Emma Goto
We live a lot of our lives based off of metrics. You want to get healthy? You might set a weight goal or count calories. However, philosophy professor and author, C. Thi Nguyen, argues that we sometimes focus too much on the metric and lose sight of our original goal. Weight loss doesn't always equal health, for example, and in the author's case led to him eating the same meals every day, as it made it easier to count the calories. This bias towards a specific number is a concept that Nguyen has coined "value capture".
On a larger scale, the world is full of metrics and ranking lists which people try and use to make informed choices - the top universities, the best wine choices. But Nguyen argues that ranking these on a pure number means you lose out on a lot of nuance. Certain universities will be better-suited for certain students, and the wine you should choose should vary depending on what food you pair it with, not the taste on its own. Not to mention universities and winemakers will then focus their efforts on trying to improve their ranking on the list which might come at the detriment of the quality of education, or produce less wine that actually tastes good with food.
The crux of this book is then comparing these metrics to the metrics you aim for in games, which on the surface seem to be the same thing - you try and collect 100 coins in a game of Mario, or you aim to score as many points as possible when you play basketball. But Nguyen tries here to explain how the metrics in games are actually different, and a good thing.
I think if there ever were a person qualified to write a book about philosophy and games, it would have to be this author. He loves board games, video games and in general seems to be quite the collector of hobbies - rock-climbing, yoga, fly-fishing and even yoyo-ing. To be honest I found this part of the book most interesting, and would prefer to learn more about Nguyen and his hobbies rather than the philosophy of value capture that he's trying to get at.
And so his first point about games is that although games have a metric you aim for, they are actually less about the actual outcome. If the goal of basketball is to put a ball in the hoop, you could just walk over to it with a ladder and directly drop it in. Games are more about the rules that the players collectively have decided must be followed for the ball going into the hoop to count. And so in games the process of playing the game itself is tied to the outcome.
He terms this as "striving play" - where you are ultimately trying to reach that goal or metric (win a game, catch a fish) but your purpose is in enjoying yourself with the process along the way. Of course there are exceptions (if you are a professional athlete or genuinely trying to catch a fish to eat it) but generally speaking if you lose a game and don't meet your goal, you don't really mind, because the whole point was the fun of it all.
And he proposes that we should use what we have learned from games to decide how we choose which metrics are important and which are not. Metrics are still useful since there's not enough time in the world to individually decide on everything - we still have to outsource some of our decision-making to other people. In the case of the author, like when buying a fridge - since who has the time to learn the intricacies of what makes a good fridge.
(To be honest the book started to lose me here. Although the subtitle on the cover says "How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game", the book doesn't actually have the answers).
The author also argues that chasing metrics and value capturing will give you power socially - in the case of science, publishing more papers is an indicator of success, and so people will game the system instead of being more thorough in their research and publishing fewer (but better) papers. And in the worst-case scenario, the metric-chasers will become socially dominant and we start to lose out on things that can't be summarised into a neat metric.
He finally introduces the concept of "autotelic activity" - activity that is valuable for its own sake (i.e. not tied to a metric or goal at the end of it). Because if you're trying to gain social status or wealth by chasing metrics, at the end of the day, what is the point of it all? And the answer should be that you value the process of chasing a metric - or, playing games.
After reading this book, I felt a bit lost. Although this book at first comes across like a pop-science book or self-help book, thanks to Nguyen's personal anecdotes and casual tone, this doesn't go as far as giving you a list of suggestions, or an actual answer to the problem like you might expect a self-help book to do. Maybe that's too much to ask, but I feel like it's just missing something to round it off. Or maybe the problem of chasing metrics isn't something that I really connect with at this stage in my life (if that doesn't make me sound like I'm too full of myself).
Nonetheless though I think it's a solid read, maybe it wasn't just quite for me. I'd love to see Nguyen come back to this in 10 years with a follow-up - maybe with time he will be able to flesh the whole thing out just a tiny bit more.
PS: As a final thing I found amusing, Nguyen is a former food critic and an avid amateur cook. And he seems to have a specific vendetta against cookbooks. Of course he concedes it is very good for someone new to cooking as it provides the exact ingredient breakdowns and step-by-step instructions. But this results in a dish that is the same every time - he recounts a tale where he had 3 separate friends make a ratatouille, and noticed they all tasted the same (because they had all used the same NYTimes recipe). Whereas Nguyen has made ratatouille 10 different ways from all the different cookbooks he owned. Actually I was rather amazed that he's made ratatouille that many times, not to mention he has enough friends that he's had 3 of them make ratatouille (or maybe that's the sort of friend group you develop from being a food critic)?
