By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes C. Thi Nguyen's The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game is one of those books that can change the way you look at the world. Since finishing it, I find myself asking a simple question: What game is being played here, and what score is everyone trying to maximize? Once you start seeing those games, they're almost impossible to unsee. The Score  helps us see a world where scoring, tracking, and quantifying our experiences run through nearly every aspect of modern life. He doesn't dismiss or argue against scoring systems on their own. In fact, a strength of the book is acknowledging how useful they can be. Scores help us learn, grow, explore, create, and make sense of complicated systems. Games themselves are wonderful examples of this. Constraints and scoring often make games meaningful. Yet, the danger comes when those measures of success stop serving our values and begin replacing them. This is where the issue of value capt...