thing that could be measured is a massive assumption about the world. The assumption is that there's one thing that's stable that you can rank. Another way of looking at the world is that humans have a thousand different capacities—logic, emotional sensitivity, painting—and there's no singular way to measure intellectual capacity across all of them.
If I had to bet, I would bet that consciousness is not a single thing. Assuming there's one thing we can measure, quantify and put on a scale is a mistake.
The tabletop role-playing game Fate is a great example. In Dungeons and Dragons, you get points for killing things. In Fate, you get points for getting yourself and the team in trouble out of your character motivations. It pulls interesting narratives and emotional conflicts out of people because that scoring system is good at focusing you on the fly. It's narrowing and guiding, and sometimes that's great. The worst thing would just be to have that goal displace the larger goal of creative expression.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
We need these structures. So many of our metaphors come from music. The goal and the game of music is not to win, but to be surprising and to harmonize. I like these ideas of the blended experience, like a musical scoring experience. As you think about the future, what would you like young people to know, preserve and remember?
NGUYEN
The thing I care about the most is the spirit of play. The philosopher María Lugones puts it well. Playfulness is the ability to step lightly between different rule sets and to occupy rule worlds creatively. There's something really deep in thinking of different rule structures as things to lightly enter and explore.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Thank you, C. Thi Nguyen, for sharing with us and embracing the spirit of play. Your book The Score elevates our gaze beyond metrics to what makes life worth living. Rather than keeping the score, we can write the story of our lives and stop playing somebody else's game. Thank you for adding your voice to The Creative Process.
