Skip to content
- Author: C. Thi Nguyen
- Full Title: The Score
- Category: #books
- We were climbing for different reasons. I wanted to get to the top any way I could—anything that would count as a victory, that would give me that next number. Sherwood would climb a route, get to the top, frown, and mutter, “Well, OK, but that was pretty ugly,” and then keep climbing it over and over again until the movement felt beautiful to him. His comment—that I had to savor the movement—got stuck in my head over the next few months. It changed my whole relationship to climbing. I started to pay more attention to the sweet joy of the movement—to lavish loving attention on the microscopic adjustments, the explosive hip twists. At night, I would dream about how it felt.
- If you want a portable version, try this: Value capture occurs when you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them. Value capture happens when a restaurant stops caring about making good food and starts caring about maximizing its Yelp ratings. It happens when students stop caring about education and start caring about their GPA. It happens when scientists stop caring about finding truth and start caring about getting the biggest grants. It even happens in religion. A pastor recently told me that his church had become completely obsessed with baptism rates. The higher-ups had established an internal leaderboard in which the pastors competed on monthly baptism rates, and it was starting to dominate everybody’s attention. He’d found himself caring less about the long-term spiritual development of his flock and focusing more on trying to deliver popular sermons that would up his baptism rates and move him up that leaderboard. In value capture, you’re outsourcing your values to an institution.
- Call this the Gap. The Gap is the distance between what’s being measured and what actually matters.
- In a lecture on his game design process, Knizia said that the most important tool in his game design toolbox was the scoring system, because it sets the player’s motivations in the game. Scores tell the players what they’ll want during the game. And this is the heart of how game designers shape our actions—and how those actions will feel—in the game. A scoring system specifies motivations for the player to adopt.
- Perhaps this seems unnerving, letting another human being inside our heads to tinker with our goals. But this goal manipulation can be relatively safe in games. Because often in games, the goal isn’t what really matters. We adopt the goal in order to experience the process. The beauty is in the struggle. This is a very specific kind of orientation. Let’s give it a name: striving play. In striving play, you try to win not because winning is important, but because the act of trying to win gives you a delicious struggle. In striving play, you don’t really care about winning in a lasting way. You temporarily induce in yourself a desire to win, so you can enjoy the process of trying. Striving play involves a motivational inversion of ordinary, practical life. In normal life, we struggle in order to attain some goal that we really want. In striving play, we adopt a goal in order to have the struggle that we really want.
- What I most wanted was the feeling of complete organized attunement—and I got that from seeking elegant mastery over moderate climbs, and not from the perpetual quest for more difficult climbs. In other words, I was turning into a game designer, by creating my own personal version of the game. I was starting to play around with what counted as winning. I was starting to tune the game to my own purposes, to give me that specific mental state of ecstatic organization and flow.
- Games grant us a precious experience of clarity. It is a clarity of purpose—a clarity of value. In a game, for once in our lives, we know exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, and afterward, we know exactly how well we have done. There are no larger questions about the meaning of our lives, no existential angst about our goals, no ambiguity. We know what we are pursuing in explicit, immaculate, unquestionable detail. Games offer value clarity. They are an existential balm for the confusion of ordinary life.
- And I realized at some point that I had an entire theory about games, in which clear and simple scoring systems were the magic ingredient that opened up the door to a whole world of delightful play. And I had an entire theory about metrics, in which clear and simple scoring systems killed what really mattered.
- In the first half, we’re going to discover that we can each approach scoring systems with two very different attitudes. We can approach them playfully—bending ourselves in and out of them, dancing between them, changing them, modifying them. Or we can be captured by them—we can let scoring systems dictate our goals and targets to us, even when those goals fit poorly with our lives. So at first, it’s going to look a lot like the difference is a matter of individual attitude. Maybe, you think, the solution is simple: We should, as individuals, try to have the right attitude, and just be more playful about everything. But in the second half, we’re going to discover why the solution isn’t so easy. Because the world often makes it extremely hard to be playful. The basic nature of games and their social environment—their quickness, their disconnection, their disposability—encourages in us the playful attitude and makes it easy to find and sustain. The nature of metrics discourages playfulness. They encourage, instead, value capture: a rigid attachment to an external system of values. We will discover value capture everywhere—in journalism, education, and business, but also in our food, our hobbies, and the way we measure our own health and happiness.
