Vox

Leitura de 49 min

The problem with gamifying life

Summary

Philosopher C.T. Nguyen joins Sean Elling to explain what games are and why they feel freeing: they are “voluntarily undertaking unnecessary obstacles” (via Bernard Suits) so that the struggle itself becomes the point. Nguyen contrasts “achievement play” (where winning is what matters) with “striving play” (where trying hard enables immersion, but the outcome doesn’t ultimately matter), using examples like rock climbing and fly fishing to show how constraints can create focus, presence, and even a kind of guided attention that some people can’t reach through “pure” meditation.

The conversation then turns to why scoring systems that delight us in games often feel suffocating in real life. Nguyen argues that institutional metrics aren’t designed for joy, are often imposed without meaningful choice, and—most importantly—are tied to real stakes (grades, jobs, money, status), collapsing the separation between a game’s goals and our deeper purposes. He introduces “value capture”: when rich, plural values (learning, health, good journalism, meaningful connection) get replaced by thinner proxies (GPAs, steps, likes, page views), which then reshape what we want.

Finally, Nguyen explains why metrics are so tempting: they offer “value clarity” and portability—numbers travel across contexts and aggregate easily, but at the cost of nuance. He frames two endings: a bleak one where society forgets what can’t be easily counted (including art and the humanities), and a hopeful one where people rebuild spaces for playfulness and resist letting metrics become their central values. For Nguyen personally, what matters most is the shared “moment of epiphany”—especially when understanding is reached together in conversation.

Recommendations

Books

  • The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game (C.T. Nguyen) — The central book discussed, about how scoring systems shape attention and values and how to resist metric-driven life.
  • The Grasshopper (Bernard Suits) — Cited for a foundational definition of games as voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles.
  • Trust in Numbers (Theodore Porter) — Recommended for understanding why quantitative measures “travel” and aggregate well, and what gets lost when institutions rely on them.

Topic Timeline

  • [00:01] — Opening question: why scoring feels magical in games but flattening in life
  • [00:03] — Defining a game (Bernard Suits): voluntary unnecessary obstacles for the experience of struggle
  • [00:04] — Why games matter: valuing the process over outcomes; games as intrinsically meaningful activity
  • [00:05] — Rock climbing as a “game” and how constraints define the activity
  • [00:08] — Fly fishing as striving play and a tool for intense attention and immersion
  • [00:11] — Play vs work; “achievement play” vs “striving play” and the purpose/goal distinction
  • [00:13] — The paradox of constraint creating freedom; rules as tools for discovery and focus
  • [00:17] — Why institutional scoring systems undermine autonomy (design, choice, and real-world stakes)
  • [00:20] — Treating life like a game: healthy reflection and switching “games” vs moral disaster with real resources
  • [00:26] — “Value capture”: how metrics replace richer values in school, work, health, and social media
  • [00:33] — Can you use metrics instrumentally without being captured by them?
  • [00:36] — Why numbers comfort us: value clarity, portability, and the tradeoff between aggregation and nuance
  • [00:44] — Two endings: depressing drift toward the countable vs hopeful rebuilding of playfulness
  • [00:50] — What matters most: epiphany and shared understanding as Nguyen’s personal meaning of life

Episode Info

  • Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing
  • Author: Vox
  • Category: Society & Culture / Philosophy / News / Politics / News Commentary
  • Published: 2026-02-09
  • Duration: 0h49m

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

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[00:01:01] When we play a game, something kind of magical happens.

[00:01:06] The rules, the constraints, they give us the space to explore freely.

[00:01:13] Games create little worlds where we can be different versions of ourselves.

[00:01:19] But when life becomes a game, somehow all that magic is stripped away.

[00:01:28] Everywhere you look, life is being scored.

[00:01:31] Your productivity, your fitness, your popularity, your status.

[00:01:36] There’s a number for everything.

[00:01:39] And we spend so much time trying to boost those numbers that it’s easy to forget what

[00:01:45] they were supposed to measure in the first place, if we ever knew.

[00:01:50] Why is that?

[00:01:52] Why do scoring systems feel so liberating in games, but suffocating in real life?

[00:01:57] Why does the same structure that brings us pleasure in one domain make everything flat

[00:02:02] and soulless in the other?

[00:02:08] I’m Sean Elling and this is The Gray Area.

[00:02:16] My guest today is philosopher C.T. Nguyen.

[00:02:20] He wrote a book called The Score, How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.

[00:02:26] It’s about the strange power of scoring systems, how they shape our values, how they

[00:02:32] capture our attention, and how they quietly teach us to see the world and ourselves very

[00:02:39] differently.

[00:02:41] This is one of the coolest philosophy books I have read in years.

[00:02:47] It changed not just how I think about games, but how I think about damn near everything.

[00:02:53] How I think about life, really.

[00:02:55] And that’s because the book is using games as a way to interrogate what actually matters

[00:03:01] in life, or maybe what should matter in life.

[00:03:17] C.T. Nguyen, welcome to the show.

[00:03:19] Hello, it’s good to be here.

[00:03:21] I’m so glad you’re here.

[00:03:23] I’m just going to ask a very basic question out of the gates here to get us going.

[00:03:29] What is a game?

[00:03:31] On the most fundamental level, how do you define it?

[00:03:34] Nice and simple, right?

[00:03:36] Yeah.

[00:03:37] For me, the most beautiful and useful definition of a game comes from the philosopher Bernard

[00:03:44] Tute.

[00:03:45] He was kind of this like cult figure who wrote this book called The Grasshopper in the 70s.

