Playing the Right Games: Why Scores Quietly Replace Meaning

CT Wen is a philosopher of games. He is the author of a new book called The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game. T, welcome to Bankless.

Hello. I have no idea what I'm doing here. I was going to ask you this in the pre-show, but you know, maybe we should ask it here. Do you know what's amazing? I enjoyed your book so much, and I've enjoyed some of your previous writings because so much of what you talk about on Bankless, which people think of Bankless as a crypto podcast, but what is crypto? It is finance. It is money. What is money? What is finance? It is a game. So much of crypto takes place on another game engine that we call social media. Twitter X. It's all games all the way down. And so this is why I feel like there's so much to learn from you actually.

Excellent. Then you do not have the wrong person. I'm not walking into the wrong room. No, this will be a lot of fun. I want to talk to you about games and social scalability and all of the interrelated things. But actually, maybe the place to start, give this some salience for Bankless listeners, is the way you start your book.

There's a story in the first chapter of your book about someone that I personally identified with, and maybe some Bankless listeners might identify with as well. This is a student. She's an overachiever. She's obsessed with her body mass index, her GPA. She's the child of immigrants. Her parents pushed her to get 4.0's through school. She's a competitive golfer trying to get in the most highly ranked prestigious university. Basically, life gave her a set of these scoring systems, and she was trying to optimize for a high score throughout all of the systems that she was engaged in.

And what snapped her out of it? The idea that you promote that these things are games. Many of these systems that she's engaged in, the rankings, the metrics, if she could step back and get some distance from them, if she could start asking questions about these systems rather than just accepting them. She changed her phone background to this constant reminder: Is this the game you really want to be playing? I really enjoyed that because it's a question I think that has some salience for everyone listening. Is this the game you really want to be playing?

Why is that an important question to you?

So, there's so many ways to talk about this. Maybe the most important thing for me, and this applies both to games, to real games, and to game-like systems outside, is the idea that we have a significant choice in the games we play. We can pick the games we play. We can pick which scoring systems we engage in, and we can pick and fine-tune and tailor them. We can shift and move them around.

And I think I've been trying to figure out for a while. I wrote this book in part because this student wrote me that email after I gave an early talk version of a lot of this material, and I was trying to figure out what is it about the framing of how I was talking about things that was really impactful. I think it's that we know in our hearts that we play games for fun, for enjoyment, for richness, for satisfaction.

And then if a game pulls us in and then we fight all our might to max out that score, and then we end up with misery and sorrow, I think it's really intuitive to think to yourself like no, you screwed up, right? I've had this experience a lot fly fishing. There's one mode of fly fishing I engage in, which is dryfly fishing, which is very, very difficult, very weird. The point is to get a trout to eat your fly off the surface of the water. It's incredibly beautiful to me. It's incredibly satisfying. It's hard as hell.

You actually have to stalk and sneak and move through the undergrowth, and you see a trout, and then you sneak up on the bank, and you cast this delicate little cast to the trout that you see. There's another mode of fishing that I don't enjoy. Some people really enjoy it. It's called euronimpying. You're basically bouncing this heavily weighted fly along the bottom. You can't see it. It's kind of exhausting. I find it miserable. Some people love it. But you catch a lot more fish.

And one of the things I've been running into a lot of the times is a certain kind of person. I was about to say dude and I stopped myself, but I should just say like everybody I met like this is in fact a dude. A certain kind of dude who's like you got to euron. It's such a better way to catch fish. And then they're like I hate it. It's miserable. Dryfly fishing is so much more fun, but you got to do it cuz you catch more fish. It's so much more efficient.

And I'm kind of like, we're letting the fish go, man. This is a game. This is a catch and release game. You go out, you catch some number of fish, and then you let them go and you go home. And what is the goddamn point, right? There are times when you're forced to do something because you need to survive. And there are other times where we make these choices. And I think a lot of the times we don't even realize we're making a choice. We think it's forced on us.

I think the dude that I'm thinking there's a specific guy I ran into just miserable on the side of the river just hating his fishing and thinking he had to do this that he thought it wasn't a choice. He thought he had to optimize for this particular score. And I don't know that seems to miss the point of the whole thing. So yeah, that's why it's important to me.

