Yellow-breeched philosophy, or writing like a humble bee
AI Log reviews The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game
Zig-zag steerer, desert-cheerer,
Let me chase thy waving lines,
Keep me nearer, me thy hearer,
Singing over shrubs and vines.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson from The Humble-Bee (1837)
“The secret of being a bore is to tell everything” is not so much a dunk on boring people as it is Voltaire offering backhanded advice to writers. Emerson puts it this way: “All writing should be selection in order to drop every dead word.” The Score by C. Thi Nguyen is built of living words. It follows a zig-zagging path through what might seem at first glance a boring landscape, full of the rules and measures that structure human activities.
This enthusiastic description from an essay by Henry Farrell captures Nguyen’s achievement.
It is a book that is about metrics (like viewer numbers, though I don’t recall him citing those in particular) and how they define not simply our lives but our very selves, if we carelessly let them. It is a book about pizza. Also: weird yo-yo tricks and the zen-like states that accompany them. Also also: climbing, on which there is lots. Also also also: drunken cooking competitions. And that is just for starters. It is a book that absolutely ought not work, for the same structural reasons that bumblebees ought not be able to fly. The aerodynamics are all wrong. But good god, does it fly. The achieve of, the mastery of the thing! I would not have believed that a book about metrics could be a joyful and delightful book. The Score not only manages that extraordinarily difficult trick, but makes it look easy.
Like Emerson’s Humble-Bee, Nguyen is “a yellow-breeched philosopher,” lighting upon interesting ideas you would not notice without him to guide your attention. His stops include brief introductions to the work of underrated historians Lorraine Daston and Ted Porter, insights about games from John Dewey’s Art as Experience, and several intricate descriptions of games and hobbies Nguyen loves.
He brings a spirit of play to the art of writing, which may sound like I am describing poetry for kids, but The Score is decidedly prose for adults—though of a form that abandons the plodding habits of most academics writing for a general audience. It reads more like an adventure novel than a nonfiction bestseller.
The book’s hero is games, a topic mostly ignored in the serious world of professional philosophy. Games bring feeling and joy into human life. Paradoxically, games create fun by imposing constraints on humans who play them. Nguyen credits Bernard Suits with this insight: “Game rules seem to restrict us, but actually they are creating more freedom and possibilities—because game rules bring new kinds of action into being.” The fact that these are rules we agree to in advance and that they bind us only temporarily is key to the freedom they offer.
Like many stories of adventure, the book’s villain has much in common with its hero. Metrics are games gone bad. Both make use of rules and ranking, but metrics aim at permanence, and this is the defining difference. The purpose of metrics is to manage human behavior for the long term. They provide clarity about goals and how to achieve them. Metrics capture values, turning them into numbers to be used in formulas and equations so that decisions are easier to make and enforce. In the age of the spreadsheet, they operate at a scale that lets us keep score across an incredible range of human activities.
Net-worth and annual salary are examples that show how money, that very old and perfectly fungible measure, represents and distorts the value of a person’s life and labor. Thanks to data science, networked computing, and bureaucratic management practices, we now have many such numbers: BMI, FICO, g-index, GPA, h-index, KPI, LDL, SAT, etc. These define our position in relation to others, and to our own aspirations. They seemingly capture the value of our efforts to manage ourselves effectively. In so doing, they capture our attention and our sense of self, at least to the extent we accept what Nguyen calls, “simplified, often quantified renditions” of what we value.
Various meanings of the word capture—to represent accurately, to control by force, to record in a database—illustrate the complicated relation between The Score’s hero and villain. The book’s plot is about how games—maligned as a waste of time and producing nothing of measurable value—avoid value capture. Games appear weak because their rules and scoring systems are so easily set aside. They take so little of ourselves to play; we can be anyone in a game, and only for the time a game takes. As Nguyen shows us again and again, in these moments, we feel free.
Games offer relief from repetitive structures of bureaucratic institutions and commercial platforms that put us on a treadmill, running for no purpose other than to meet the targets displayed on a dashboard and pay for our daily bread. They “let us play around with rigidity—to try on explicit rule sets and mechanical scoring systems and then step back from them.” Games teach an active, participatory approach to life, one that privileges an aesthetic attitude not of passive appreciation but of engagement and action.
This description makes it seem that changing things would be easy, as if a shift in attitude toward games is all we need to throw off metrics. But all games can offer are moments of freedom, brief reminders of better ways of being. The collection of modern apparatuses made of institutional metrics and rules is too intricately powerful to be overcome by temporarily inhabiting alternatives. Nguyen says, “We need infrastructures of art and infrastructures of play.” We need alternative apparatuses: institutions and systems built of art and games that let us unyoke ourselves from our numbers and escape ordinal measures of value and success.
The Ordinal Society by two social scientists thinking along the same lines as Nguyen pairs nicely with The Score. See my review at…
Like a lot of college teachers, Nguyen has experimented with alternative grading in hopes that his classroom would become a place of freedom and growth. Nearly every teacher and student sees how grading reduces complex and open-ended learning efforts to a number. But as Nguyen shows, teachers who try to play around with the rigid system of letter grading meet resistance, even from students who feel damaged by the pressures grading places on them.
Doing away with or subverting the educational scoring system that has defined students’ academic success since kindergarten does not suddenly free them to live their best lives. As Nguyen reminds us, “A college class is not a game.” Metrics like GPA attach themselves to students permanently, at least it feels that way. Even in small classes that create strong incentives for engagement, such experiments often leave students disengaged and confused. The Score winds down with Nguyen’s own story about how difficult it has been for him to change his grading practices. Grading is “part of a large scoring system, a world-spanning one,” that is impossible for one teacher to change, or even a handful with institutional support.1
Nguyen contrasts his failure to find alternatives to grades with a story about boardgamegeeks.com. This artifact of the good, old internet of the 2000s offers an “overall score” for each game, a metric that generates an numerical ranking. But, as he notes, “if you click on the overall score, you are immediately taken behind the scenes.” The superficiality of the overall score becomes visible, revealing the reductive process of value capture. That click gives you access to all the numerical scores and qualitative reviews for the game. You see the complex diversity of what people value about the game, which means you have to ask what you value in games and think about your preferences in relation to the widely different experiences of the reviewers.
Boardgamegeek illustrates the potential for new infrastructures, systems that express a plurality of values, and so offer insight into how games structure aesthetic engagement with the world. The implicit question is why we don’t build more systems that do that? Why don’t we use metrics as the starting point on a path to understanding complex human values instead of as an end? A call to create such systems would have been the obvious way to conclude The Score—Five ways that games will transform your life! Three ideas for making your institution more playful!
Nguyen zags instead. He steers his readers to a choice; he asks us to play a simple game. I won’t spoil it, but I will celebrate how this conclusion turns the experience of reading into an illustration of the educational power of games. Reading a book is itself a game. No attempt to summarize its content, distill its arguments, or measure its value can take the place of playing, and this is a book worth playing.
The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game (2026) by C. Thi Nguyen.
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We should still try! Small efforts like the ones Nguyen describes may have large effects on complex systems. When a bumblebee flaps his wings and writes about it…
Thank you for this great review Rob. I listened to him on a podcast with Sean Carrol a few years ago and have been fascinated by the notion of “play” ever since. It also, I think, links to Huizinga’s view on homo ludens.