[00:03:50] And his definition of a game is that a game, playing a game is voluntarily undertaking

[00:03:57] unnecessary obstacles in order to create the experience of struggling to overcome them.

[00:04:03] Why do we get off on that so much?

[00:04:05] What is the purpose of that?

[00:04:07] Why do we like having obstacles and then that feeling of navigating and conquering them?

[00:04:11] What is that doing for us?

[00:04:13] The reason you play games is actually different in every game.

[00:04:16] There are some party games that I play to chill out with my friends to take the edge off.

[00:04:22] There are some games I play because the thought process is so interesting.

[00:04:27] Coming up with that calculation, figuring out that perfect move and go or chess or reacting

[00:04:32] at just the right moment to block a shot and smash brothers is perfect.

[00:04:37] I think the thing that unites everything I’ve just said is that the pleasure, the value,

[00:04:43] the glory is in the process of acting and not the outcome.

[00:04:48] And that I think is one of the things that Bernard Tute’s definition really revealed to me.

[00:04:52] Either you think that being involved in the process, doing it, feeling yourself doing it,

[00:04:58] being in the process of figuring out, talking to other people, pushing against other people,

[00:05:03] cooperating with other people, either you think that can be beautiful in and of itself

[00:05:08] or you think that games are useless and insane and that half the time what people are doing just makes no sense.

[00:05:15] And I think that’s, I mean, I kind of think that by the time you get to that point,

[00:05:20] you’ve gone down this alternate rabbit hole, the rabbit hole of thinking that only outcomes,

[00:05:25] only products, only like stuff we make that we can hold in our hand is valuable.

[00:05:31] This is probably like asking you who your favorite kid is.

[00:05:36] But do you have a favorite game?

[00:05:39] These days, for me, the most beautiful game is rock climbing.

[00:05:43] Just the the carefulness and the intensity.

[00:05:45] You have to focus on your body and your balance and how you move in relation to the rock.

[00:05:50] Like that is an extraordinary experience for me.

[00:05:55] It’s interesting that you mentioned rock climbing as a game.

[00:06:01] I imagine a lot of people wouldn’t think of something like that as a game.

[00:06:04] They would think of it as an activity, a hobby, whatever.

[00:06:09] What makes it a game?

[00:06:11] So again, this is like this is this this is Burner Suites definition that I think is so clarifying.

[00:06:16] For suits, a game is anything where the constraints or the obstacles are central to what you’re doing.

[00:06:22] In some sense, they’re like the reason you’re doing it.

[00:06:25] And that that’s true of video games, right?

[00:06:27] If you buy a puzzle game and you just like hack it and jump to the end without going through the struggle,

[00:06:33] you haven’t you haven’t done the thing. You haven’t played the game.

[00:06:36] If you get to the if you get to the finish line of a marathon by taking a taxi, you haven’t played the game.

[00:06:42] If you climb a ladder, if you use a ladder to get to the top of a rock climb, you haven’t done the thing that’s valuable.

[00:06:49] Right. And I think this is this is the interesting thing.

[00:06:51] I mean, I’m a philosopher and philosophers will endlessly argue about whether this definition is exactly right.

[00:06:57] And this kind of a sense in which I don’t care.

[00:07:00] Right. Like it doesn’t really matter if this idea that to Taz of doing things for this for the obstacle of creating struggles voluntarily.

[00:07:09] I think it’s pretty close to our natural language concept of a game.

[00:07:13] But I don’t care if it’s exactly right.

[00:07:15] What I care is that he’s like pointed to this thing that is a central part of human life and like delineated this like perfectly useful little category of the things that we do with the constraints and the obstacles are central

[00:07:29] to why we find it valuable. And if you ask yourself why you do those things, then then the answer has to be that it’s it’s something in the doing itself.

[00:07:38] So something like climbing or even fly fishing, which you write about kind of beautifully in the book.

[00:07:44] I have probably not spent more than 10 seconds of my life thinking about fly fishing, but reading about it in your book, maybe want to go fly fish tomorrow.

[00:07:55] But what that has in common with something like climbing is it creates the space for total immersion, total presence, you know, the flow state, right?

[00:08:07] Like the happiness is kind of just in the doing in the way it makes you feel there is no for the sake of.

[00:08:14] Now, we tend to lump all these sorts of activities under the umbrella of play.

[00:08:19] Do we call it play because it’s doing something for its own sake as God and Aristotle intended or for some other reason?

[00:08:28] I mean, let me go back for a second. I just want to talk. Can I just talk about fly fishing for a second?

[00:08:33] I’m like in my basement right now. I haven’t fly fished in like a month.

[00:08:37] Oh, yes, you can intensely fly fishing. I think is a really good example.

[00:08:43] I mean, the experience of fly fishing for me is super interesting.

[00:08:47] Like part of what makes fly fishing the sport it is for me is that it requires so much intense attention to the specific details of nature.

[00:08:57] Right. Like there comes some kinds of fishing like I fished my whole life.

[00:09:00] There’s some kinds of fishing where you just cast something out. You don’t need to look. You don’t need to pay attention.

[00:09:04] You reel you reel in your or sometimes you get something.

[00:09:06] Some of you, you know, you just you’re blank fly fishing.

[00:09:10] The kind of fly fishing I like dry fly fishing where you try to trick a trout into taking a floating imitation insect off the top of the water.

[00:09:19] The way that’s done in its like extreme and purest form is that you have to like quietly walk down the river searching the surface of the water.

[00:09:28] First, you look for the subtle details of the water that indicate to you that there might be some like a holding spot, some soft, slower water.