I think when we invoke the word game, when somebody invokes the word game in a conversation, people's brains probably go straight to something like, you know, chess or video games, we are obviously talking about games in a more expansive fashion than that. Like using games as a lens to view a lot of our behavior that we engage in. Yeah. How expansive can we really get here? Like how far does this really go? Is everything a game no matter what environment that we're in, is it always a game or is it possible to escape games? Like how expansive can we really get here?

Right. So I mean this is really important because I don't think everything is a game. When I started thinking about this stuff, I was kind of lost about what a game really was, cuz it seemed like really an important concept, but I couldn't get my hands around it until I found this incredible book by Bernard Suits called The Grasshopper. He's a philosopher he wrote in the 70s. This book is kind of a cult classic and in it he gives a definition of games that I think is incredibly useful cuz it points to one specific point of life but not everything.

So, there's short version and a long version. I'll give you the short version first, but I suspect you're going to want the details of the long version. So the short version is that playing a game is voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of the activity of struggling to overcome them. It is so what a game is is something where one way he puts it is in a game there's always like an easy way to get to the goal and then we put a constraint on ourselves. We take he says like the long way on purpose, right?

You run a marathon there are easier ways to get there. You could not only take a shortcut, but you could call a lift, right? I'm a rock climber. Like, you could climb up the front of the rock or you could go back up the back, which is easy, or you could climb a tree or you could get a ladder, right? There are all kinds of easier ways to get there. And one of the things suits is saying is that in games when we're playing a game, we're trying to hit some goal, but it doesn't count unless we do it under the constraints, right?

Like if you thought the goal of basketball was just to pass the ball through the hoop, then logically what you should do is take a stepladder to the court and then pass the ball through the hoop as many times as possible. But that doesn't count, right? So the thing that's really important for suits is whatever the value of basketball is, it's essentially bound up with doing the activity inside a constraint system.

So if you believe that right then the world just quickly divides into what what suits calls normal practical activity and game activity. In a normal practical activity there's some goal you want and you just do as efficiently as possible cuz all that matters is the goal. Right? If you're hungry and you need fish, you take the most efficient means possible, which is actually like a net or like dynamite, right? Or right. When you're this, I think people forget about this, but when you're doing this other thing that I do, it's the technical term for it is angling. You're not trying to catch fish as tricky as any by any ways you can. You're not using a net. That's what commercial fishermen use because that's actually the most efficient way.

What you're doing is you're trying to trick the fish into biting your fake lure or your bait. You're engaging with the psychology of the fish, right? Like all angling involves tricking the fish into biting a baited hook or biting a fake lure. That is a much harder way to catch fish. And it's a game because if you're doing that, it's like, so I don't know if you know this, but if you're fishing, I don't know why my mind why my mind is not fishing today. If you're fishing and you're reeling in and you get something and it turns out that you accidentally hooked the fish on the side. It didn't bite the hook, but you just like it doesn't count. You're like, "Oh crap, I the term is sn I snagged it. It's not I didn't really catch it." Because what you're trying to do as a specific tricking thing, right? And what makes it a game is that what it matters that you did it that particular hard way, right? Does that make sense?

Under this under this is under the suit's description anything could be a game but not everything is a game because it depends on why you're doing it he has this great by the tell me if I'm rambling on too long this is like a topic on which I could talk infinitely but one easy example he says is imagine two people climbing a mountain together next to each other one is climbing it because there's some rare medicine at the top that they really want and the other is a rock climber right they're they're a mountaineer they're they're engaged in the game of rock climbing And the way you can tell that one is playing a game and the other is not is if like somebody passes by in a helicopter and says, "Hey, do you want a quick ride to the top, then the person who just wants to get there for the medicine, right? They're like, "Of course, I just want the goddamn medicine so I don't die. Get me to the top as quickly as possible."

And the mountain climber, and this is really important, it doesn't matter if they're a professional or an amateur. It doesn't matter if they're doing it for the reward of being the world's top mountain climber or if they're doing it for pure joy. The mountain climber who's playing a game will reject the helicopter because it doesn't count as climbing the mountain unless you did it under a specific set of constraints.

