Review: The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game by C. Thi Nguyen

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 capture arises and stays with the reader well after the book. Metrics begin as proxies for what we care about, but over time they become the thing we care about. 

Education is an obvious example. Grades are meant to represent learning, yet it's easy for learning to become secondary to earning the grade. The same thing happens in research. Publishing, citation counts, impact factors, and the endless pressures of "publish or perish" gradually replace the underlying purpose of scholarship: creating and sharing knowledge. As someone who spent years in higher education and wrote a dissertation in a system shaped by those incentives, Nguyen gave me a vocabulary for something I'd long experienced but hadn't articulated as clearly.

That insight extends well beyond academia. Throughout the book, Nguyen demonstrates how these systems become captured—sometimes intentionally, often indirectly—by larger structures of competition and capital accumulation. The commodification of everyday life makes it increasingly difficult to simply enjoy something, to pursue mastery, or to create for its own sake without those activities being absorbed into another accounting system.

Nguyen does try to emphasize agency and awareness over solving the system itself. His argument isn't that we should reject scores altogether, but that we should remember they are tools in service of some larger purpose. That's a distinction I've had to hold onto throughout my own career. Teaching has metrics. Publishing has metrics. Degrees, evaluations, productivity, and impact all have metrics. Those measures aren't meaningless, but they become dangerous when they quietly replace the reasons we entered those professions in the first place.

At the same time, I wasn't enthralled with the awareness and agency argument. Nguyen argues that agency comes from consciously choosing which games to play, and I largely agree. But that choice is unevenly distributed and is packed with privilege. Many people find themselves trapped in games they never chose and cannot easily leave. The criminal justice system, for example, often resembles a game of Chutes and Ladders played without a clear rulebook or adequate resources or maybe more like starting a Monopoly game already in debt and with most of the properties already owned. Naming the game is empowering, but awareness alone doesn't guarantee the freedom to disengage from the game.

Nguyen's chapter on transparency challenged me. He's right that making everything measurable and visible changes behavior and invites gaming. We see that everywhere. But transparency also creates accountability. Whether in government or public institutions, the ability to question decisions has real democratic value, even if it comes with significant costs. I don't know that tension is solvable, and I appreciated that Nguyen doesn't pretend otherwise. This is where his work was more challenging in an intriguing way as he talked about experts in public arenas.  We want accountability of experts and therefore, often use transparency (of the resources they use), and yet, as experts they understand systems (in which they're experts) that we can't. So it can be challenging in the public arena (a different set of metrics and games) to call them to account without undermining their expertise.  Again, it's not that they shouldn't be held accountable or be open to challenge, but there is a way in which the politicalization of expertise can undermine the goals of why we have the experts in the first place.

As a lifelong gamer, I also loved how the book deepened my appreciation for play itself. It sent me back to thinking about games not simply as entertainment but as carefully constructed systems of constraints. Why is this scoring system designed this way? What experience is it trying to produce? Those questions extend beyond board or video games. And it calls back to improv comedy, where a scene becomes its own game of continually raising the stakes, or about everyday interactions where people unconsciously invent games together.

That perspective connected me strongly to Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken, SuperBetter and Imaginable. McGonigal explores how we might intentionally use game thinking to change or augment our lives. By contrast, Nguyen asks what happens when game structures begin shaping our lives whether we notice them or not. 

I also couldn't help wondering what higher education would look like if more people read The Score. I don't imagine we'd eliminate grades or assessments overnight. But perhaps we'd become more reflective about what they're actually for. Grades are artificial scores that contribute to larger artificial scores (college rankings), and somewhere along the way we risk losing the plot of education itself. Administrators, too, are trapped within systems demanding ever more metrics to justify decisions, budgets, and institutional success. Nguyen helped me see that they are often playing games they didn't design either.

Nguyen doesn't offer an escape hatch, and I do appreciate that. His two endings acknowledge his ambivalence about his work and where it leads the reader. We're still living inside these systems. Naming them doesn't free us from them. But perhaps it allows us to participate in them more consciously.

I don't think we're anywhere close to dismantling systems built around capital accumulation and optimization. Those structures are deeply woven into modern life. But I do think I'm better for having read this book. It has given me a richer language for recognizing the games around me, understanding the scores that are being kept, and occasionally asking whether I want to keep playing.

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