GoKawiilLike many millions of people, I usually begin my morning doing a few gentle word puzzles on newspaper websites: Connections and Strands in the New York Times, Polygon and Codeword in the Times, plus a couple of others. I do it strictly by the clock so it doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes, and I don’t take it very seriously – I have till now resisted the endless offers to pay for a subscription that would allow me to track my scores, share my results and compare my performance with that of others. Nonetheless, and though I would swear I am not a superstitious person, I am conscious of a gut feeling when I do well (all the words, all the connections, no hints!) that the day is going to be a good one and an even stronger sense when I mess up that it’s a sign of more bad things to come. Do I believe this nonsense in order to motivate me to try harder or do I try harder because I believe this nonsense? I have no idea. But it works for me, especially since it makes me feel that by the time I get to the news in the newspapers the important stuff has already happened, which makes the news easier to digest.
The games I play each day are almost embarrassingly simple; there are far tougher ones that I avoid because they would take too long and would probably leave me with a sense of impending disaster. There is a world of game-playing out there that makes far greater demands of the players, from elegant cryptic crosswords through to complex strategy board games and on to multi-level role-playing computer games. Some of these games will take over your life if you let them. At the same time, prompts that come with even the simplest online games are designed to make you hand over more than just your passing attention. Why do newspapers take so much time and trouble to promote their games and puzzles sections to their readers? Because they know that it’s an excellent hook for keeping them on the website. That way, even if they don’t sign up for all the performance metrics on offer, they are still conforming to the various measures media outlets value – minutes, clicks, idents and the rest.
My modest game-playing habit falls somewhere between these two poles. On the one hand, there are better, smarter and more rewarding games that I could be playing. On the other, there are far more intrusive and extractive forms of gamification and data-harvesting that lie in wait for unwary participants in just about any online (and indeed offline) activity. C. Thi Nguyen wants us to recognise the enormous difference between these two ways of playing. One offers rich human experiences. The other threatens to turn all human experiences into a measurable and marketable product. The reason we might muddle them up is that they both rely on the same mechanism: scoring. All games need scoring systems – whether simple or complex – to make it possible to know who is winning, or if it is a collaborative game, what the shared goal is. Without a measure of progress, it is impossible to be sure whether any progress is being made. Money-sucking metrics are also a form of scoring – sometimes explicitly (‘Improve your credit score!’), but more often buried in the background. We don’t get to see the way the time we spend playing games improves the ability of online platforms to sell our data to their advertisers. But we can be sure all the same that we’ve become a number.
Nguyen, a keen game-player himself, suggests a series of useful tests for distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy scoring systems. Good games deploy essentially arbitrary means of keeping score. Their measures of achievement exist not as ends in themselves but simply as devices to allow creative/competitive/co-operative activity to take place under their auspices. The fact that in contract bridge spades and hearts score thirty points per trick and diamonds and clubs score twenty points per trick doesn’t mean anything in itself. It is not a gauge of actual value. It is only when playing the game that these scores matter because only then do they give the players a structure within which they can try to be their best selves. By contrast, bad games pretend that their scores have an independent meaning. Nguyen, who is also a university teacher, gives the example of the endless ways that universities are now ranked according to various metrics. These measures are often fairly arbitrary – do admissions criteria or graduate employment rates really tell you what you need to know about the quality of the education on offer? But once the measure becomes a rating and institutions can move up and down a league table, the scores start to acquire a life of their own. The arbitrary becomes an unavoidable determinant of achievement. Everyone ends up playing the game.
From this distinction other things follow. Good games are voluntary. Players decide to take part – and to sign up to the scoring system – because they want to enjoy what the game has to offer, not because they feel they have no other choice. Good games advertise their essential arbitrariness rather than trying to conceal it: the rules exist only so that the game can be played. Bad games hide their arbitrariness, dress up their rules as having an independent legitimacy and aim to trap players into taking part. Think of all those universities and colleges spinning their wheels trying to rise up the rankings. Many would much rather not be playing that game. It’s time-consuming and expensive. But they have to pretend it’s meaningful in order to motivate themselves to invest the necessary resources. And once they start down that path it is very difficult to stop. Bad games reinforce the fallacy of sunk costs. A good game is one you can choose to walk away from, which is the reason that the decision to keep playing feels empowering rather than enervating. Nguyen quotes Bernard Suits, who sums up the difference like this: games add value when the players ‘voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to make possible the activity of struggling to overcome them’. Anything else – involuntary participation, unavoidable obstacles, lack of exit options – represents something very different. Then the game is a form of value capture.