[00:09:36] And then you have to look and see usually if you’re lucky and if you’re attentive enough, you can see the trout like kind of come up and sip other insects off the surface of the of the water.

[00:09:49] And then you have to cast delicately this tiny little insect, this fake insect to land in front of the trout.

[00:09:56] And if you get it all right, you get like the most glorious experience of a trout swimming up, like seeing your fly, kind of inspecting it and then like deciding to go for it.

[00:10:08] Hopefully, it’s clear that catching fish is not actually the point because we let the fish go.

[00:10:14] Right. Like almost all fly fishers are catch and release fishers.

[00:10:18] The point is that in order to do this, you have to cultivate this incredibly intense form of attention.

[00:10:26] You have to stare at the surface of the water.

[00:10:29] In the experience I have fly fishing is basically like it cleans out my soul more than anything else I can think of.

[00:10:36] And the main reason is that there is nothing else I do that is anything like fly fishing, where you go to a river and you stare with absolute attention at the surface of moving water for like a day.

[00:10:51] And I mean, I think one of the reasons it works for me is some people are natural meditators.

[00:10:55] I’m not. I’m like a total hyper weirdo.

[00:10:58] And if you’ve taken me to a river and you’re like, look at that river and clear your mind, I would last like 30 seconds and then I would like get bored.

[00:11:07] But if you give me a game, if you give me a target, if you’re like, try to catch fish, if you give me this goal and puzzle, suddenly that kind of transforms my entire spirit.

[00:11:19] Like the way I attend to the world and it kind of guides my attention.

[00:11:23] And I think this is like this is the really interesting thing about games.

[00:11:26] And this is an interesting thing about games and play.

[00:11:29] So I think play, as I understand it, like it’s anything you do for its own sake.

[00:11:34] It’s anything where you do where the process, the doing, the activity is the important part and not the outcome.

[00:11:41] By the way, this is this is something that’s really important.

[00:11:44] Suits notes that not all games are play. Right.

[00:11:47] Like if you got good at poker and you hate poker, but it’s the only way for you to make money now and support your family.

[00:11:54] You’re playing a game, but it’s not really play. It’s work. Right.

[00:11:58] Well, is that what you call achievement play?

[00:12:01] So achievement play is play is play for the point of winning. Right.

[00:12:06] The goal of achievement plays to win. It’s only valuable if you win.

[00:12:09] Striving play is play where you play for the sake of the process, for the sake of the struggle, and you don’t galactically care if you win.

[00:12:19] But for striving play, trying to win, you have to try to win in order to experience that that that absorption. Right.

[00:12:29] This is the thing I was talking about fly fishing for me.

[00:12:31] Fly fishing is striving play. The thing I want is absorption.

[00:12:34] The thing I want is to be lost in the river and to have my mind like poured out of my ego and like sent somewhere else.

[00:12:42] But I can’t do that without a goal. Right.

[00:12:44] I have to try intensely to catch a fish to have that experience of absorption.

[00:12:49] So the paradox of games is that they are governed by rules and structure and scoring systems.

[00:13:02] And yet they do create the space for freedom and play.

[00:13:09] Why is that? Is that as paradoxical as it seems?

[00:13:15] Yeah, this is there are like so many levels to this paradox.

[00:13:20] You know, one thing you can do at the climbing gym is they set specific problems.

[00:13:25] And to do the problem, you have to do all the holds are of the same color.

[00:13:30] That’s the problem the gym set for you.

[00:13:32] Or you can just kind of do whatever and just wander all over the holds and go anywhere you want.

[00:13:38] And I was like a really clumsy human being who had like no sense of where my hips were.

[00:13:44] And I only like was forced to find like a refinement in hip motion and a refinement in subtle body balance when I climbed a specific hard problem,

[00:13:55] especially because some problems have been set to like kind of force you to like inch your way over like with your hips only like a millimeter away from the wall.

[00:14:04] And it’s like that kind of constraint that pushes you to find something new.

[00:14:14] And I think games kind of do something similar. Right.

[00:14:16] If you have a lot of games, each game pushes you into a new kind of like rock climbing pushes me to an attention to attention and delicacy.

[00:14:25] Like chess pushes me into like hyper forward thinking, like clear logic or like, you know, right now, my I’ve just been learning a weird new skill toy,

[00:14:39] which is the Japanese like ball and cup game with where you have to like precise control where this ball is going.

[00:14:46] And suddenly you’re learning how much you can control momentum by like knee motion and dropping with things to like give yourself.

[00:14:55] You can you learn that you can control your frame of reference in relation to a moving ball by dropping yourself up and down.

[00:15:02] And these are never things I would have found except that some weird ass restriction pushed me there.

[00:15:09] Well, the thing about those games like chess or whatever is they also narrow your focus.

[00:15:16] I think intuitively we think of freedom in negative terms.

[00:15:21] It’s the absence of control, the absence of rules, the absence of constraints.

[00:15:27] And obviously that’s not the case in games.

[00:15:30] And there is this weird way that it’s like not true in life either.

[00:15:35] I mean, you hear this kind of thing a lot in military culture that discipline is freedom,

[00:15:40] that true liberation is being fully committed to a certain structure, a certain system,

[00:15:44] because you’re not paralyzed by constantly figuring out who you are, what your purpose is.

[00:15:49] You have an identity, you know what you value, you know what you’re supposed to do, and you just you just get up and do it.

[00:15:55] Does that way of thinking make sense to you?

[00:15:58] Absolutely. 100 percent.

[00:16:00] There is a deep resonance here with the idea that as old as Rousseau, I think maybe even older,

[00:16:06] that what governments do is they create new rights via restrictions.

