Are We Measuring Our Lives in All the Wrong Ways?

C. THI NGUYEN: I found this incredible book, Bernard Suits’ “The Grasshopper.” Suits offers the following definition of what it is to play a game. He says, “To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of making possible the activity of overcoming them.”

EZRA KLEIN: One thing I like about analytics is that outside of the context of simply argue about the flaws of analytics, not having them allows you to bullshit yourself a lot. Allows you to bullshit yourself about whether or not people are reading you, what you’re really doing here, are you serving an audience. But then having them allows you... See more

EZRA KLEIN: You’ve said that the world is, and I’m quoting you here, “The world is an existential hellscape with too many values and games offer a temporary relief from that.”

C. THI NGUYEN: So the essential insight that I got from Suits is that in so many games, the target isn’t the point. The point is this rich experience along the way. And I think a lot of the mistakes we make with games is we get into these things and we forget about these larger purposes. The fact that they can be fun. The fact that they can be beau... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: Twitter is doing two things simultaneously. One thing it’s doing is it’s flattening all the kind of rich reactions you have into likes. So already you have not only a binary filter— like or dislike— that pushes you in the direction of aggregated numbers instead of a few deep connections, but you also get this timing filter where peop... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: The way I navigate the world right now is I’ve developed a fair amount of defensive suspicion about certain kinds of pleasure. A marker of design game-like systems is that they’re very pleasurable to operate in.

C. THI NGUYEN: Since I finished the “Games” book, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly this question, why we’re seeing this increase of points everywhere, not just inside formal games? And the answer seems to be that quantified measures are extremely good tools for large-scale bureaucracies to organize themselves.

C. THI NGUYEN: But I think the most important thing about games is the way they manipulate our agency. The way we enter into this alternate self. And that’s I think where you can see the greatest power of games and their greatest danger. The greatest power of games is that you can explore this landscape of different agencies. The greatest danger of... See more

C. THI NGYUEN:  What I ended up thinking is that what makes games special is not just that they create a world or an environment, but that the game designer tells you what abilities you have and what obstacles you’ll face, but most importantly, what goals you’ll have.  What the game designer is doing is creating an alternate self for you,... See more