“Brilliant and wildly original . . . Nguyen is a connoisseur of games and his musings about
them are ingenious and entertaining . . . The Score is socially attentive historically
literate and imbued with sensual glee.” —Becca Rothfeld The Washington Post “I give this
excellent book five stars.” — Stuart Jeffries Financial Times “Quirky and enthusiastic . . .
[In The Score Nguyen] combines an enthusiast’s celebration of games’ inner workings with a
lament for the power of metrics to flatten our lives and capture our values . . . Nguyen helps
us see how games transform instincts into something beautiful valuable and meditative.” —
Bloomberg A philosophy of games to help us win back control over what we value The
philosopher C. Thi Nguyen—one of the leading experts on the philosophy of games and the
philosophy of data—takes us deep into the heart of games and into the depths of bureaucracy
to see how scoring systems shape our desires. Games are the most important art form of our
era. They embody the spirit of free play. They show us the subtle beauty of action everywhere
in life in video games sports and boardgames—but also cooking gardening fly-fishing and
running. They remind us that it isn’t always about outcomes but about how glorious it feels to
be doing the thing. And the scoring systems help get us there by giving us new goals to try
on. Scoring systems are also at the center of our corporations and bureaucracies—in the form
of metrics and rankings. They tell us exactly how to measure our success. They encourage us to
outsource our values to an external authority. And they push on us to value simple countable
things. Metrics don’t capture what really matters they only capture what’s easy to measure.
The price of that clarity is our independence. The Score asks us is this the game you really
want to be playing?