- The fish are the focus, but not the value of the activity.
- Catching fish is the goal—but not the purpose—of fly-fishing.
- There are two very different motivational states in which we can play a game. There’s striving play, and then there’s also achievement play. The achievement player is trying to win because they actually value winning. The striving player, on the other hand, doesn’t actually care about the win, deep down. They are only trying to win because they value the struggle. The achievement player cares about the win itself; the striving player cares about the process of trying to win.
- This is a paradox at the heart of striving play. In a game like chess, striving players want a prolonged, delicious fight. But the only way we can get the feeling we want is by playing to shorten the fight—by constantly trying to end the game as quickly and decisively as possible. To achieve our true purpose, we need to ignore it and just focus on the narrower in-game goal. We have to submerge ourselves in a simpler, alternate consciousness: one that just wants to win.
- Philosophers have a term for this kind of thing: a self-effacing end, which is an end that cannot be pursued directly.
- Once I became aware that I had fallen into the Gap, I should have been able to course-correct and adjust my scoring system to achieve what was really important. But I didn’t. I had slowly forgotten what I had originally cared about. I was letting the sharp, clear metric dominate my inner vision. I had been value captured. I wasn’t using a scoring system to achieve my own values; I was letting the scoring system set my values for me.
- In value capture, you’re outsourcing your values. You’re letting an external metric or ranking set what’s important for you. You’re outsourcing the process of figuring out your own sense of meaning.
- The problem with outsourcing is also not just that your values are coming from the outside. We learn most of our values from external sources: our upbringing, our culture, art, and religion. But when you pick up your values from your family or your community, you’re free to modify them and adjust them on the fly as you live your life. You can start with an external value and then tailor it to fit. But something very different happens when you’re value-captured by an institutional metric: You’re binding yourself to an inflexible external standard.
- With value capture, you’re buying your values off the rack. They won’t be tailored to you; they won’t be made for your specific life and personality.
- But notice what happened. We didn’t keep to the same goal—cool, awesome tricks—and invent some incredibly profound better way of measuring coolness and awesomeness objectively. We changed the topic. We focused our judgments on something that was easier for us all to evaluate in the same way.
- The food writer John Thorne once said that the difference between a recipe and a dish is that a dish is a live thing, an idea of balance that’s in a creative cook’s head. A dish has to be remade anew each time, in response to changing ingredients and changing circumstances. But a recipe, he said, is a dead thing, a writing down of how a creative cook made something once. This can encourage, in some people, a particular mindset: of just following the recipe exactly as written. The problem with strict and unyielding obedience to the recipe is that you’re stuck on a dead thing. You don’t explore. You won’t respond and adapt to the particular details of the now—how this particular tomato tastes today, how this batch of garlic smells as it sizzles. You’re stuck repeating how somebody made something once. You don’t make the transition from the strict rules to the live idea of balance.
- But clear rules are also incredibly useful. The value of mechanical recipes lies precisely in their accessibility. They offer guidance for inexperienced people who don’t have ready access to some wise and willing teacher.
- The second mistake is total obedience to the recipe. Some people get stuck on a recipe. They will cook it for the hundredth time and still measure each ingredient precisely as instructed. A recipe is only one way to cook something; if you cook it the same way every time, you won’t see what the variables are, and what happens when you make different choices. You won’t understand the dish.
- Note: “Just tell me what to do!”
- John Thorne knows these two problems well. This is why, in his food writing, he rails against obsession with precise recipes and praises the flexible, open-ended dish. But he also includes plenty of recipes in his books—because he knows that the dish is what really matters, but also that you can’t write it down. So he gives you a recipe and simultaneously reminds you that it’s only a starting point. Thorne’s writing reminds me of that old Zen saying: When you see a finger pointing at the moon, look at the moon—not the finger. Recipes are the finger, pointing the way to the moon. You shouldn’t obsess over the finger. But you also need that finger, or you’ll never find the moon—or that grilled Georgian chicken with garlic-walnut-cilantro sauce.
- The best philosophical account of games I know of is in Bernard Suits’s book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia—a hidden treasure of philosophy about what games are and why we play them. In it, Suits gives us a definition of games. Here is what he calls the “portable version” of the definition: To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to make possible the activity of struggling to overcome them.
