date: Jan 19, 2026 source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_S6C2yQGxY
The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game w/ C. The Nguyen
This session is a part of The Wise Agency inverse course experience. 
• The Wise Agency The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game explores how hidden metrics shape our values, motivations, and sense of success. Drawing on philosophy and everyday life, C. Thi Nguyen examines how we get trapped by external scoring systems, and how we can reclaim agency by choosing, or rejecting the games we play in order to live more intentionally. More: https://objectionable.net/ https://www.amazon.com/Score-Stop-Pla...
Notes
The Score: about why scoring systems are often so delightful in play and games - and so soul-deadening in institutions.
Attention sport
- climbing
- flyfishing
- mushroom hunting
cultivating this really intense subtle awareness of little changes in the appearences(generalized term)
task-based-attention as a replacement for meditation
Or he names it to give you a target and so "train" attention.
Theory: flyfishing people need meditation but ther are too doogly to accept that into their lives and flyfishing is like dude cover. Like they can tell themselfs they are too manly for meditation and still getting what they really need, which is peace, meditation and staring at flowing movement and cultivating their attention.
John Gierach, fly-fishing author:
You walk back from from a day of failing to catch fish, feeling all disappointed. But your senses are heightened, you can smell the crispness of the fall air more intensely, you can see the bugs in the air, and you remember: that catching fish is the goal but not the purpose of fly-fishing.
This is about difference-between purpose and goal, philosophically.
When you play cards with your games, winning is the goal but not the purpose. The purpose is to have fun.
The paradox of games is that to have purpose/fun you have to have the goal.
litmus-test is that even when you lost, your evening wasn't wasted. If not you probably where an asshole and being an asshole is not knowing the difference between goal and purpose.
This was the sunny side of scoring-systems
Here’s a puzzle: Sometimes, scoring systems enable the magic playfulness of games, and some of the richest life experiences we have. Sometimes, scoring systems seem to drain all the joy out of life and produce the miserable, empty grind. Why?
A scoring system is a quantitative evaluation, designed to enter a singular verdict into some official record. Short version: a scoring system is a system designed to produce convergence of judgments. If you agree to the scoring system in the beginning, you’ll agree to the final judgment it produces.
The guiding thought: scoring systems are designed to produce a singular verdict.
Note that you can have a game or a competition without a singular verdict. Skateboarders can compete for the coolest trick with a plurality of senses of cool, and a plurality of judgments.
In the history of skateboarding, it was the professionalization of skateboarding and large prizes that led to the need for singular judgments. To do that, pro skateboarding started to focus on measurable outcomes — height and number of flips — over aesthetic qualities.
A disgusting case study: Pick-Up Artist competitions
Pick-up artists compete usually for some specified number of some achievement. Those include things like:
of phone numbers collected in a night of sexual encounters within a night
Top speed from meeting somebody to sexual encounter
Anthropologists note that pick-up artists rarely compete on: Pleasure or Quality of relationships
Sociologist Eric Hendricks: a common reed in pickup artist culture is the need to sacrifice any interest in pleasure in order to win. (Hendricks considers PUA a kind of weird asceticism, where all kinds of bodily pleasures and emotional happiness are sacrificed on the altar of pure success and achievement.)
Notice that # of sexual encounters and timing are relatively easy-to-quantify, clear, publicly verifiable acts. Pleasure and relationship quality are not.
His worry is that we are all become a kind of pick-up artist in every activity we are doing
Mechanical scoring systems systematically change the target to something easier to measure.
What makes games an art form? (Are they ways of telling stories, a special kind of movie, or what?)
Why do we play games?
Act I: Why games are often great
A games he likes: Sign – Thorny Games
Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper:
Games are unnecessary obstacles, that we take up voluntarily, for the sake of the activity of struggling to overcome them. (He means all kinds: sports, board games, and surely video games.)
Achievement players: playing for the sake of winning at the activity Striving players: playing for the sake of engagement with the activity (Striving play = “the journey is the destination”)
Striving play involves a motivational inversion: In ordinary life, we take the means for the sake of the ends. With striving play, we pick the end for the sake of the mean it forces us through. (In gewöhnlichen Leben nehmen wir die Mittel um der Ziele willen. Beim strebenden Spiel wählen wir das Ziel um der Mittel willen, durch die es uns zwingt.)