Okay, T, let's let's test this because I I like that definition and I understand it very clearly through the lens of the mountain climber example. But so so here are some serious I'll call them serious games that I play like almost like career games, right? So one is a game that David and I play as maybe the podcast game, right? Where we create content we haven't guests and subjects we want to talk about, but we also have a scoreboard related to that. Like we have downloads, we have views.

Another game that David and I play is a social media game where you have tweets and some of them are successful. They get a lot of likes, they get a lot of retweets, some are not so successful. And we have social media games across YouTube as well, right? It's like the thumbnail, you can optimize a podcast thumbnail to be more clickable and thumb some thumbnails and titles do better than others. We also have business games that we're engaged in, right? like revenue growth type games as we grow our our media company. Crypto itself is just like one big financial game.

It seems like you know all the games I played computer games in my youth almost seem to resemble like the life games that I'm playing now. I mean it's just about bouncing around and collecting coins. you know like profit number go up wh which of these are games under the suits definition and which of these are like because if you asked about the podcast for instance I don't think that if there was a way for us to generate millions of views in all of our videos and podcasts by cheating in some way by I don't know paying YouTube off or something like this or paying Spotify. I don't think we'd do it. That wouldn't be fun. And so I guess we're playing a game.

Yeah. No, this is that's you've already answered your own question, but like so for so first back up remember that for suits and I think this is really important. What gaming is is a motivation and two people can do the be doing the same activity next to each other and it looks really similar and what really what makes one a game and the other not a game is their reason for doing it. Whether they whether they're doing it to be involved in the process and the struggle or that's essential or whether it's not. And I think you you just so I also want to say it's really important that not everything that's gamelike is a game. There's this whole category of gameish things.

And I think it's really important that there are a lot of times where we hyper orient towards a scoring system and they're not always games. A lot of a lot a lot of the examples I have in my book are cases where there's a ranking system. There's so much power attached to it and people just zero on the power via that ranking system. There's no other way to get it except by that ranking system. And I'm not I don't think those are games. They're game-ish. They look like games. They might grab on some gaming psychology, but they're not games in this sense. But you answered the question already, which is I mean, here's one way to put it. Think about a video game, right? Like what what are you trying to do with a video? You're trying to get to the end screen.

How do you know that it's a game, that you're playing it as a game? Cuz there are all kinds of ways to get to the end screen that don't involve going through the game. You could you could uh you could hack it, right? You could hack the software. You could pay somebody else to play the game for you. Like none of these count cuz the point maybe that's an easy example. The point is to do it yourself. And I suspect that there are some people for whom podcasting is not a game cuz they would do anything to make the number go up.

And I suspect for you we could figure out all kinds of things that would count as cheating. What if I told you that you could get more of an audience by doing an optimized AI simulation of you who would like pander perfectly via focus groups and we'd make your numbers go way up. Or what if I don't know you were uh you wanted your social media account to go higher so you bought the social media company and instructed the programmers to you know an example out of nowhere like to like rechange the coding to make your numbers go up right I think if it weren't right does it make sense if it weren't a game you would take any means necessary and it might not be a game a lot of these systems a lot of people respond to ranking systems just because they are incentives are connected to money they'll do anything they can to make them go up that's an important phenomenon that's right next to games.

But if we can find something that intuitively feels to you like cheating, like not the way you wanted to do it, like if there's anything I could say where you would be like, I wanted that but not that way. Like what's what's in some sense what's crucial to suits is that what a game is is something where we care about the method that we did it. We care that we did it out of this particular talent or using this particular ability, right? You you probably care that you get podcast counts by people listening to you talk and you doing the interviews live instead of having an optimized bot create a similacum of you.

Can we talk about social media for a minute? I I recall you wrote an entire article about Twitter and its gamification. This is something that many listeners are very familiar with. Crypto is overactive on social media. Is social media a game? And is it a is it a healthy game? What are we what are we doing here?

What really matters for thinking about social med I I think at some point the question of is this a game by that definition I gave is a boring question. That's not okay what we actually what I actually care about here. What matters is the fact that certain game-like things are happening. And I actually think what's really crucial to understand the damage of the gamification of social media is to understand that it's not a game in a really profound way, but it's superficially game-like and it motivates us in a game-like way.

And how is a game like? Can maybe get to that definition. Is it because it has points? Is it because it has a mechanism?

