{"id":11273,"date":"2026-06-29T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11273"},"modified":"2026-06-29T11:00:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T15:00:05","slug":"the-score-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/29\/the-score-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Score."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Multiple people suggested C. Thi Nguyen\u2019s book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else\u2019s Game<\/a><\/em> 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 \u2013 good and bad \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nguyen\u2019s premise is that we are all, to some degree, playing other peoples\u2019 games \u2013 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\u2019s the right game to be playing, but for most people, money isn\u2019t 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\u2019re a psychopath who needs to make more money than anyone else, in which case you are playing a different game as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the most salient and accessible example Nguyen gives is health. The rise of personal health devices \u2013 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 \u2013 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 \u201chealthy\u201d in a global way is difficult at best, and probably impossible to operationalize in a practical sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nguyen also discusses social media, even though he appears to be a very scant user \u2013 or perhaps he\u2019s 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\u2019s framework, say that that is the point \u2013 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\u2019s proposal to the union, the other criticizing UNC\u2019s 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\u2019s game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Score<\/em> is incredibly light and easy to read, certainly the most accessible philosophy or philosophy-adjacent book I\u2019ve ever read. (It beats the pants off Sophie\u2019s World<\/em>.) The chapters are short, and most chapters are built around short anecdotes, many taken from Nguyen\u2019s own life \u2013 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\u2019t, like rock climbing (go around it) and yo-yo tricks (which I didn\u2019t know was still a thing).<\/p>\n\n\n\n