[00:16:12] Right. You create you create a right to property by restricting people from taking stuff.

[00:16:17] You create like other kinds of rights by restricting people from like attacking each other in public.

[00:16:24] I think there’s actually one of maybe this will help.

[00:16:28] When I was starting this whole project and I was thinking about games, I was I was reading all the stuff that was making me really angry,

[00:16:36] that was trying to understand games and art form by thinking about movies and narrative.

[00:16:41] And I mean, they do that stuff, too. But I was really interested in how the rules shaped us.

[00:16:45] And my first thought was that if you think of games as like free form rule systems made for delight,

[00:16:53] then what they are is like art governments. Does that make sense?

[00:16:56] Like they’re like playing with what we do for governance.

[00:17:00] So John Dewey, the philosopher John Dewey says that every art form takes some normal human activity and like refines it and hyper concentrated.

[00:17:09] And games do two things. They hyper concentrate like activity and choice and skill and decision.

[00:17:16] And they do it by taking the structure of governments and contracts and rule systems.

[00:17:22] And instead of using them for like desperate moral purposes, they like break them free and create weird ass forms of life where you’re suddenly like,

[00:17:31] I don’t know, playing a storytelling game and the rules tell you you have to make up like screwed up backstory in order to like get your stamina back.

[00:17:42] And now you’re forced to do this thing because the game has like freed you into a new area.

[00:17:49] So why is it then that when we impose scoring systems on everyday life, socially, professionally, personally,

[00:18:00] they often, maybe not always, but often have the opposite effect that they do in games.

[00:18:06] Why do we lose autonomy when we do this?

[00:18:10] There are there. This to me is the most interesting question.

[00:18:16] And there are so many levels to answer this on.

[00:18:19] One answer is that games are designed for fun and pleasure and joy a lot of the times.

[00:18:24] And institutional scoring systems are designed for something else.

[00:18:27] Typically something like optimizing productivity or maybe at best accountability, but they sure as hell aren’t designed for fun or freedom.

[00:18:36] The next answer is that not only are games typically designed for fun and joy, you have free range over games.

[00:18:46] You can move between games. You have choice over games and you rarely have choice over the scoring systems that are found in institutions.

[00:18:54] A crucial thing about games is the point systems are detached from ordinary life in most cases.

[00:19:00] Again, not all the time, but a lot of the times it just doesn’t matter how many points you got.

[00:19:06] And it doesn’t matter whether you want or not.

[00:19:08] The goal of play and the purpose of play are different.

[00:19:14] When my spouse and I pick up a board game and we try to kill each other, the reason that’s possible is because goals and purposes are different.

[00:19:24] Right. My purpose for playing with my spouse is to have an interesting, lovely, excellent time.

[00:19:31] My goal is to win.

[00:19:34] And the reason I can have this special experience of going all out of completely trying to like destroy her position and take everything apart

[00:19:42] is because winning in the game doesn’t matter.

[00:19:45] Right. There’s nothing that’s actually tied to her long-term well-being about whether she loses or wins or whether I lose or win.

[00:19:52] And that’s completely different when scoring systems are tied to your grades, your resume, your earnings, your income.

[00:20:00] The freedom we have to just go all out in this kind of secluded environment only happens.

[00:20:06] We only get it when the meanings are detached from ordinary life.

[00:20:11] And that’s not something that happens with institutional metrics.

[00:20:16] But games are also these like bounded little worlds, right?

[00:20:19] I mean, the purpose of a score is to tell you who’s winning and who’s losing.

[00:20:22] And that works in a game because games are these domains with fixed rules and standardized or universal goals.

[00:20:28] But can we treat life that way without stripping it of everything that makes it interesting and diverse and worth living?

[00:20:37] There’s a way in which treating life like a game is everything important and the path to a full, rich, meaningful life.

[00:20:51] And there’s a way in which treating life like a game is a moral disaster.

[00:20:56] And they’re different.

[00:20:57] Yeah. OK. Say more.

[00:20:59] OK. Thanks, Sean.

[00:21:04] The way to treat life like a game that’s valuable is to reflect on whether the activities and the scoring systems that you’re engaged in are actually meaningful and rich.

[00:21:16] I mean, if there’s anything we can learn from like true play, it’s that we have a huge amount of choice about the nature of the activity, the nature of the struggle and the richness we find from it.

[00:21:29] I mean, the magic of games is that you don’t have to play any particular game.

[00:21:33] I mean, the magic of games in the best ideal circumstance.

[00:21:36] There are plenty of cases where someone might be forced to play a terrible game.

[00:21:40] But in the ideal circumstance, you can try marathon running.

[00:21:43] I tried marathon running. I hate it. It sucks. It makes me miserable.

[00:21:47] And then I tried rock climbing. And you can like change the game that you’re playing.

[00:21:51] Like I used to try to climb the most difficult climb in rock climbing.

[00:21:54] Now I try to climb as I get older and have realized I’m never going to be that strong.

[00:21:59] I try to find elegant climbs and max out how elegantly I’m climbing them, right?

[00:22:03] You can you can modify, you can switch, you can dance between games.

[00:22:06] And like I think the right spirit of gaming that is like a gateway to the right spirit of life is stepping back from particular systems and scoring systems and constraints and rules and asking if they actually work for you and not being content if they’re not working for you.

[00:22:26] That’s that’s the hopeful spirit.

[00:22:28] The bad spirit is, I don’t know, having a billion dollar company and trying to max out its profits no matter what.

[00:22:36] Yeah.