Yeah, I think the crucial thing that when I'm thinking about social media as a gamified platform, I'm thinking that's because it renders a clear singular pronouncement of how well you did. So the crucial thing it has is a scoring system. I scoring systems are really interesting to me. So when I wrote my first book about games about AC my academic book about games as an art form I didn't realize something really crucial which is that you can have a game without having a scoring system.

So I think one way to think about it is that what a scoring system is is it's something that yields an instant clear verdict that everyone agrees to. Right? Like so if you if we play a game, we all agree to a particular scoring system and then the scoring system looks at our activities and it spits out a bunch of points and we know exactly how we did and there's no way to there's no way to argue it, right? So if you're playing like one of the classic German like Euro games that I'm obsessed with like the game tells you exactly what each sheep is worth in victory points, what each like gold and you just add it up, right? There's no space for argument.

One of the important things I think is that real games you have that a lot but you don't have to have them. So, uh, the example I've been thinking about a lot is like skateboarding before it went pro, before it went official. Like, if people go to the skate park in order to they can have a game and they can compete even to have the coolest trick, but there's no actual system that guarantees that we will all agree about the coolest trick, right? Like, in fact, you can have this competition. You can you can have at home cooking competitions and you don't actually need to agree on a verdict, right? everyone can come out and be like, right, have a different opinion. That's that's fine. That's a that's a possible game.

The thing that distinguishes, I think, a lot of the of the more formalized games that we're more familiar with is the existence of a scoring system that says something like we're going to have people jump and then we're going to measure how they jumped on a ruler and then the winner is the person that went higher on the ruler. or that says like we're going to do this thing and then every time you every time you like collect a sheep token you get two points right that kind of clear that kind of clear scoring system is distinctive to board games and that's what I think gets borrowed by social media the existence of a single I mean here's one way to think about it in kind of normal communicative life there are so many different values that we could be judging ourselves by and that we could be aiming for.

You could be communicating to be funny or entertain each other, right? You could be communicating to connect. You could be communicating to learn. You could be communicating to figure things out. You could be communicating, right? That plurality of values means that different people can be judging a conversation in different ways. Like sometimes I've had conversations at parties where it's very clear that the other person is trying to oneup me and I was trying to like have an interesting connection and then they think they won the conversation. I think it was like the worst conversation ever. Like that's that's completely possible.

But if you're on social media there is a scoring system and if you orient yourself towards it then you have an instant and complete way to like you know insta compare each tweet, insta compare each post, right? and insta compare different individuals in terms of their like follower or subscriber count. So it's that like reduction to a single dimension that then gets quantized so that we can make instant comparisons that seems that to me is like this weird intense feature that is an artificial feature of some institutions and technological systems and it's gameish so we can get sucked into it and like start relating to it like a game.

There's a crucial massive difference from most games and that crucial massive difference is it's interconnected to the rest of the world. So a crucial I think one of the crucial concepts from a lot of theorizing about games and play is that games are weirdly detached from the rest of the world. There's this concept that's in the game scholarship that says one of the things this is from an anthropologist named Johan Hosinga Hosinga and he says in the book Homoludin that what games and play are is an activity that occurs in something called a magic circle and a magic circle is a space and time that's separated in some way from normal life.

The way that there's a scholar Anakah Wearon, and the way she puts it is we've created this meaning boundary where meanings change. And it I mean it that sounds fancy, but what it really means is you and I could be I mean I could be best friends with Ryan and hate David, but we play basketball and David's on my team and Ryan's the other team and it doesn't matter what my social relationships are. Those are canceled and I am all in for cooperating with David and trying to destroy Ryan and then afterwards like it doesn't matter, right? It would be really weird if for people to like who were on the opposite team to be like emotionally hurt that I block their pass, right?

So, and another thing that's really important about games is that in not all but in most games the points are unattached from ordinary life. So if you if I I mean I mean this is I I I can feel a question back there and I think maybe I'm jumping the gun on the answer but one quick answer to a lot of questions is in a game if I go all out and ignore think about nothing but the point and think about nothing about maxing but maxing out my point at the expense of everybody else then nothing changes in the world when the game is over. It does not matter if I slayed my spouse or my spouse slayed me.

