THE SCORE

A philosophical theory of games and what it means to win them.

Nguyen, a professor at the University of Utah, opens with a challenging question: “Is this the game you really want to be playing?” The question inspires two accounts of how scorekeeping enters into play. One involves rock climbing, which, a friend tells him, has a guiding ethos: “Man, you gotta just savor the movement.” The second is a very different kind of game, the publication of academic works and the scoring system that is used to indicate the prestige of the journals in which they appear, as well as the influence they exert on the field. That scoring system encourages scholars to keep their heads low and their work narrowly focused on “fairly arcane technical questions,” a game that Nguyen, by necessity, bought into, setting his big-picture, wild-haired philosophical concerns aside. We all have choices, of course, and when it comes to such scorekeeping, Nguyen holds: We can either subvert and modify the rules or be “captured” by them, either play the game in order to play the game or play it in order to win by criteria not of our own making, what Nguyen calls “striving play,” in which there’s a gulf between goal (victory) and purpose (fun). Scoring systems constrain us, while, by the author’s account, a game properly designed provides the liberatory scaffolding for players to create new selves: “Games are an art form that works in the medium of agency itself.” Though largely jargon-free, Nguyen’s narrative can sometimes be heady to the point of headachy, but he’s also delightfully irreverent, as when he lampoons “a certain kind of gamer asshole” who lives in a zero-sum world and has to win every time—and who, as a result, is “just evil.”

An engaging look at the games we play and whatever freedom we might have as we do so.