Multiple people suggested C. Thi Nguyen’s book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game to me this spring, but I was way ahead of them, putting a hold request in at my library the week it came out. It is a book about games, although it is much more a book about philosophy and the modern world, and touches on games – good and bad – as a way to address how we are manipulated into pursuing goals or acting certain ways by the rules that other people or corporate entities set up to manage us.
Nguyen’s premise is that we are all, to some degree, playing other peoples’ games – passively choosing to do things that do not fulfill us or help us achieve our goals or just make us happy, because we are instead following what amount to scoring systems in all aspects of our lives. The simplest example is the pursuit of greater income over all else at work: If money is what truly makes you happy, then maybe that’s the right game to be playing, but for most people, money isn’t everything (once you have enough to meet your basic needs), and for nearly all people, there are diminishing returns to making more money, unless you’re a psychopath who needs to make more money than anyone else, in which case you are playing a different game as well.
Perhaps the most salient and accessible example Nguyen gives is health. The rise of personal health devices – I owned a Fitbit for about five years before I got sick of how they died every year and a half or so and became trash – has led owners or wearers to judge their health along a few specific scales, such as weight, BMI, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and so on. None of these is an actual measure of health, and Nguyen points out that even defining what it means to be “healthy” in a global way is difficult at best, and probably impossible to operationalize in a practical sense.
Nguyen also discusses social media, even though he appears to be a very scant user – or perhaps he’s simply following his own advice. I recently hit 6000 followers on Instagram, a rather paltry number, and the app told me to celebrate it and gave me a graphic to share (I did not). Is the point of using Instagram, or any social media app, to amass likes or followers? I would argue it is not. Yet the rules of their particular game, in Nguyen’s framework, say that that is the point – this is how you measure success on Instagram, and therefore you should act accordingly. I gained followers particularly because of two videos I posted, one criticizing MLB’s proposal to the union, the other criticizing UNC’s head coach for abusing the arm of an 18-year-old pitcher on his staff. So should I post more critical videos to try to stir the pot and gain more followers and likes? Reader, I will not. That would be playing someone else’s game.
The Score is incredibly light and easy to read, certainly the most accessible philosophy or philosophy-adjacent book I’ve ever read. (It beats the pants off Sophie’s World.) The chapters are short, and most chapters are built around short anecdotes, many taken from Nguyen’s own life – I respect and appreciate how many quirky interests he has, some of which align with my own, like board games and cooking, and some of which don’t, like rock climbing (go around it) and yo-yo tricks (which I didn’t know was still a thing).
There isn’t much mention of specific games in The Score, which was a little disappointing because they would have provided some more specificity for Nguyen’s examples. He does mention The Mind for its elegance – it has a very short rule set, yet is very fun and offers significant replayability – and a few video games he likes, as well as the fact that he lost many hours to playing the original Civilization video game in college, which happened to me as well (fall of junior year … I was thoroughly addicted to it). I thought he might get more into the gamification phenomenon, where companies use various techniques like points, rewards, leaderboards, competition among friends or strangers, and so on to encourage users to engage in some specific behavior. Duolingo is gamified language-learning. I have mixed feelings on it; about two years of daily use got me to a very basic level of conversational Welsh, and I’ve been using it for German for the last nine months, where I’m probably also at basic conversation as long as you can forgive my incorrect word order. Verb at the end I get, but the rules for the stuff in the middle … well, Duolingo doesn’t teach that kind of material, because it can’t be as easily gamified. So am I learning languages, or playing a game about learning languages?
You don’t need to be a gamer of any sort to read and gain something from The Score, and to the extent that they’re marketing it as a book about games, that’s a mistake. This is a book about life; I’d call it a self-help book if that term didn’t have pejorative connotations. Nguyen subtly lays out how to figure out when you’re being played by someone who wants you to play their game, and then how to find the games, literally but more figuratively, that you do want to play, actions that will help you be happier and find fulfillment, whether it’s in your family, at work, or in your many hobbies. And if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re too online like I am, and could use a reminder that every app and algorithm is trying to sucker us into playing their games, so the answer is to log off and play something else instead.
Next up: I just finished Big Fan by my friends Joe Posnanski and Mike Schur and began Gene Wolfe’s Shadow & Claw.