[00:22:37] And not caring if that destroys every other life or like other people’s well-being or way of life.

[00:22:47] Because that is, I mean, the first way of doing it, I mean, deeply respects the boundedness of games and the fact that there are these little detached systems that we can dive into or out of.

[00:22:59] And the other thing I’m talking about is when you take a real world system that is connected to everything, that is connected to people’s well-being, that is connected to, I don’t know, the financial security of the world.

[00:23:12] Yeah.

[00:23:13] And then you treat that like a game and you try to go all out to destroy people.

[00:23:19] But you’re not doing it under a temporary disposable scoring system that you’re just going to throw away at the end of the night.

[00:23:25] You’re doing it for real resources.

[00:23:40] In the wake of the release of millions of documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, the rich and famous are finally feeling some pain.

[00:23:47] But even with corporate resignations here and with former Prince Andrew being arrested in the UK, the question remains.

[00:23:54] How did Jeffrey Epstein remain a thriving member of the elite for decades when everyone seemed to know what he was up to?

[00:24:02] I don’t think you could be friends with Jeffrey Epstein, whose M.O. was obviously having sex with young girls, even as Trump said, on the younger side, and not know his M.O.

[00:24:12] Untangling the Epstein conspiracy.

[00:24:14] That’s this week on Today Explained, every weekday and now on Saturdays.

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[00:26:17] There’s a phrase in the book that I think is really important.

[00:26:37] And the phrase is value capture.

[00:26:40] Could you talk about how the values of scores and metrics in life quietly shape and reshape what we actually desire?

[00:26:52] When I was writing my first book about games, a lot of people were like, oh, you love games.

[00:26:56] So you must love gamification. You must love the gamification of work and education.

[00:27:00] And my first response was like, if you actually understand what makes games special and distinctive,

[00:27:05] you will hate the gamification of grades and education and work and communication on social media.

[00:27:12] And in trying to express this, I started using this term value capture.

[00:27:17] So value capture is the idea that sometimes your values are rich or subtle or dynamic or plural or developing that way.

[00:27:26] And then you get parked in an institution or a social setting that feeds you simplified, typically quantified versions of those values.

[00:27:35] And then the simplified quantified version takes over, like going to school out of a love of ideas and coming out focused on your grades,

[00:27:43] going to journalism focused on, I don’t know, newsworthiness or communication or explanation,

[00:27:50] and then coming out like obsessed with your retweet numbers or follower accounts or page views or subscriber accounts or starting some health practice,

[00:28:00] hoping to be healthier and happier and then coming out obsessed with your step counts or your BMI or your weight.

[00:28:07] In each of these cases, there’s this shift.

[00:28:11] And I’m really interested in that shift. It’s a shift between this kind of this rich, subtle, often changing way of valuing and then the narrowness and thinness of metrics.

[00:28:24] And I’ve been thinking about this, about why this is bad.

[00:28:28] The first thing I thought was something like, and I think this is what a lot of people think, but like, oh, the problem with this is that from the outside, you’re not autonomous, you’re not free, you don’t get to choose.

[00:28:37] And I don’t think that’s quite right, because a lot of the gamifications are ones that people choose, right?

[00:28:41] People choose to put on a Fitbit. People choose to go on a social media platform and orient themselves towards likes.

[00:28:53] I think what’s really important is not the issue of choice always, but the nature of the values that we find in metrics.

[00:29:00] I think they’re like thinner and they’re emptier.

[00:29:05] The way I put it, I’ve been putting it, is that the most important thing to think about here is the gap, the gap between what’s really important and what’s easy to measure institutionally.

[00:29:16] So I think to really understand the harm of value capture, what it’s really doing for us, we have to ask another question, a question about the nature of metrics, the nature of data, the nature of institutions.

[00:29:28] And what happens when we tie our values to large scale institutional scoring systems?

[00:29:34] Because scoring systems, I mean, I kind of think they’re like the hidden mover of the modern world.

[00:29:41] Like what’s happening in the modern world is that we humans are becoming reoriented to care not about what matters to us and what we find is important to us.

[00:29:54] But we’re oriented towards things that are easy to coordinate on in large scale mass bureaucracy.

[00:30:00] One hundred percent.

[00:30:02] I mean, I think you say this somewhere in the book, which seems obvious, but you just don’t really think about it.

[00:30:09] That, you know, any scoring system communicates a goal.

[00:30:13] And whenever we consent to judge ourselves by a metric or number, we’re also conceding that that’s the goal, that that’s the whole point of doing the thing we’re doing.

[00:30:22] And it’s not hard to see how that can go wrong in your life if you start playing these games without asking yourself if those are actually your goals.

[00:30:31] Right. You know, like you mentioned, like I’m a journalist and I used to write pieces all the time.

[00:30:36] Now I do the show. And in both cases, people are judging me by page views, by clicks, by the download numbers.

[00:30:45] And I hate it, but I’d be lying if I pretended that all these metrics didn’t slowly shape how I come to value the work and the work I do or don’t do.

[00:30:57] And I would I am sure that we are all dealing with our professional versions of this, but it’s just a very concrete example for me how this has impacted my life.

[00:31:10] And it’s not like I was oblivious to it, but I think reading the book made me really sort of wrestle with it.

[00:31:15] And it’s and then you can start seeing this play out in other domains of life, too.

[00:31:20] And it’s it’s it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere.

[00:31:26] It’s it’s value outsourcing. Yes. Right.

[00:31:32] And I think it’s really important to remember that we outsource all the time and we outsource values all the time.

[00:31:37] I mean, you have to. Yeah, you have to. Right.

