The Score: Gamifying the Nature of Metrics with Thi Nguyen

Now, tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired the book.

So the book comes from two directions.

One of the specialties I've had, the really weird specialty I have in philosophy is philosophy of games.

I've been-- My first piece of academic work, my first academic book was a book called Games: Agency as Art that was trying to explain, uh, what games were and what made them special, and part of this was about how point systems sculpted what we did in games, how point systems, like everything from like how we score points in basketball to like what gives you experience points in an indie tabletop role-playing game, how that changes the nature of your action, how that shapes what you do.

That's half of what I've been doing.

And the other half is trying to understand how information flows in a society.

I work in a field called social epistemology, which tries to understand how knowledge gets made, how trust gets sculpted, and how information gets transferred socially.

And on that side, I've been really interested in the nature of metrics.

And I mean, at, at my, at my first job, I was for a long time the learning outcomes liaison for my philosophy department, which meant that I was supposed to report in clear, crisp, quantified form objectively true metrics for how well we were teaching people philosophy.

And I started worrying a lot about the basic dynamic of metrics in an institution and what got captured and what didn't.

And what, what actually happened was, for a while, I realized that out of my game stuff, I had this picture of how clear, explicit scoring systems were like the gateway to play, to joy, to discovering new narratives, to discovering new kinds of action.

And then I had another story from the other half of my work about how institutional scoring systems that were clear and explicit missed everything that was important and sucked the life out of education, art, and community.

And then I realized that these two pictures were deeply intentioned, and I had to explain to myself how these two things could be and how, how I could square how different scoring systems were in two different parts of my life.