Games Gone Wild: How Metrics and Gamification Distort Reality and Capture Values 

Quantification is everywhere. Fitbits, smartwatches, and phone apps track steps, calories, heartrate. Governments and academic institutions use metrics, ranking systems, scores. Social media platforms count likes, shares, views. All this counting and measurement—all this data—enables the scaling and success of many parts of twenty-first-century life. I readily acknowledge that in some spheres, standardization and numerical measurement have their place. But what if there are some things that aren’t meant to be counted—and when we start counting them, our own values start changing, too? What if there are some things that aren’t meant to be gamified—and when we turn them into games, we are the ones who end up getting played? Are truly human goods subject to datafication and the almighty algorithm? 

Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen tackles questions like these in The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Nguyen specializes in the philosophy of games, having written a previous book on the subject. That led him to this deeper exploration of how metrics, scoring, and gamification affect all of us well beyond the realm of games. 

Why Games Bring Joy 

Nguyen explains why humans have always created and enjoyed games and why he has spent a large chunk of his life studying and playing them: “Games offer me the joy of complete absorption in performing one clear task in a precise, well-defined world. They banish the nauseating complexity of ordinary life. They give me the refuge of clear rules and clear goals. In their restrictions, there is freedom.” 

Nguyen’s point applies well beyond games to many disciplines and arts in which we participate. In his 2015 book The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford calls this paradoxical concept “empowerment through submission.” As Crawford explains, “human agency … arises only within concrete limits.” Nguyen strikes a similar note when he says that “games reach into you and give you a new form of agency.”

Consider music, one of the examples Crawford provides. Without submitting to the external order and authoritative structure of scales, notes, time signatures, musical notation, and the rules and techniques for playing a specific instrument, one cannot play music in any meaningful way at all. Freedom is not found in abolishing the rules, but in creatively working within them. As Crawford states, “the musician’s power of expression is founded upon prior obedience.” So too, with games. We submit to the rules of the game, and we open ourselves up to the possibility of experiencing a measure of order, agency, freedom, and even bliss (especially if it’s a well-designed game). 

Nguyen also explains how games involving bodily skill and movement can bring you into a state of flow, resonance, or attunement with yourself and your surroundings. In a certain sense, to employ Albert Borgmann’s terminology, we might even consider such games focal practices. A focal practice, Borgmann explains in his 1984 book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, “is one that can center and illuminate our lives” because it is some sort of activity that engages us with the world and with each other, requiring the exercise and development of skill, and our full attention and presence in real time and space with real things and real people. Borgmann says such practices are so vital in our technological age because they “engage the peculiarly human strength of comprehension.”

Nguyen additionally highlights how games provide us with much needed experiences of striving play and process beauty. Striving play is an experience in which we temporarily “adopt a goal in order to have the struggle that we really want.” In games we voluntarily take on specific sets of challenges, which is part of what makes games enjoyable and stimulating, if we don’t get consumed by just trying to win. Part of why games work could be that they tap into what Naseem Talib calls our antifragility: that we get stronger through struggle and challenge. Nguyen goes on to argue that there is something beautiful about the process of human striving. He calls this process beauty: rituals, activities, games that are “designed to encourage and shape our action into something more beautiful, more thrilling, more funny.” 

In Nguyen’s view, games have a lot going for them. And if games are so great, then “why not just gamify our work, our education, and everything else, and make them just as flexible and playful?” The problem is that that’s not how reality works outside of the game. When we apply metrics, scoring systems, and other quantitative measures to the many complex and fuzzy aspects of human life, we risk trading what’s easily measurable for what’s truly valuable. 

Why Gamification Brings Confusion 

Nguyen argues that the very things that make games so enjoyable, and even beneficial, can have the opposite effect when we keep score of things that aren’t meant to be scored. Games are great—for things that are meant to be games. This is the book’s driving concern, and one that deserves our attention: the effects of metrics and measurement on our values, social incentive structures, and even our self-conception and relationships. 

