36: C. Thi Nguyen - Measurement, Meaning, and Play
Full episode transcript and all linked references available at https://dialectic.fm/c-thi-nguyen.C. Thi Nguyen (Website, Philpeople.org, X) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah focused on values, games, agency, art, aesthetics, and data. His new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game is out now.Thi is also the author of Games: Agency as Art, in which he explores how game designers work in the medium of agency, but sculpting a players abilities, goals, and obstacles to create "harmonious action." I first learned about Thi's work via his interview with Ezra Klein in 2022, which is one of my all-time favorite podcast episodes. In it, he discusses Agency as Art, How Twitter Gamifies Communication, Why Q-Anon is game-like, and more.The Score is a marriage of his work on games and on data and metrics. He explores how scoring systems in games allow for playfulness and agentic exploration of our values, while scoring systems in real life produce what he calls value capture. In an effort to make the world more quantified, comprehensible, and trustless, metrics are flattening our values and sapping the meaning out of our lives. One way he describes his work is that James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State also applies to the human soul.In this conversation, I aimed to cover the most compelling ideas in the book in two parts. First, we explore the local side: personal agency and values, attention and the difference between recognition and perception, process vs. outcome, and why playfulness and openness allow us to have richer lives.
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Speaker A: Playing is taking normally useful resources and wasting them for fun. Speaker B: Wasting them for fun. Speaker A: But, okay, here's the big but. It's only a waste galactically if you thought that stuff was pointless. The other notion of playfulness that I find really useful, what she says that playfulness is, is the ability to move lightly between worlds. There's worlds of rules and landscape and meaning, and sometimes you might be in the business world and you're focused on profits, and sometimes you might be in the family world, and sometimes you might be in the artist world trying to be expressive.
One way is to just inhabit one of of these worlds like permanently. But another thing you can do is to realize there are different worlds you can shift between and not be stuck in them. And she says, "To be playful is to inhabit the worlds lightly and creatively." There's two different things: really good at role shifting versus being willing to completely transform yourself and get yourself stuck in a role forever. One worry might be there's one thing, which is playfully being able to shift into different roles, and there's another thing that this world might reward, which is psychopathically committing yourself to a hyper-simplified role and never being playful with it.
Attention and value are so interlinked. What you value is what you pay attention to. One of the ways that games work is that the scoring system guides what you're trying to do, which deeply guides your attention. Uh, Reiner Knizia, who's my favorite game designer, has this moment where he's like, the most important thing in my game design toolbox is the scoring system because that tells the players what to care about. What to want in the game. Games are the art of agency, right? They work in the medium of agency. Some games are incredibly good because they give you enormous agency, but some games are really good because they hyper-constrict your agency.
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