[00:31:39] Like you outsource like I outsource my values about dishwashers all the time.

[00:31:45] Right. I just like buy a dishwasher.

[00:31:48] I just don’t think about it like it’s not that important to me.

[00:31:51] Someone else has made the decisions about what matters in a in a dishwasher.

[00:31:55] And I think what’s really important is that it makes sense to outsource valuing and vouchers decisions.

[00:32:03] The further it is from the center of your life and soul, but the closer you are to like what really matters to you and what makes you you.

[00:32:13] The the more self destroying and soul destroying it is to outsource your values.

[00:32:22] And I think part of what’s going on with a lot of metrics is that they’re prefabricated value systems.

[00:32:26] It’s really easy. You can just grab them. Right.

[00:32:29] Just like, look, I don’t want to do the research about my dishwasher.

[00:32:32] I’m just going to look at some online review and take number one.

[00:32:35] If you do the same thing about the idea of what makes your podcast good, the idea of like what makes your work good, what makes your education good, the idea of what makes your life good, then you are letting I mean, I literally think what you’re doing.

[00:32:51] Like if you outsource your your say your sense of what makes a good communication, if you tie that to how many likes you get, you’re literally like outsourcing your values and your social values to Mark Zuckerberg.

[00:33:09] And I mean, it’s even more than that because I think it’s not just an external person.

[00:33:14] The most important thing about this value outsourcing is like other kinds of outsourcing.

[00:33:21] What you’re doing is you’re onboarding and internalizing a system that’s been made to work at mass scale.

[00:33:30] Right. It’s not like metrics will not measure the tiny little subtle details of your life.

[00:33:37] Do you think there’s a way to play these games without also being played by them?

[00:33:41] I mean, I think we are all very good at fooling ourselves.

[00:33:44] And I imagine many people will tell themselves that they can play all these social and professional games without compromising what they actually deep down value.

[00:33:53] Do you think that’s mostly bullshit?

[00:33:56] I mean, it’s it’s possible. It’s hard.

[00:33:58] I mean, it’s it’s hard.

[00:34:00] I wrote this damn book about it and it’s still hard for me.

[00:34:03] It’s possible.

[00:34:04] I mean, here’s one way to put it.

[00:34:07] Right now, you can’t escape from the fact that metrics are tied to incentives.

[00:34:11] You can’t escape from the fact that metrics are tied to money, power and influence.

[00:34:17] But it’s one thing to know that a metric will give you more power and more influence.

[00:34:22] And it’s another thing to take it inside yourself and take it on as your central value.

[00:34:31] Because if you just know that it’s a resource, then you can trade off.

[00:34:35] You can decide like, look, one one way you could I mean, you should tell me how this plays out for you.

[00:34:42] But I would imagine if I were a big famous podcaster like you, one way to do it would be to be like, look, here’s what I want.

[00:34:51] Here’s the message I want to communicate. Here’s I care about it.

[00:34:53] In order to get it across, I need good subscriber counts.

[00:34:58] But if I get a huge subscriber count by compromising my values on journalism and communication, then that’ll be worthless.

[00:35:07] So in that case, you’d be trying to increase your subscriber count as an instrument to achieving some other value you’d articulated yourself.

[00:35:19] That’d be one way of being a non captured way of being.

[00:35:21] Another way of being would be like being like, OK, I’m just here’s the goal.

[00:35:25] Maximum subscriber counts. Do whatever it takes. Right.

[00:35:28] And then you would never trade off. You would just do whatever it takes.

[00:35:32] And I think that the key is, I mean, we can’t rewrite the world so that there are no metrics and no incentives tied to metrics.

[00:35:40] But at least we can like keep them outside of our central valuing system and keep them at arm’s length.

[00:35:48] And know that they’re only like very rough measures that kind of that will that will give us resources,

[00:35:56] but not let them actually like determine what the thing we’re trying to do is and what we’re collecting resources for.

[00:36:04] Institutions, as you say, we love the scores and they love the metrics because even though they’re they’re clean proxies for things we think we give a shit about.

[00:36:15] Right. They they they make our their quote values visible.

[00:36:22] Why do we find that visibility is so comforting?

[00:36:26] Is it just about efficiency and control or is there something deeper going on here?

[00:36:30] Some craving for clarity or simplicity or whatever.

[00:36:34] And these are these these numbers give us the illusion of that.

[00:36:40] The pleasure of games is having an experience of value clarity.

[00:36:44] Right. In normal life, if you actually like let yourself be exposed to the rich complexity of life,

[00:36:50] you have all these like brutally complicated decisions to make.

[00:36:54] Right. Like you’re constantly trading off.

[00:36:56] I’m constantly trading off between things that make me happy, things that make my kids happy, things that will connect me to my friends,

[00:37:02] things that will be good for work, things that will keep my body from falling apart.

[00:37:06] And like there’s no clear way to make a decision that how do you measure the happiness of my child against, you know,

[00:37:15] the value of putting more time into a research effort?

[00:37:19] That’s a deep, rich, non-mechanical decision.

[00:37:25] And games make that easy. Right.

[00:37:26] Like so if you’re in a game for once, you don’t have to make these complicated tradeoffs.

[00:37:30] You know exactly what everything is worth.

[00:37:32] You know exactly what gets you one point.

[00:37:34] What gets you one point?

[00:37:35] What gets you two points?

[00:37:36] And what gets you three points?

[00:37:37] The values are clear.

[00:37:38] There are no questions about who won.

[00:37:40] And one of the pleasures of value capture, I think, is that you go on a general universal standard of value.

