In an age where we track our steps, compete on language app leaderboards, and obsess over university rankings, a new book offers a stark warning: our love of scores is quietly ruining our lives. Philosopher C Thi Nguyen explores this modern malaise in his compelling new work, The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game.
The Perils of Points: When Metrics Become the Goal
The book's argument is powerfully illustrated by the author's own experience with the language-learning app Duolingo. What began as a genuine quest to learn Japanese gradually mutated into a hollow pursuit of experience points and leaderboard status. Nguyen recounts spending a holiday glued to his phone, mindlessly repeating a simple Kanji lesson to farm points, while ignoring his family and learning nothing new.
This, he argues, is a classic case of "value capture" – a process where the metric designed to measure progress (like points or rankings) supplants the original, nuanced goal. We internalise the score until it redefines our core sense of what is important.
From Law Schools to GDP: Society's Dangerous Game
Nguyen extends this analysis beyond personal apps to the structures of society itself. He cites the example of American law school league tables. Introduced to provide objective data, these rankings collapsed complex educational philosophies into a single number. Schools were forced to chase that number to attract funding and students, often at the expense of genuine teaching.
A perverse incentive emerged: part of a school's rank is based on its rejection rate. This has led institutions to spend resources soliciting applications from students they never intend to admit, simply to reject more people and appear more elite.
At a national level, Nguyen warns of our fixation on metrics like GDP and exam grades. This pursuit of "delicious clarity" in a simple score comes at the expense of context and nuance, a seductive but dangerous bargain he calls "the grim truth about the heart of data."
Reclaiming Wonder in a Scored World
Despite the gravity of his subject, Nguyen's writing is lucid and entertaining, filled with personal passion. He vividly describes the intrinsic joy of rock climbing's "explosive hip twists" and the meditative focus of fly-fishing, where the point isn't the catch but the state of mind achieved while trying.
The book is a call to protect the delicate, unquantifiable experiences that make life worth living—wonder, absorption, and play—from the "dumbed-down epistemic fundamentalism" of graphs and leaderboards. The Score is an urgent, enriching read that challenges us to question what we are really optimising for, before we waste our lives playing someone else's game.
The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game by C Thi Nguyen is published by Penguin (£25).