Nguyen fears that we live in a world in which good games are being driven out by bad ones. The most elegant online puzzles become something else when they are also a device for extracting marketable data. Good games should be mildly addictive, but once a game becomes just another one of the compulsions that underpin the attention economy then its hold over its players will be a drain on their autonomy rather than an expression of it. Meanwhile, most scoring systems are not really games at all. They are means of reducing the variety and complexity of human experience into a version that is easier to package up and parcel out. This suits corporations with something to sell, governments with something to control and people with something to hide (what else is a credit score for?). The result is a flatter, blander, more fungible world: most things lose their distinctive qualities when they get turned into a number. What they gain is a measure of interchangeability. This works well for organisations that are interested in economies of scale. It works badly for anyone who just wants to do their own thing. Nguyen calls the difference between these two outlooks ‘the Gap’; it represents the distance between what is easy to measure and what actually matters.
But Nguyen wants to go further. Just as he is clear-eyed about the vices of a gamified existence, he is starry-eyed about the virtues of a game-playing life. There is nothing he likes better than losing himself in a new passion: soup-making, yo-yos, rock climbing. It rarely lasts, because past a certain point the rules of the game that had seemed to liberate hidden forms of expression come to stifle his urge to experiment. But that simply means it’s time to try something new. For Nguyen, we only learn what’s valuable by choosing to commit to activities that have no inherent value. What counts is the pursuit of excellence under conditions of freely chosen constraint. If we are constrained by others, then we are not free to be ourselves. But if we are altogether unconstrained then we don’t have to try. Choosing to engage in trivial pursuits gives us the external discipline of rules without the burden of coercion. ‘Games matter,’ Nguyen says, ‘because games don’t matter.’ If we can remember this, we will do far better in a world in which hidden forms of coercion are proliferating.
Maybe. But I have two problems with this account. First, on the page, it’s lifeless. There is a lot in The Score about Nguyen’s excitement and then frustration and then renewed excitement as he masters new skills or plays new games. I am sure it was all meaningful in the moment. But it’s dull in the retelling. Yo-yo tricks – at the level of Nguyen’s – clearly require a high level of technical excellence. I wouldn’t mind watching him in action (there are videos apparently). But it would take a writer of rare skill – which Nguyen is not – to make it compelling reading. I once knew someone who competed in national fireworks championships, which turn out to involve all sorts of arcane rules to help determine who is best at lighting up the night sky. The YouTube channel to which he directed me so I could watch his bronze-medal-winning performance was amazing, at least at first viewing. But after a while it all started to seem a little samey for anyone who didn’t know what the judges were looking for. What it was not at any point, however, was fun to hear about.
Nguyen writes like an analytic philosopher. He values definitional clarity and his book pursues ever sharper distinctions between the games that add value and the forms of gamification that take it away. The result is an argument that soon becomes repetitive. Each refinement of his central point says more or less the same thing: when people score you without your consent, they want something from you, which will be oppressive, but when you choose to score yourself then new possibilities open up. Bad scoring produces convergence. Good scoring encourages variety. Bad scoring projects power. Good scoring resists it. And so on. It’s a binary picture. This is the other problem. The world – including the world of game-playing – isn’t binary at all. Much of it doesn’t fit that pattern.
What’s missing from The Score are hard cases and history. In some classic earlier histories of the way human beings live through and under arbitrary systems of game-like rules, one standard example is the evolution of manners, or etiquette. For instance, in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (‘On the Social Function of Games’) from 1938, game-playing is identified as running side by side with the emergence of civility, whereby codes of behaviour are established to regulate otherwise chaotic human interactions, often at the cost of freedom of expression. Seen in one light, civility manifested as etiquette is clearly oppressive. You don’t get to choose the rules which say that this spoon is for the soup and you don’t get to opt out either: pick up the wrong utensil and you won’t get invited back. Good manners can serve as a tool of class oppression by dint of their essential arbitrariness – we decide what counts as good behaviour so that you can’t share in its benefits. And even though they are not numerical, social codes are also a scoring system. The better you play the game the more access you will have. But one false move can send you back to the beginning.
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