The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game

A philosophy of games that explores how scoring systems shape our desires and values. Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen examines games across multiple domains—video games, sports, board games, cooking, gardening, fly-fishing, and running—to reveal how they embody free play and highlight the beauty of action itself, often prioritizing the experience of doing something over its outcome. Nguyen also investigates how scoring systems function within corporations and bureaucracies through metrics and rankings. These systems tell us how to measure success and encourage us to adopt external measures of value. However, metrics capture only what is easy to measure, not necessarily what matters most. By outsourcing our values to these systems, we sacrifice our independence in exchange for clarity. The book asks whether the games we play—defined by the metrics we follow—are truly the ones we want to be playing.