We live a lot of our lives based off of metrics. You want to get healthy? You might set a weight goal or count calories. However, philosophy professor and author, C. Thi Nguyen, argues that we sometimes focus too much on the metric and lose sight of our original goal. Weight loss doesn't always equal health, for example, and in the author's case led to him eating the same meals every day, as it made it easier to count the calories. This bias towards a specific number is a concept that Nguyen has coined "value capture".
On a larger scale, the world is full of metrics and ranking lists which people try and use to make informed choices - the top universities, the best wine choices. But Nguyen argues that ranking these on a pure number means you lose out on a lot of nuance. Certain universities will be better-suited for certain students, and the wine you should choose should vary depending on what food you pair it with, not the taste on its own. Not to mention universities and winemakers will then focus their efforts on trying to improve their ranking on the list which might come at the detriment of the quality of education, or produce less wine that actually tastes good with food.
The crux of this book is then comparing these metrics to the metrics you aim for in games, which on the surface seem to be the same thing - you try and collect 100 coins in a game of Mario, or you aim to score as many points as possible when you play basketball. But Nguyen tries here to explain how the metrics in games are actually different, and a good thing.
I think if there ever were a person qualified to write a book about philosophy and games, it would have to be this author. He loves board games, video games and in general seems to be quite the collector of hobbies - rock-climbing, yoga, fly-fishing and even yoyo-ing. To be honest I found this part of the book most interesting, and would prefer to learn more about Nguyen and his hobbies rather than the philosophy of value capture that he's trying to get at.
And so his first point about games is that although games have a metric you aim for, they are actually less about the actual outcome. If the goal of basketball is to put a ball in the hoop, you could just walk over to it with a ladder and directly drop it in. Games are more about the rules that the players collectively have decided must be followed for the ball going into the hoop to count. And so in games the process of playing the game itself is tied to the outcome.
He terms this as "striving play" - where you are ultimately trying to reach that goal or metric (win a game, catch a fish) but your purpose is in enjoying yourself with the process along the way. Of course there are exceptions (if you are a professional athlete or genuinely trying to catch a fish to eat it) but generally speaking if you lose a game and don't meet your goal, you don't really mind, because the whole point was the fun of it all.
And he proposes that we should use what we have learned from games to decide how we choose which metrics are important and which are not. Metrics are still useful since there's not enough time in the world to individually decide on everything - we still have to outsource some of our decision-making to other people. In the case of the author, like when buying a fridge - since who has the time to learn the intricacies of what makes a good fridge.
(To be honest the book started to lose me here. Although the subtitle on the cover says "How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game", the book doesn't actually have the answers).
The author also argues that chasing metrics and value capturing will give you power socially - in the case of science, publishing more papers is an indicator of success, and so people will game the system instead of being more thorough in their research and publishing fewer (but better) papers. And in the worst-case scenario, the metric-chasers will become socially dominant and we start to lose out on things that can't be summarised into a neat metric.
He finally introduces the concept of "autotelic activity" - activity that is valuable for its own sake (i.e. not tied to a metric or goal at the end of it). Because if you're trying to gain social status or wealth by chasing metrics, at the end of the day, what is the point of it all? And the answer should be that you value the process of chasing a metric - or, playing games.
After reading this book, I felt a bit lost. Although this book at first comes across like a pop-science book or self-help book, thanks to Nguyen's personal anecdotes and casual tone, this doesn't go as far as giving you a list of suggestions, or an actual answer to the problem like you might expect a self-help book to do. Maybe that's too much to ask, but I feel like it's just missing something to round it off. Or maybe the problem of chasing metrics isn't something that I really connect with at this stage in my life (if that doesn't make me sound like I'm too full of myself).
Nonetheless though I think it's a solid read, maybe it wasn't just quite for me. I'd love to see Nguyen come back to this in 10 years with a follow-up - maybe with time he will be able to flesh the whole thing out just a tiny bit more.
PS: As a final thing I found amusing, Nguyen is a former food critic and an avid amateur cook. And he seems to have a specific vendetta against cookbooks. Of course he concedes it is very good for someone new to cooking as it provides the exact ingredient breakdowns and step-by-step instructions. But this results in a dish that is the same every time - he recounts a tale where he had 3 separate friends make a ratatouille, and noticed they all tasted the same (because they had all used the same NYTimes recipe). Whereas Nguyen has made ratatouille 10 different ways from all the different cookbooks he owned. Actually I was rather amazed that he's made ratatouille that many times, not to mention he has enough friends that he's had 3 of them make ratatouille (or maybe that's the sort of friend group you develop from being a food critic)?
