Looking at the cover of The Score, a book by C. Thi Nguyen released in January 2026, you might assume it's a self-help book thanks to the subtitle that promises you "How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game".
Let me correct that impression immediately by noting that near the end of his book, Nguyen, a professor of philosophy at The University of Utah, answers the question as to whether you can do this as follows: "It's incredibly hard, and I don't have a great answer here." Okay.
Nguyen spends much of The Score writing about two topics: the nature of games and how easily we can become trapped in game-like structures in the real world. To do this, he frequently conflates games with metrics because both feature mechanical scoring systems at their core. In more detail, Nguyen writes:
In a game, for once in our lives, we know exactly what we're supposed to be doing, and afterward, we know exactly how well we have done. There are no large questions about the meaning of our lives, no existential angst about our goals, no ambiguity. We know what we are pursuing in explicit, immaculate, unquestionable detail. Games offer value clarity. They are an existential balm for the confusion of ordinary life...
[Metrics] promise the same delicious clarity: that if we adopt some simple scoring system, our values will become clear and easy to communicate. University rankings, social media follower counts, page views — each of these promises to simplify the meaning of success in the world.
Metrics come in all shapes and sizes for individuals, families, and communities. If you're getting a cholesterol check, the doctor will tell you whether you have "won" based on how your numbers compare to what's ideal. If you're a retail salesperson, you might be ranked against all others in the same position, with bonuses for those on top or who perform above a certain level. You might participate in a reading club with the goal of finishing X books a month or have an exercise regimen in which you're trying to hit certain reps, distances, or weights.
On a larger scale, we rank education systems within states and countries, we compare murder rates in cities, we look at box office sales for movies, we chart the richest people in the world, we examine countries' GDP or their debt-to-GDP ratio. Metrics along these lines are omnipresent.
The problem, Nguyen points out, is that metrics often feature "a mismatch between the clarity of the score and the density of the real world". They flatten reality and shake out ambiguity; they warp human activity in unexpected, unproductive, or negative ways. If, for example, teachers are going to be judged by how well students perform on standardized tests, then teachers might focus on training students in how to take such tests. Are those tests the best way to judge whether students are learning? Not necessarily, but once that metric is adopted, we start functioning inside that worldview.
Nguyen gives examples of metrics warping behavior in his personal life, such as pushing to conquer rock climbs with higher difficulty ratings without enjoying the actual climbing; focusing on the number of philosophy journals he's been published in; and caring about the standing of his philosophy department compared to others. (For the record, The University of Utah is in the 100-150 range on this list of 225 universities. Does that matter? Not unless you're applying to universities...and possibly not even then.)
I'm sure you can think of similar examples in your life. A couple of years ago, I hit a period in Duolingo in which I raced to complete the easiest lessons possible just before midnight so that I could extend my streak of consecutive days on the app. Was I learning anything? Not really, but the number kept going up, so I guess I succeeded, albeit in the feeblest way possible.
What's happening, says Nguyen, is that we're treating scoring systems in games and metrics as identical, but "[i]n games, the value of the outcome is inseparable from the value of the process", whereas metrics "tend to track what's easy to measure — simple externalities and obvious outcomes. And they tend to be rigid. The very nature of institutional metrics resists adjustments and tailoring."
We can measure a country's GDP, but that tells us nothing about what that domestic product is, how much of the population is in poverty, whether people are happy or fulfilled, or how that country's environment is being impacted. If a tree limb falls on my car and breaks my windshield, me paying to replace that windshield adds to the GDP, which is viewed as a positive outcome without regard for my personal situation.
Nguyen spends 150 pages — almost half the book — exploring all aspects of metrics and how they influence our behavior and society thanks to the fallout derived from the Four Horsemen of the Bureaucracy — Rules, Scale, Parts, and Control — that make metrics what they are. After doing this, Nguyen suggests that examining these Horsemen "will help us give a tidier answer to the original question: Why do games and metrics hit so different when they both involve mechanical scoring systems?"
The Rules Horseman isn't an issue as both games and metrics use "mechanical rules" that make it "easy for anybody to enter into the scoring system". We can all calculate who wins 7 Wonders and what the teenage birth rate is in the United States.
But, Nguyen continues, metrics and games only sort of overlap on Parts, and "[g]ames tend to exclude Scale and Control from setting the central purpose of play", whereas metrics "are inextricably married to Scale and Control".
