Culture and Society
PUBLISHED
I consider it a privilege to get to spend my working life as a writer. From the comfort and safety of a desk I get to explore the sciences by mostly tap dancing with my fingers. Somewhere a great ancestor of mine is sighing at the thought, and yet between all the notifications and unread emails I find myself exhausted all the time.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.One of the ways I like to unwind when the endless feedback gets too much is to play games. I score goals on Fifa (sometimes), develop new abilities on Witcher, and defeat worms on, well, Worms. It makes you wonder, why is keeping score so fun in our free time and so soul-sucking in real life? It’s a question Professor C Thi Nguyen, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah and author of The Score: How To Stop Playing Someone Else's Game, has thought about a lot.
“I think the answer comes in a few stages,” he told IFLScience. “The first is really that game scoring systems are tuned for our joy or pleasure, and large-scale metrics are not. A lot of my earlier work was in the philosophy of games, and one of the things I was interested in was how a lot of people trying to study games focused on their cinematic qualities, their fixed story, and their dialogue, but not the game part.”
“Rainer Knizia, my favorite European board game designer, says the most important thing in my designer toolbox is the scoring system, because it sets the player's motivations in the game. I think game designers are really using scoring systems and constraints and rules to shape action.”
The larger aim is to make the experience of chasing that scoring system delightful. That's just not true of large-scale metrics.
Prof C Thi Nguyen
"Like for me, a rock climber, the goal is to go up this cliff and the rules: don't use trees, don't use a rope to pull yourself up, don't use spikes. Just use your hands and feet in the rock. That creates a really particular and intense and subtle kind of motion."
“I sometimes teach game design in the University of Utah Game Design Program, and what you're doing is you're testing your game and you're fine-tuning the scoring system. There's this whole elaborate process where the larger aim is to make the experience of chasing that scoring system delightful. That's just not true of large-scale metrics. They're tweaked for totally other reasons.”
Nguyen says he spends a lot of time worrying about what we can quantify, and what we lose in the process. Think for a moment about some of the most common health tips that cycle around. In a day, we should allegedly get "10,000 steps", eat "5 fruits and vegetables", and secure "8 hours sleep". It’s imperfect advice, but it captures people's attention because it’s simple and easy to measure.
These rules are intended to spread detailed information about health by squashing it down into easy-to-follow advice. A process of simplification that Nguyen has termed “value capture”. It describes the way simplified versions of values become widespread and can overtake what’s actually important. That gray area between what’s easy to measure and what really matters is what he calls “the gap”, and you’ve likely encountered it in all sorts of ways.
Take social media. If you post an infographic about saving the bees, you might only engage a handful of people, but the influence of that engagement could result in someone putting a few potted plants by their front door. A meaningful contribution to what really matters – saving the bees. Alternatively, you could post a clip of Rowan Atkinson in Man vs. Bee and it might get 15,000 interactions, but the bees are no better off.
The large-scale systems we're in were not built to make us feel joyful or refreshed or rejuvenated. They were built to get us to maximally optimize for greatest numbers of outcomes.
Prof C Thi Nguyen
You could be forgiven for feeling disappointed by the performance of your infographic, after all, we’re taught that views are everything. In truth, it’s a symptom of trying to game a system that values most what is easily measured, not what we really care about.
Perhaps we can’t blame the creators of social media apps for not inventing a “meaningful change inspired” metric on the bottom left corner of a post. Still, this gap in how we’re measured and rewarded versus what it is we actually find joy in can help us to understand what makes modern life so exhausting, even when – for many of us – so much of it is spent sitting at a desk.
“The large-scale systems we're in were not built to make us feel joyful or refreshed or rejuvenated,” said Nguyen. “They were built to get us to maximally optimize for greatest numbers of outcomes.”
“I do find that modern life exhausts me. One of the things I find a lot of relief in is games, and I think it is precisely because you can tune games how you wish. I used to read a lot more philosophy and literature in my spare time, and I just don't now. I think it's my job, but also my job is 80 percent in front of a computer or reading a book.”
The reason metrics feel so inhumane is they're not tuned to produce an experience of a good life. And a lot of games actually are, I think.
Prof C Thi Nguyen
“So, in my spare time, I now seek ecstatic physical activity. It's all like rock climbing and fly fishing and yo-yo, and like weird animal movement. I'm choosing the things that I think I need as responses, but also a lot of those activities have been tuned to produce a feeling of satisfaction and openness in your life, body, and mind.”
“Most of the activities we're doing in ordinary life are not. They're tuned for some complete other reason there. The reason metrics feel so inhumane is that they're not tuned to produce an experience of a good life. And a lot of games actually are, I think.”
So, don't let the KPIs get you down. Now who's for a game of Avalon?
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