This is like in bob's dialog when we say phenomenoly first. A dialogical mind as a abinding(and maybe still as "looking for") in this for all contexts.
Some people say this makes sense and others respond with this does not actually exists
An argument for the actuality of striving play: Sometimes we limit our ability to win in the long-term, even as we try all-out to win in the short-term.
We play without trying to make our stratehies better (like reading up on the best strategies). Somehow that looks like an irrationaly move but i would argue that is non-rational
Another argument for the actuality of striving play: Stupid games (like twister): Only fun if you try to win. The most fun part is failing.
Stupid games are funny as failures. It’s only a failure if you were trying to succeed.
Stupid games demonstrate the possibility of striving play. If striving play is possible, then we must have the capacity to absorb ourselves temporarily in disposable ends.
In striving play, the goals of the game are just a means and not what really matters. We push them around to get the kind of activity we want.
the scoring system creates the player’s motivations in the game – Reiner Knizia(famous german boardgame designer)
A game designer manipulates your in-game goals and your abilities, and the environment of challenges in order to create interesting, beautiful, or fascinating action.
The goals are specified by the scoring system. It is the means of communicating a sharply specified set of goals.
The scoring system and your desires are actually the medium of art here. The game designers are pushing around constrains and your desires as their artistic medium. That's what they are doing
Slogan: games are the art of agency
Striving play demonstrates our capacity for agential fluidity.
We can temporarily take on a specified goal, and absorb ourselves in an alternative agency, where we devote ourselves entirely to the pursuit of that goal.
In particular, they highlight clearly explicated systems of rules and scores make it easy for us to exercise our agential fluidity.
Games offer a way to communicate modes of agency.
They form a library of agencies.
They can thus help us become more free, by teaching us more ways of being — by expanding our inventory of mental styles.
Worry: How could following rules and pre-specified goals ever make us more free?
What’s the point of all these rules? Isn’t it authoritarian, uncreative, and unfree?
Miguel Sicart: games are a bad form of play. Play is essentially free, and games try to structure it, destroying its essence.
Resolving the apparent contradiction:
Unrestricted freedom often leads to the repetition of habitual frames of minds and ways of deciding.
Strict rules, adopted temporarily, can push us out of our habits.
This should be a familiar thought:
For example: yoga forces us into new postures. It breaks habits of movement through obedience to strict direction. But this creates flexibility in the long term.
Another slogan: Games are yoga for your agency.
Act II: Gamification and rankings are often terrible
Value capture, more careful version:
An agent’s* values are rich and subtle, or in the process of developing in that direction.
The agent enter a social environment that presents you with simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values.
Those simplified values dominate their practical reasoning in the relevant domain.
Agent = individual or group. (A department or a university can be value-captured by the rankings.)
Value capture includes gamification, and more:
Academic assessment, research impact factors, retweet numbers, Facebook likes, numerical wine scoring, FitBit numbers, quantified policing, money.
Like:
You go into journalism with a vast love of truth, but you leave caring about number of clicks.
You start exercising for your health, but you end up trying to max out your FitBit per-week numbers.
You start controlling your diet for your health, but end up trying to hit optimum targets for weight and BMI.
You start learning out of curiosity, but you come out focused on grades.
You starting tweeting for the sake of truth, justice, and conversation, and end up aiming largely at viral content.
Example of value capture
The US News and World Report law school rankings:
Force all schools and prospective students into a single value system
Prevent schools for pursuing alternate missions
Punish schools for not conforming to the value system embedded in the rankings (which cares about LSAT scores of incoming students, and employment rates 9 months after graduation)
Important finding: students used to try to figure out which law school fit their values for education — which required thinking about what they cared about, for their legal education and career.
Now students largely just want to go to the “best” school and take the USN&WR list to set what “best” is.
Value capture disrupts the process of value self-determination
We should be choosing our values for ourselves, tailoring them to our psychologies and our place in the world.
Value capture cuts off that process, substituting pre-fabricated and standardized values for tailored ones.
The main idea in a slogan: With value capture, you outsource the process of self-determination.
