by C. Thi Nguyen
C. Thi Nguyen loves games, said Dan Piepenbring in Harper’s. In his new book, the University of Utah philosophy professor puts himself out on “a long, creaking limb” by suggesting that much of human activity can be explained by two countervailing inclinations of the species: our tendency to gamify life’s purpose and our pursuit of freedom from that chase through, well, less consequential games. If you enjoy board games, fly fishing, or even recreational cooking, you probably appreciate the type of game that Nguyen endorses: an activity whose sometimes arbitrary rules enable us to play more freely and experience different aspects of ourselves. Nguyen worries, however, that our urge to quantify the value of our lives and achievements is soul-sucking, and his worries are less fun to read about than his paeans to play. He writes so beautifully about mastering the yo-yo, in fact, that I’d read a whole book on the subject and “would feel alive at the end.”
“The Score is part polemic and part philosophical inquiry,” said Simon Ings in The Telegraph (U.K.). Nguyen is telling us that in our trying to make life more frictionless, our governments, businesses, and individuals too have created metrics that measure the wrong things. “The result is that our civic life has become superficially efficient but fundamentally amoral.” Nguyen mentions a pastor who neglects other needs of his congregation because he’s been told to meet a baptism quota, and The Score also prods us to consider how the ranking of universities discounts schools’ distinctive value systems, how the pursuit of individual wealth steals time from relationships, and how we’ve come to believe we’re healthy as long as each day we each log 10,000 steps. Nguyen’s cautionary tales can get repetitive, but he is forever leading readers toward a particular set of conclusions, and “if we truly want to understand our civic plight, we should read The Score.”
At the end of the book, Nguyen offers two possible scenarios for our future, said Stuart Jeffries in the Financial Times. In the “Cynical Sad One,” as he calls it, our values continue to be perverted by misleading metrics as tech companies and other businesses monetize such scoring. But because Nguyen is essentially “an upbeat, hopeful guy,” he throws his heart into a second potential outcome, “advocating a kind of playful rebellion against rules and metrics.” Being more cynical myself, “I suspect the evisceration of our values by scoring systems will continue,” as business interests outweigh human interests. “I would love to be proved wrong,” though, and in the meantime, “I give this excellent book five stars.” | 