[00:37:52] Right. You’re on like the gold standard.

[00:37:55] Like everyone can understand you.

[00:37:56] You can understand everyone else.

[00:37:58] It’s easy to communicate like you all will agree instantly.

[00:38:02] So the first thing is the sense of clarity.

[00:38:04] But there’s a second explanation.

[00:38:07] While I was researching this book, I found this other book by Theodore Porter.

[00:38:15] He’s a historian.

[00:38:16] The book is called Trust in Numbers.

[00:38:18] And this book like rocked my world to the core.

[00:38:21] So what he said was there are two ways of knowing about the world, of understanding the world, qualitative and quantitative.

[00:38:27] And they’re both good.

[00:38:28] They’re good at different things.

[00:38:29] The problem comes when we reach compulsively for the quantitative and we don’t ever let ourselves balance these two ways of knowing.

[00:38:39] Qualitative ways of knowing, that is speaking, thinking in words.

[00:38:44] That way of knowing is very rich, very context sensitive, very open ended and dynamic, but it travels badly between contexts because it requires a lot of shared background knowledge to understand.

[00:38:58] Quantitative knowledge, he says, has been designed to travel.

[00:39:03] The easiest example for me for my life is like grading.

[00:39:06] So qualitative feedback is like what I give my students in like long written responses to their essays where I talk about their originality, their rigor.

[00:39:16] I respond to what they’re trying to do.

[00:39:18] I try to work with what they’re thinking about.

[00:39:20] I try to think about in multiple dimensions about their originality versus their openness.

[00:39:25] I took a talk about all of this stuff, but that doesn’t travel well outside of the specific context of philosophy.

[00:39:31] Like, you know, some employer in Silicon Valley is not going to care about this.

[00:39:34] And more importantly, it doesn’t aggregate.

[00:39:36] Like you can’t take the thousands of these that a student generates and push them into one number.

[00:39:41] The way that we get aggregation is we make a letter grade.

[00:39:45] A is a four, B is a three.

[00:39:47] And we kind of hold that little slim meaning constant across the entire world of universities and high schools and employers.

[00:39:55] So everyone vaguely knows what it means.

[00:39:57] And then we can all connect, collect and understand like a B.

[00:40:01] It means roughly the same thing.

[00:40:03] And because it means roughly the same thing to everyone, we’ve prepared the system.

[00:40:07] Then we get instant aggregation into grade point averages.

[00:40:10] So one way to put it is that the portability is this incredibly powerful thing,

[00:40:15] which has an enormous price where the price is sacrificing subtlety and context.

[00:40:21] And that price is an intrinsic part of its powerful functionality.

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[00:44:36] You end the book in a very non-book way,

[00:44:56] which is to say you end it like a good old-fashioned

[00:45:00] choose-your-own-adventure game.

[00:45:03] There’s ending A and ending B.

[00:45:06] One is a little sad and the other is a little hopeful.

[00:45:11] How would you sum up these two endings

[00:45:13] and which one do you really believe?

[00:45:16] Ending A, the sad ending,

[00:45:19] is about how originally we made all this shared language

[00:45:24] just to help us get what we really wanted,

[00:45:26] to help us get what we actually cared about.

[00:45:31] But what we actually care about is really hard to express.

[00:45:34] And what’s really easy for us to come up with language with

[00:45:38] and to count and track is the tools, the instruments, the resources, right?

[00:45:43] It’s easy to keep track of money and hard to keep track of your weird-ass joy

[00:45:47] in playing with a yo-yo.

[00:45:49] And because it’s so easy to track and communicate about the outcomes,

[00:45:54] the tools, the instruments, the resources,

[00:45:57] that can just track our attention until we forget

[00:46:00] internally and externally about the things that really mattered.

[00:46:04] So the first ending is an ending about how the ease of communication

[00:46:08] makes us forget about happiness and joy and satisfaction.

[00:46:13] My editor complained that it was so depressing

[00:46:18] that she couldn’t survive.

[00:46:21] Really? I didn’t think ending A was all that sad.

[00:46:24] I mean, I can tell you why, if you want.

[00:46:26] No, tell me why. I’m really interested.

[00:46:28] What I took you to be saying is that the things that make us us,

[00:46:32] the things that make life rich and meaningful,

[00:46:36] we don’t have precise language for these things.

[00:46:38] I mean, this is the stuff of poetry, not science.

[00:46:41] We love these metrics because they’re simple

[00:46:43] and they make everything intelligible and that’s useful for sure,

[00:46:46] but they can’t capture the deeper stuff, the shit that we really care about.

[00:46:49] They don’t capture the why.

[00:46:52] And that’s kind of beautiful to me, but I guess the sad part is that

[00:46:56] maybe we’ve internalized the idea

[00:46:58] that if something can’t be systematically scored or measured,

[00:47:01] then it’s not real or it doesn’t matter.

[00:47:03] And that’s a bummer.

[00:47:05] You’re talking about the intermediary stage before we get to the sad stage.

[00:47:09] The intermediary stage is the one where we recognize

[00:47:12] that there are some things that are really easy to talk about,

[00:47:15] that are familiar, and there are other things that are weird and matter,

[00:47:19] and that’s what we have poetry for.

[00:47:22] Poetry and art is there for us to stab

[00:47:27] and point to what really matters

[00:47:31] when it’s hard to count it together slowly.

[00:47:35] The fuzziness is crucial for pointing at things that matter,

[00:47:39] but we don’t have ready language for.

[00:47:41] That’s the intermediate step.