To be absolutely clear:
The claim isn’t just that value capture is harmful when it happens without our knowing. (That’s moderately uncontroversial)
The claim is that even when we knowingly and voluntarily participate in value capture, it is very costly.
Institutional metrics have a particularly inflexible, mechanistic quality that often makes them bad values individuals and small communities to adopt.
They are prefabricated values — and your values are something you don’t want pre-gab.
Why are institutional metrics hard to tailor, and ill-fitting for individual lives?
For that, let’s turn to work in the history and sociology of quantification:
He says he has four horseman on this and only shows one of them here
Trust in Numbers by Theodore M. Porter | Goodreads
Porter, Trust in Numbers:
The quantification of knowledge trades nuance and sensitivity for portability and aggregability
It does so by stripping off nuance and context
This renders the information readily transmissible between people with little shared context.
Consider the Grade Point Average:
We could evaluate students in a piecemeal way tailored to their particular needs and emotional states. There’s not a lot of use for the students themselves for easy aggregability of scores.
We need letter grades and their numerical equivalents to do large-scale management of students: to make them easily rankable en masse on a spreadsheet.
Porter: information is a kind of knowledge that has been prepared to be understood by distant strangers.
Sabine Leonelli: data is knowledge that has been prepared to travel to unexpected contexts, to be used in unexpected ways, by unknown people.
This is usually referred to as the portability theory of data.
Theory of data says we have something to worry about. That something is really at stake here. Like a real dilemma that will always work agains our efforts to find connection. We have justification-system the leverage data or information. Metrics give rise for quick justification.
Its working againsg contextualization
That’s the first claim: institutional numbers are de-contextualized.
I don’t have time, but the other claims are that institutional numbers involve judgments that remove sensitivity and expertise, and substitute simple rules that anybody could follow, with no special background.
Value capture involves centering yourself around values that have been re-formulated to be de-contextualized and insensitive to the finer grain.
They are off the rack values.
BACK TO GAMES
But aren’t games also off-the-rack values? Games include mechanical scoring systems. So why are they different?
Notice in both games and metrics, mechanical application criteria mean that anybody can pick up and use the evaluation criterion. They’re highly accessible.
But notice a huge difference:
In games, we can freely shift between games and modify games.
Metrics tend to be pervasive and inflexible.
There is a difference-between games and metrics
Consider speed-running: if Mario Odyssey is boring to you, you can change the goal and try for speed instead of points.
If speedrunning Mario Odyssey is boring, try Minimum Captures Mario Odyssey.
Players and communities invent alternate goals and rules to shape the kind of action they like.
The freedom from the demand for cross-comparability, frees the playes and communities in invent alternative goals and rules, to tailer actions to what they like. It gives people the freedom
Consider indie tabletop roleplaying.
Indie developers complained that Dungeons and Dragons point system was primarily built around killing things and completing quests — that it encouraged a basic cycle of efficient killing and shopping.
An alternate scoring system: FATE, in which you get FATE points for getting into trouble in character, and then spend them to activate those same character qualities to have special abilities.
But you might ask: how do you compare a Mario Odyssey speedrun score to a normal Mario Odyssey score and how do you compare that to a NoCaptures run?
The answer is: you don’t need to.
Compare to grades:
If I want to modify the grading system and create three independent tracks for skill acquisition, effort, and community and I refuse to combine them — this won’t interoperate with the GPA system.
Since metrics function to create easy and comprehensible information-aggregation and scale, there is an enormous pressure to interoperate. The same interests and filters tend to be held stable at scale.
With games, designers and players are free to create radically different micro-scoring systems for radically different purposes. Designers create a diverse ecosystem of highly variable experiences and players can choose or mod to their heart’s content.
Here’s the worry
Games, by their very diversity, encourage the attitude of reflective control, by allowing us to experience very different scoring systems and then periodically keying us to step back and ask if we want to keep playing. And the lack of enforced large-scale stability permits tailoring and variation.
Metrics, by their monolithic pervasiveness, tend to discourage reflective control and discourage tailoring.
Games are a technology that encourages play with meaning-making.
Metrics are a technology that encourages outsourcing meaning-making to distant sources.