Is Life a Game?

What does make a meal or a trip “successful”? It’s hard to say; this is one of the reasons that you can see value capture happening and be almost powerless to stop it. For many years, until I started writing this column, I was an editor at The New Yorker; I’ve now given up my editorial duties. But, because no one deactivated my login, I still have access to the magazine’s traffic software, which lets me see exactly how many people read my columns. I know very well that the value of a given piece of writing isn’t reflected in how many people read it. Even so, I can’t help but check on the leaderboard to see how my articles chart, and feel satisfaction and desolation when my numbers surge or plummet. The stats are so much more concrete than my internal, unarticulated writerly goals.

There’s a paradox here. Goals, rankings, and metrics help us thrive. Without them, we’d be lazy, and unable to compare, coördinate, and connect our efforts. We can’t live by intuition alone. At the same time, there’s almost always a gap “between what’s being measured and what actually matters,” Nguyen writes. It might even be the case that “many of the important things in life seem to consistently defy measurement.” So how do we measure what we do without misleading ourselves? How can we use rankings without letting them rule us?

There are lots of ways we could answer these questions. Nguyen approaches them through games. In his previous book, “Games: Agency as Art”—a philosophical smash hit, which won the American Philosophical Association’s Book Prize, in 2021—he argued that games let us “flirt” with different “modes of agency.” A pacifist in real life becomes a military strategist at the chessboard; playing poker, you might proudly deceive your spouse. In “The Score,” Nguyen extends these ideas. Games, he writes, can train us to focus on value, by teaching us “the distinction between goals and purposes.” When you’re playing charades with your family, your goal is to win, but your purpose is to be part of a group of people enjoying themselves. For this reason, as long as you have a good time, you can feel satisfied even if you lose; it would be bizarre to get mad about losing at charades. In order to enjoy the game, however, you must also take winning seriously. You have to commit, temporarily, to its values—not just to the value of winning, but to values like being demonstrative, extroverted, and unselfconscious.

There are players for whom goal and purpose are identical. They pursue what Nguyen calls “achievement play”: professional athletes, for example, play games to win, and believe deeply in the glory of victory. But most of us pursue “striving play,” in which “you try to win not because winning is important, but because the act of trying to win gives you a delicious struggle.” This involves an interior balancing act. A striving player doesn’t want a game to be too easy (there’d be no struggle) or too hard (there’d be no winning); she might find the sweet spot by putting handicaps in place, or tweaking the rules. But the struggle can’t be allowed to take precedence, either: it can be the purpose, but not the goal. Nguyen recalls a friend who found that his ten-year-old son was beating him in Monopoly. The game dragged on until the dad discovered that his son was reverse-cheating, by sneaking cash back to him. The son hoped to prolong his victorious game for as long as possible. But you can’t be a rock climber who doesn’t care about getting to the top. You have to strive.

Broadly, Nguyen thinks that we can draw lessons from game-playing as we try to navigate a reality ruled by rankings and metrics. In the real world, as in the game world, scores are motivating and clarifying; they can help groups of people coalesce around shared goals. But real-world scores, like game scores, are also reductive. In both cases, that’s the point, as it were, of having a score. A group of people playing charades may come to the game with different purposes—Bob wants to break the ice, Anne wants to flirt, Steve wants to show off his acting chops, Jill is competitive—but the score helps them form a “quick, artificial community” around the shared and simplified goal of winning. Similarly, the writers, editors, producers, and businesspeople who work at a magazine all can agree, for purposes of decision-making, that it’s good when a story finds lots of readers, and orient their efforts around that goal. But they must also be clear about their individual purposes, which are different, nuanced, and harder to communicate. If they focus only on the score, they’ll lose track of what counts.

Take this thinking to the extreme. Suppose that the world is run by groups of people who succeed through coördination, by agreeing on shared goals. Those goals may be reductive, but they’re still useful—and the more that people agree on them, the more coördinated everyone becomes. Over time, we learn to talk in the same ways about the same things. We come to agree, for example, that a great recipe is one that’s received tens of thousands of likes online. That attractive people look a certain way, with “tens” at the top. That particular neighborhoods place higher in coolness than other neighborhoods. In all sorts of official and unofficial ways, we’re ranking and sorting. And the more we do this, the more we keep doing it, since everything outside the realm of ranking seems a little mysterious. Those unliked recipes, ordinary-looking people, and unfamous neighborhoods—aren’t they just mid, forgettable, and random?

In Nguyen’s view, something like this is happening to our society. He is not only a serious game-player—in “The Score,” he ambles through discussions of board games, video games, party games, and the like—but also a devotee of pastimes such as skateboarding, cooking, and yo-yo. It’s interesting, he writes, to see what happens when scores are introduced into activities where they’ve previously been absent. He finds, for instance, that scorekeeping has pushed skateboarders to focus more on obvious, badass tricks than on “steeze,” or stylish ease, which is more difficult to quantify. He suggests that the advent of scores for wine has made bold, fruity wines more popular at the expense of subtler ones, which might pair better with food. It’s not that these developments have made skateboarding and wine worse, as such—kickflips and fruity wines can be great—but that they’ve decreased the variety of ways in which excellence can be experienced. Purposes exist in players, not games, and yet the games have come to dominate the players. For Nguyen, rock climbing is about the feeling of moving up the wall, and yet someone else may find the same activity rewarding in a different way. The more we standardize our experience and stress goals over purposes, the less variety we cultivate.