[00:47:43] The sad part is when the hyperclarity of easy-to-count metrics

[00:47:51] makes us forget about the value of poetry

[00:47:54] and what poetry counted for,

[00:47:56] and then, I don’t know, university systems

[00:47:59] start cutting out all humanities, all art, and all philosophy,

[00:48:03] which is happening.

[00:48:04] I mean, my department’s getting cut.

[00:48:06] Our budget’s getting slashed in favor of AI programs.

[00:48:11] And then, we don’t encounter that stuff anymore.

[00:48:15] I mean, I’m worried that we’re systematically, socially shifting

[00:48:19] our attention away from poetry and the things that poetry points to

[00:48:23] towards the easily countable.

[00:48:25] So that’s why it’s the sad end.

[00:48:27] Did I just hear you sigh horribly?

[00:48:29] Yeah, with the AI line that that’s…

[00:48:32] What you just described is literally just ice picks to my fucking soul.

[00:48:37] So, yes, I sighed.

[00:48:39] Give me the happy ending, Chet.

[00:48:41] What’s ending B?

[00:48:42] I’ve kind of already given you the happy ending,

[00:48:44] but you might like the reason why I have two endings.

[00:48:47] So the happy ending is what I said before, right?

[00:48:50] Like, look, there are some kind of ways to structure the world

[00:48:54] that discourage playfulness.

[00:48:59] When we offer simple, metrified, easily countable,

[00:49:05] easily understandable, fully pervasive systems,

[00:49:07] this discourages playfulness.

[00:49:09] But that gives us a sense of what the other direction is like,

[00:49:13] and it’s going to be hard to build.

[00:49:15] But the other direction is to de-emphasize

[00:49:20] large-scale pervasive measures and rebuild play in.

[00:49:24] And I mean, the cheerful part of this is, for me,

[00:49:27] how many worlds that are genuinely playful are flourishing, right?

[00:49:31] Like, you know, I wandered off into the wilds of the internet

[00:49:36] and found a community that was interested in, like,

[00:49:38] emotionally cathartic, like,

[00:49:40] self-exploratory indie role-playing games

[00:49:43] where you, like, play out codependent relationships.

[00:49:45] That exists, too, right?

[00:49:47] That’s not been squashed.

[00:49:49] Like, worlds that encourage deep playfulness

[00:49:53] are also out there and also flourishing in a weird way.

[00:49:59] If it’s true that metrics don’t capture what really matters

[00:50:04] or they only capture what’s easy to measure,

[00:50:06] then I have to at least ask you

[00:50:09] what you think really matters in life.

[00:50:13] And in the spirit of your book, I’m not asking you

[00:50:15] what should matter for everyone in life.

[00:50:17] I’m really asking what matters most to you in your life.

[00:50:21] What matters to me, there are these moments.

[00:50:25] I’ve been thinking about all my weird obsessions,

[00:50:27] and all my weird obsessions I realized,

[00:50:32] everything from cooking to board gaming

[00:50:36] to, like, conversations with people,

[00:50:38] they’re all built around the moment of epiphany.

[00:50:41] Like, when you have this really difficult rock climb

[00:50:45] and you don’t see how you can do it,

[00:50:47] and then you realize, oh, it’s about the balance.

[00:50:49] Move my shoulder there, and then everything comes together

[00:50:51] when you do it with your body.

[00:50:53] Or when you see all these, like, weird, complicated ideas

[00:50:56] and you feel like there’s some heart to them

[00:50:59] and you don’t have the words,

[00:51:04] as you can finally put it towards that moment of epiphany.

[00:51:07] And the height of this, and I think for me,

[00:51:09] this is probably why I’ve built my life

[00:51:13] around the weird way I’ve built my life.

[00:51:15] The height of this, the best thing in life

[00:51:18] is when you’re talking with other people together

[00:51:21] about some complicated thing, and you don’t understand it,

[00:51:24] and you keep pushing each other,

[00:51:26] and you keep getting closer and closer,

[00:51:28] and there’s a moment where you figure it out together,

[00:51:31] and in your conversation, you get exactly the right word,

[00:51:36] exactly the right image,

[00:51:38] and suddenly you’re there together understanding the thing.

[00:51:42] That is my meaning of life.

[00:51:44] I’m going to leave it right there.

[00:51:47] This is one of the best books I’ve read this year,

[00:51:50] if not the best, and it’s the end of the year,

[00:51:52] which means I’ve read a lot.

[00:51:55] It’s going to sit with me, I think, for a very long time.

[00:51:58] Thank you.

[00:51:59] That means more to me than I could express

[00:52:03] in any words I have.

[00:52:05] Or metrics?

[00:52:06] Yeah, certainly not.

[00:52:15] All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

[00:52:17] I hope you can tell that I did.

[00:52:19] There’s so much here that I’m going to think about for so long,

[00:52:23] and I hope it landed like that for you, too.

[00:52:27] As always, we want to know what you think, what you thought,

[00:52:31] so drop us a line at TheGreyArea at Vox.com,

[00:52:35] or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line

[00:52:37] at 1-800-214-5749.

[00:52:41] Please also rate, review, subscribe to the pod

[00:52:44] that helps us grow the show.

[00:52:47] This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey,

[00:52:49] edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala,

[00:52:52] fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch,

[00:52:54] and Alex Overton wrote our theme music.

[00:52:56] New episodes of The Grey Area drop on Mondays.

[00:52:59] Listen and subscribe.

[00:53:01] The show is part of Vox.

[00:53:03] Support Vox’s journalism by joining a membership program today.

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[00:53:22] We’ll see you next time.

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