A Philosopher and Fly Fisherman’s Take on Games
Thi Nguyen champions the richness of playing over the point system

What is a game? According to University of Utah Associate Professor of Philosophy Thi Nguyen, a game is a free agent’s crystallization of doing. It’s engaging obstacles just for the feeling of overcoming them. Games can be rich and fulfilling when people value the experience but can become toxic when the ultimate goal causes them to lose sight of everything that happens along the way. Aware of humans’ love for games and hoping to capitalize on it, many institutions today are vastly gamified. Social media, fast food rewards apps, and corporate advancement programs all use aspects of games to keep users and employees fixated on a goal—without them even knowing it.

Thi Nguyen worries about the impact of not being able to see our involvement in these highly gamified external systems.

The gamification of society

Nguyen’s new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game, provides the narratives needed to recognize what systems you are locked into and the blueprints to regain control over the games you decide to play.

"I started thinking about games as a project in my Philosophy of Art class… I was trying to understand what makes a game great, and I was struggling with people saying that it's the cinematography or the script or good cutscenes [in games] because that's what makes movies good." Before studying the gamification of society, Nguyen focused on the games themselves. German board game designer Reiner Knizia said that the most important thing about a game is its scoring system because it tells the players what to care about.

Manipulating desire

In Nguyen's first book the faculty-philosopher analyzed how games were an art form that manipulated the cares of the players. In the same way that a writer molds their words, events, and characters to elicit an effect on their readers, game designers craft their scoring systems to manipulate desire. "After I published the book, people kept saying, 'Oh, you like games, right? You must love gamification. Help us gamify education!' And I said, no way!" Nguyen defines gamification as the introduction of a scoring system to a non-game environment. He believes that in instances when education, work, and social media have been gamified, there have been generally negative effects. Those in the system are no longer participating to learn and contribute but rather to earn points in the respective system.

These effects have even been observed in his own classroom. Nguyen elected to make his entry-level classes ungraded—he wanted students to learn for the sheer love of it. But this shifted the scoring system. "Students told me, 'I hate that you made this class ungraded because I love this class. But now I can't justify coming because I have all these hard engineering classes to study for.'"

Something had to change. So, as a philosopher does, Nguyen asked students to make their own grading system and, in the process, to ask how it can best achieve the goal of education and skill learning in this new era.

"I think a lot of students receive grades as an externality. They think that 'the world tells me to do this, and so I'll do it.' And we had to articulate what they actually wanted from college. Surely, you don't want to just use ChatGPT for everything and just come out with no skills, right?" The students’ new system included a final paper, but it was not weighted heavily. Instead, there were a series of multi-day workshops where students discussed their writing process. Critical thinking was done in class and with fellow students, not at home where it's easy to lean on AI.

Not slowness, but richness

Deploying critical thinking yourself takes more time. Using AI, you could generate a paper in minutes while avoiding the struggle and the rawness of the process. This is an efficient way to score a good grade, but it defeats the purpose of learning itself. "My discipline often suffers because we make our classes difficult. So, students end up receiving worse grades and taking longer to graduate. But we believe there's evidence that they come out really smart, creative, thoughtful, and strong. There's a reason that Silicon Valley keeps on recruiting philosophers aggressively, right?"

It's true. Daniela Amodei, the President of Anthropic; Jack Ma, the co-founder of Alibaba; and Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator were all humanities majors. Even so, creative thinking and the time it takes continues to be undervalued in an academic world hyper-focused on metrics.

As an avid fly fisherman, Nguyen finds the pastime helpful for understanding the hidden payoff of slowing down and thinking. What matters to many is the number of fish caught. They frequently use a style of fishing called euro-nymphing, which is done by imitating the larvae carried by the currents below the surface. Regardless of the time of day or year, you can count on trout to hold their position and effortlessly engulf nymphs as they pass by. It's easy, dependable, and you're likely to hit some appealing metrics.

But instead of these strategies, Nguyen chooses the inefficiency of dry fly fishing, which involves analyzing all aspects of the river. As a naturally rushed person, Nguyen deeply appreciates how it forces him to notice the little things. "A lot of what people call slowness is actually a rich, thick experience of a really detailed world. I don't think that I'm slower in fly fishing; I think I'm seeing more detail and resolution." This process, according to Nguyen, is an example of a good game, where the focus is on the richness of the activity, not its point system. When those who practice euro-numphing miss the sight of a trophy fish surfacing, Nguyen can cast right to it for a much-deserved payoff.

Playing somebody else’s game

Nguyen's insights are helpful in today's fast-moving, industrialized world. But even during the agrarian age in which Socrates lived, the classical philosopher urged the people to think about what they were doing rather than marching onward in non-reflection. "I feel so deeply connected to that tradition," Nguyen says. Just as Socrates asked people to slow down, Nguyen does the same with his students and his readers.

You might feel trapped in a reward system—playing somebody else's game—but Nguyen notes that you are already further along than you think. "I love watching my students' faces when I point out that their yoga classes have no grades.
Because for many people, they've spent their entire life with a second education system that has no grades attached [and] loving it." Nguyen's ideas are foundational to the humanities, which teach us how to think more creatively and see the world more clearly. By extracting yourself from unwanted point systems and focusing instead on the richness of doing, thinking, and learning, you can prepare yourself for any imaginable future in any industry. This is the work and the enduring value of the humanities.

 

You can read the New York Times review of “The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game” and watch a video of Thi Nguyen at “play”.