At which point you might wonder why Nguyen is comparing games and metrics at all. Are we wasting our time here, comparing apples and aardvarks? To some degree, yes, we are, especially since Nguyen repeats examples, takes a long time to get to a point, and makes the same point several times. One of the common refrains of If Books Could Kill — a podcast that reviews "airport bestsellers", a term that could apply to The Score — is that these books seem to be a decently long article or blogpost blown up to book length, and that feels like the case here.
I understand what Nguyen is saying — not every scoring system is equal — but I wish The Score focused more directly on scoring systems instead of covering metrics in exhaustive detail, as interesting as that topic sometimes is.
Nguyen describes scoring systems in ways that might have you seeing them from another angle, such as "Scoring systems are recipes for evaluation" and "Scoring systems engineer a convergence of judgments". Early in the book, Nguyen credits Reiner Knizia with saying that (in Nguyen's words) "the most important tool in his game design toolbox was the scoring system because it sets the player's motivations in the game. Scores tell the players what they'll want during the game. And this is the heart of how game designers shape our actions — and how those actions will feel — in the game. A scoring system specifies motivations for the player to adopt." If having the longest road in CATAN were worth 8 points, no one would care about anything other than building the longest road.
What I wish Nguyen had emphasized is that a game's scoring system is an integral part of its design. To lean on BoardGameGeek's definition, a game without a scoring system is an activity. The actions you take during a game and that game's scoring system are part of a whole, not existing independently from one another...although sometimes designers do present players with "alternate worlds", such as Michael Schacht releasing new scoring rubrics for Coloretto to reshape how players make choices.
Where I think Nguyen goes awry is that he defines scoring systems too broadly. At one point he writes, "A scoring system is a social process that delivers a quantified evaluation, and so enters a singular verdict into some official record." Does a list of country GDPs deliver a verdict? Do a week's box office numbers comprise a scoring system, or is it simply a list?
"Metrics function as scoring systems, rendering a singular value judgment and making it official", writes Nguyen, and this is my main objection with the book. A better way of phrasing this would be that people often treat metrics as if they're scoring systems, but metrics are similar to scoring systems only in the sense of them often consisting of a list of numbers or a stated threshold.
This is Nguyen's larger point, an explanation for how you stop playing someone else's game, but he takes a huge detour to get there, despite hitting on this point along the way. He mentions a student who says "if you want to get fit and healthy, weight loss is objectively measurable", to which Nguyen responds, "When did we start thinking that health meant weight loss?" (The same could be said of BMI, which might be related to a person's health or might not.)
Unlike scoring systems in regard to games, metrics aren't integral to the activities of life, but applied to those activities after the fact and only after their creation do they have or develop an influence over people's choices. At one point, Nguyen brings up the topic of sex trafficking and rightly says that the U.S. Department of State rates countries' efforts to reduce sex trafficking in a dumb way, that is, by the conviction rate of sex traffickers. Writes Nguyen, "If you decrease poverty, then sex trafficking tends to vanish on its own. But then there won't be any sex traffickers to catch and convict", which means that country will fail under that measurement, despite it succeeding in its goal.
To stop playing somebody else's game, you need to realize that the scoring system in that game might not be a scoring system at all and therefore can be ignored when you consider which moves to make. When I was setting up Board Game Beat, for example, I decided that I wanted to forgo most social media platforms because I dislike how they operate, with user engagement being their goal and with their actions designed to make users care about their subscriber numbers, their likes, and so on.
Unfortunately, you often can't do stop playing someone else's game, which brings us back to Nguyen's "I don't have a great answer here." My son is in high school and his cumulative GPA will impact which colleges he can apply to, and my opinion about the uselessness of school grades will not convince those colleges to make a space for him.
Interestingly, Nguyen ends his book by calling out BoardGameGeek as "the single best technological implementation of rankings and metrics I have even seen", writing:
The community of board games is full of people who, deep in their hearts, know that rankings and scoring systems are there to be used, modified, and abused for their enjoyment...
Any user can post a review of any board game; you can give it a rating on a 1-to-10 quality scale and write a qualitative review. And every board game does get a single numerical score based on all its reviews [sic — should be "ratings"]. The site will also list all the games in its database ordered by their score. But my sense is that most serious users of the site don't put much stock in that large-scale ranking...
I'm sorry, what? BGG does indeed provide a (mostly) open look at all the data that goes into a game's ranking, but having been on the receiving end of many user notes, not to mention seeing all the publisher ads that prominently state a game's ranking in the BGG database, I will strongly disagree that people don't put much stock in that "single numerical score".
