C. Thi Nguyen. The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Penguin Press. $32.00. 368 pp.
A few times a year I read a book that is so exciting, so energizing, and so creative that I almost cannot finish it. It makes me angry, hot and jealous that I didn’t write it. The Score was a book like that.
C. Thi Nguyen is not for everyone. He curses. He tells a lot of stories. His prose is much more casual than you’d expect for a philosopher. But he has also distilled his own study of games into an account of what it feels like to play a game you love, and what it feels like to have that love lost due to opaque systems of measurement.
“There is, in my profession,” he writes, “a single list of all the major philosophy departments, ranked by prestige. There is another list of all the philosophy journals you could publish in, also ranked by prestige. These are the scoring systems of philosophy.”
As a philosophy graduate student, Nguyen found himself consumed by these rankings. They determined what essays he wrote, which conferences he attended, and whose opinions mattered to him. He goes on:
Nobody is forcing people to use these systems. They’re just a pair of websites, each compiled by a small group of professionals, based on some annual surveys. In the end, they’re just a summary of a few people’s subjective impressions of status. We could have just as well decided to ignore them; they have no official authority. But that’s not what happened. Most professional philosophers pay intense, close, and regular attention to these lists. Most of us know exactly how we’re doing on the rankings.
Nguyen’s life was determined by these lists. Though he had once been “obsessed with some big, weird old questions,” over time he became consumed by these lists. He began writing “small, precise articles on fairly arcane technical questions.” He worked to gain entry into the graduate programs and workplaces that would support his place on these rankings. Over time, his “joy in philosophy started draining away.” Before the rankings, “my desires were grounded in my own sense of what mattered.” Though Nguyen might have desired the respect of a few fellow philosophers, they were the ones who shared his view of what mattered—“the particular philosophers I thought were cool.” But over time, the metrics determined his values. He lost the joy of the game. He was playing by somebody else’s rules.
Resisting this collapse, he began his search for a form of “value clarity”—a concept that would identify success without making it submissive to an opaque system of metrics. He landed on games.
Games identify success. They tell you what to do and how to participate. They help you cooperate and focus your energy. They are collaborative, but they are also flexible. They provoke curiosity and enthusiasm instead of crushing it. When you win a game, you exhibit intangible traits like enthusiasm, curiosity, and wonder. But most of all “winning” is not the only determinant of a game’s success. If you hate playing it, it’s a bad game.
What happens when you play a game, in other words, is the exact opposite of what happened to Nguyen when he was playing by philosophy’s rules. Why is this?
Nguyen argues that metrics and our overreliance on quantitative data are making us unhappy. Metrics are removing from our lives the qualities that make living like a game. Metrics are what led to his own value collapse, and he thinks it is leading to the same kind of collapse in the lives of many others all around.
Nguyen introduces what he calls the “four horsemen of bureaucracy”: Scale, Mechanical Rules, Parts (Interchangeable and Replaceable) and Control. The “four horsemen” are qualities that bureaucracies rely on. They reflect the reliance of bureaucracies on the quantitative. In the example of the student assigned a letter grade to assess progress, “scale” is revealed in the need to make grading systems in the aggregate, with data compiled for many students at once. “Mechanical Rules” mean that the data needs to be inflexible in order to apply to all students in the same way. As online educators have discovered, “Parts” identifies the need of bureaucracies to make instructors fungible—meaning that the work of each instructor will be consistent enough that their students can be reliably assessed (and so that the instructors can be replaced). And Control identifies the subtle threat held by bureaucracies, which is that those individuals who do not “measure up” can be replaced.
Bureaucracies rely on metrics, which are comprised of quantitative data. Metrics “function as scoring systems, rendering a singular value judgment and making it official, and use data to render that judgment.” But metrics “inherit any limitations within data” and are often transformed from being evaluative criteria to targets. Here Nguyen makes the first of many distinctions that I wish I’d made.