- A game sets two artificialities. It declares a goal for you to pursue. And then it sets extra, unnecessary constraints in your path to that goal. So why would we possibly want to do that? The answer, says Suits, is that together these goals and constraints shape a new kind of activity. So what we care about in games is not the outcome by itself. We care about achieving that outcome by a certain inefficient path. In games, he says, we care about going the long way. We care about getting to the goal in a particular way, using a particular method.
- Games create new kinds of action for you to savor.
- The game designer creates new selves for us to inhabit. They create an action skeleton—with a specified set of motivations and abilities—and then turn that engineered self loose in an engineered world. Game designers shape a new self for us, and when we play their games, we slip into that designed alternate self, and we experience new kinds of action.
- O’Neill thought transparency forced experts to make up fake reasons for public consumption. This meant that transparency would force experts to deceive the public about what they did and why, and so undermine trust. I agree, but I’m also worried about an even worse effect: Transparency can also force experts to actually change what they do—to confine their actions to what they can justify in public. Transparency can significantly undermine expert action.
- What’s magical about games—what’s different from so many other art forms—is that in games, you act. You analyze the information, you make decisions, you try to enact your will upon the game world. And well-designed games make beautiful action more likely. They call it forth. Good games don’t tell you what to do, exactly. They don’t puppet you into beauty. They leave space for your freedom, for you to choose and decide and act and react. But they create the background conditions that make it likely that your own actions will be elegant, fascinating, and thrilling. The beauty is in the process—in what it feels like to be doing the thing. And games help steer you toward finding beauty in your own actions—in finding the answer yourself, figuring out the right move yourself, instinctively reacting out of your own trained skill.
- In his cookbook on braising, Michael Ruhlman explains why you’re supposed to dust the meat in flour and brown it in butter before you do the long, low-and-slow braise. It deepens and enriches the flavor, for sure. But the most important reason you do it, he says, is because it smells amazing for the cook. Yet cookbook reviews almost never talk about the joys of cooking—which is funny because I often spend way more time on the cooking part than the eating part. The official culture ignores the beauty of the process, trains us not to pay attention to how it feels to act, to believe that joyous action doesn’t matter.
- To understand that price, we need to look at how scoring systems hook onto the world. How is it possible to get a mess of people, with their very different perspectives, intellectual styles, and cares, to automatically agree? The answer is that scoring systems usually work by changing the subject. There is a particular kind of thing that makes convergence easy for scoring systems: They like to score objects and events with mechanical edges: objects whose boundaries are easy to process with mechanical procedures.
- Here’s the key: Scoring systems don’t just discover a convergence that was already there. They produce convergence. Like courts of law, they take messy, complex situations and produce singular clear judgments—which we put into the official record, so that we can all move on with the matter publicly settled.
- You might think there’s an easy, neutral way to compare the values of things: Just put them on the market and see what price they bring. But that method is not neutral. It tends to prefer things with highly accessible value. And when we use that method intensively, we’ll start to see the world only in terms of those easy values.
- “Show, don’t tell” is a general guideline, not an absolute rule. It works most of the time, and beginners would do well to generally follow it. But if you really know what you’re doing—if you understand the deep reason underneath the simple rule—you know when to break it. You have to understand how most fiction builds its absorptive reality out of concrete sensory details and the particulars of small-scale action. And then you will recognize those rare circumstances when you can boldly tell to great effect without destroying that absorptive reality.
- And, weirdly enough, what makes the modern recipe feel modern is precisely the fact that it excludes the use of trained judgment and developed sensitivity. It feels modern because it’s mechanical. For people like me, raised on modern cookbooks, these recipes feel more real, because they’ve been written to be usable without skill
- Mechanical evaluation systems have a power. They grant us portability, and freedom from a certain kind of corruption and bias. They create easy convergence. But they also introduce a new kind of bias: a bias toward paying attention to the kinds of things that we can count mechanically, and especially toward what’s easy to count mechanically.
- Rules offers us the power of accessibility. What he asks us to sacrifice is adaptability
- Parts promises us interchangeability. The sacrifice is specificity. And when we apply Parts to people, we pay a special version of that price: we give up individual sensitivity