One concern is value capture, which occurs when an external metric becomes more important than the value the metric was supposed to quantify. This is common in large institutions of all sorts from governments to businesses, but perhaps it is most easily recognizable in the world of education. If graduation rate is the chosen metric, then we know what happens: schools try to increase their graduation rate at all costs and easily forget what that metric was supposed to represent: a well-rounded and mature graduate who is ready to launch into adulthood. Admittedly, a qualitative goal like this is much harder to measure; it’s a somewhat subjective judgment that requires expertise and personal knowledge about the individual situation. So, instead, we end up playing games trying to improve our graduation rate and easily lose sight of the larger yet more important goal.  

The tradeoffs of using mechanical scores and metrics like this are steep. As Nguyen puts it: 

We get automatic agreement by using a mechanical evaluation procedure, but there is a price to be paid for that automatic convergence. Mechanical scoring systems will tend to ignore things that are hard and subtle to count. They will tend to change what we score—and what we care about—to what is easy to count mechanically. 

This leads Nguyen to conclude that metrics aren’t neutral, but “are a world-transforming technology.” Technologies are value-laden and “the intrinsic nature of a technology can push the world in particular directions.” We’ve known this for a long time, as evidenced in that old saying, “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Applying this to metrics, we could say that when all you have are metrics, everything looks like a number. Nguyen puts it this way: “Metrics aren’t just passive things that we can freely use in any way we wish. Metrics push back. They resist our attempts to bend them to suit our interests. And then they reach out and transform the world, in a way that makes playfulness and reflective control incredibly hard.” He puts it even more directly: “What metrics do for us is bound up, inextricably, with what they do to us.” 

Such metrics-induced value capture can also lead to what Nguyen calls “value collapse” and “objectivity laundering.” Value collapse is when your values are so captured by what is measurable that you get caught in a feedback loop in which “oversimplifying your values changes how you approach the world, what you notice about it, and what you spend time exploring. So you run into a narrower set of experiences—which in turn reinforces your oversimplified values.” And you continue in the loop because you think it’s an objective measurement. “But this objectivity is only a façade,” Nguyen argues, as “such metrics often contain value judgments hidden at the core. We take subjective choice and then hide it under tons of precise math.” This is what he terms objectivity laundering, where metrics are assumed to be unbiased and scientific. This is so insidious because the metric looks so objective—it’s numbers after all! So we come to see it as a true measure of value, all the while deferring to the unexamined values hidden within the metric. 

How metrics intersect with digital technologies is an area I wish Nguyen explored further in the book. This is where the rubber meets the road for many of us. We have the ever-increasing ability to quantify and track nearly every aspect of our lives and our online activity. This is what Byung-Chul Han calls the “informatizing of the world,” in which everything and everyone are turned into sources of data for analyzing and optimizing. And much of this is being done to us as metrics shape the online world we experience, which in turn, shapes our values.  

Much has been written, for example, about the impacts of Facebook’s “like” button and how what we measure changes what we value. In many ways, we might even say that the internet—especially social media—has been turned into one big game. Nguyen’s thesis leads us to question the prudence of such gamification. 

What To Do  

Nguyen offers a way forward in what he calls an “aesthetic attitude” that embraces art, playfulness, beauty, games, and comedy for the good that such things are in and of themselves. He sees this as aligned with Aristotle’s concept of autotelic activity: things that are valuable in themselves, not based on utility. And, you might say, that is one way to define a game. 

One could add more to Nguyen’s “aesthetic attitude” list, since what he’s doing here is pointing in the direction of true leisure. I can’t help but be reminded of Joseph Pieper, who called for the recovery of leisure and warned about what happens when every aspect of life is subsumed into the cult of “total work.” Now, as all of life is subsumed under total quantification, Pieper would not be surprised that we still find it difficult to experience true leisure, that attunement to reality and posture toward God, one another, and the world for which we are designed. And, if we take our cues from Nguyen, games might just be one way to shake us free from the shackles of metrics and reclaim the human goods that deserve much more than a number. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.