He writes that data ignores “intangibles” but that “intangibles” are among the most tangible things there are. He gives the example of a possible public health goal—to lower everyone’s saturated fat intake. This might in fact achieve the desired effect of extending individual health spans. But it ignores the cost—the loss of culinary traditions that form around butter and cheese, and the joys of eating these as a multigenerational family. These joys are “intangible”—and for the purposes of data, they are impossible to abstract. They can’t be counted. Therefore, in a world determined by data and metrics, they don’t matter. Longer lifespans might seem a clear win for public health. But what really matters here—and what really might be lost—can’t be counted. A perfect cheese, in Nguyen’s words, is “glorious in the mouth, but invisible in the language of bureaucracy.” Yes!
Data, by definition, needs to be quantitative, known in the aggregate, and context-free. It is “built to travel.” You need to be able to compare, for instance, graduation rates to evaluate a college, or a student’s GPA in several classes over several years. But to make this evaluation portable—to allow it to aggregate several years of data—you lose a lot of information. You might lose how hard a student had to work to get a B in Algebra, or how much he grew after failing a few tests. You might miss that the student’s curiosity sometimes got in the way of completing assignments on time, or the fact that her creativity meant she didn’t always follow the syllabus exactly as written. These traits—resilience, hard work, curiosity and creativity—might in the long run be exactly what promises success. But because they are hard to quantify, they are lost under the metric of an assigned grade.
If metrics are “factories for values,” as Nguyen argues, then a reliance on metrics can lead to “value capture.” Over time, those traits that cannot be quantified, like a student’s curiosity, or the level of engagement a particular instructor can cultivate in a classroom, or the enthusiasm that learners experience, become less important than those things that can be measured, like letter grades.
It’s easy to read this book and feel a bit trapped—like Nguyen did as an early career professor. The solution, he thinks, comes in thinking with games. Games share a few traits with university philosophy. For one, they are a collaborative endeavor. Everyone agrees to participate when playing a game. Games adhere to a set of rules and standards and a scoring system, but you don’t play a game just to win. You play for the enjoyment of it. Games, according to philosopher Bernard Suits, “make autotelic activity vivid” (meaning, an activity pursued for its own sake). Valuing outcomes in place of process, and then making outcomes into data, has rid much of our lives of the autotelic activity that makes the process valuable, in the first place.
Allow me a personal story. I am a theologian—a “real” one, by which I mean one with a PhD. I’ve done most of the required things to be taken “seriously”—finished the dissertation, published in an academic journal, taught at a post-secondary institution. I’ve also spent a not-insignificant amount of energy trying to be “serious.” This is hard for me, because I am not very serious. And yet I felt that if I were deemed frivolous, “silly,” untidy or “creative,” I’d be discarded as an intellectual peer. I had to “play the game” in a way that made the whole thing less fun.
I’ll tell you a little secret: I think academic theology is boring. This is true almost without exception and has gotten me in more than my share of predicaments. I simply cannot bear things to be boring. It makes me break out in hives. God is, after all, so interesting! And yet the highly technical, very precise accounts of theological topics that predominate in my field—the accounts that get you the respect of your peers—have drained theology of the vitality inherent to it. God is life, after all! It’s not an accident that the old joke that theology concerns itself with “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” has hung around for so long. Somehow we are still counting angels without even believing in them.
Theology at its best can track the story of how God relates to the world—through reflection on the development of doctrine and the account of the biblical text. It can also consider the vast implications of what this all means for how we set up our human communities and our lives together. At its best, it revitalizes us, drawing us as Longfellow said toward the view that “life is real,” and that God has granted us the grace to live it. At its worst, it can make us preening obsequious sycophants, fighting each other to climb to the top of an obscure pile.
Nguyen’s book, in all of its casual directness, reminds us that communicating ideas well might also be a goal of professional academics. His work invigorates and energizes his readers by introducing a concept that they didn’t have and making it relevant. This is its own kind of excellence, and one I’d like to adopt in my own work. For this reason, I wish he had made The Score into two books. At times I felt that there were so many good ideas coming at once that I was losing his main thread. I think what he’s after is important enough that tighter editing and a clearer focus would have made his instincts accessible and relevant to nearly everyone.