The thing that makes it okay, I mean, you know, my kids have just gotten to the age where I can play video. I've been playing a lot of Super Smash with my like eight or nine-year-old and so fun. There's, you know, I just I was telling my class this, I have a class on the philosophy of games and I was like, you know, it's it's kind of weird, but it's one of the few ways I guess get to destroy try to destroy my kid all out and he gets like we like I don't have to protect his U. I can just be like it it's important because I'm really bad at them. So, platformers are about the same level and I can just try to him up and that's cool cuz that doesn't leave the game. Right. Right. It's just a game. It's just a game.

And on the other hand, if you are social media and the game the game-like thing that people are doing with finances where they go all whatever Jeff Bezos is doing, right, to max out his score in his activity is not in a magic circle, right?

I see. Okay. Okay. I I think we're starting to see the distinction between games which are fun, which don't have real world effects and consequences and which are time bound to these other gameike things, these gamified things that we play in quote unquote in real life. And both of them do have a scoring system. At least games don't have to have a scoring system, but many of these gamified objects do. Maybe let's talk about cuz cuz that's I think more the point of your book the score. It's like more about the scoring system and all of these gamified platforms and systems that we're engaged in like GDP or GPA as we talked about. I maybe we can go through this and you can help me to settle an argument with my wife.

Okay. So, excellent. This gets into some marriage counseling here. So, one thing I love to do is before we watch any movie in my house is I have to look it up on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb. I have to I'm sorry we can't be friends. Okay. Right. It's like, okay, so let's talk about this. I I want to get into the pros and cons of looking it up. I'll give you my rationale. The reason is, look, it's 90 minutes of my life, maybe two hours of my life. I don't want to waste my time on anything that's like 50% and under.

And I look at the metrics like with Clear Eyes, okay, it's not just the critic metric. It's also, you know, there's a user rating and audience rating and I'll cross reference with IMDb, so it's, you know, a bit more pure. But I'm just like not going to waste my time, okay, on a lowranked movie, right? My wife is like, "This kills it. This kills the movie watching experience." What you should be doing is you should watch movies that you like and you should form your own opinions and you shouldn't go into it with some preconceived notion of how good the movie actually is. Help settle this argument and talk about ranking and scoring systems that that I'm seeing.

We could literally spend the rest like five hours talking about this one question. This is actually when I started thinking about scoring systems. A lot of my book is about metrics and bureaucratic and bureaucratic measurement. But the place I started thinking about it was Rotten Tomatoes and wine scoring systems and what they I'm on your wife's side, but see why why tell tell me why she's right. Okay, let me hear this. Um, let me take a simple pass at it and then I'll take the big huge pass.

So, my friend Matt Stroll, who's a philosopher of art, who wrote the beautiful book Why It's Okay to Love Bad Movies, has an essay about Rotten Tomatoes. I think it's just it's just called Against Rotten Tomatoes. And one thing to note is that he notes if you think about like if you ask most people who love movies to list off great movies by their own taste and you look at them on Rotten Tomatoes, one of the things you'll find is most of them sit around 50 or 60%. Because good movies are often controversial. They're often like a lot of things that are incredible often like push against some people are repelled by like David Lynch movies, right? Incredible, fascinating, weird, provocative. Some people are repelled by them, some people don't get them, right?

So, a crucial thing about a movie that's kind of daring or kind of subtle is some people are not going to get it. Right? So if you're using Rotten Tomatoes as a measure, what you're going to pick up on the kinds of movies that do well on Rotten Tomatoes are precisely the movies that are engineered or made so that everyone will get and everyone will get about equally. So you're not going to get daring movies. You're not going to get subtle movies. You're not going to get provocative movies. You're going to get movies that are kind of acceptable to every taste. So you won't get anything that plunges into a particular taste. This is by the way this is this is different from the question about whether taste is objective or subjective. Even if taste is completely objective, right? A measure like Rotten Tomatoes is going to give you a rough okay let me run the case on let me run the case on social media and then we'll see if this applies to Rotten Tomatoes.

Okay. So, here's aa here's my case against uh social media platforms or my worry about social media platforms. One measure of how important a communication is is how deeply it strikes people and whether it changes people. And sometimes when I'm communicating to people, well, here's something I can do in the classroom. I can say something weird and interesting and it falls flat on 80% of the people and like 20% of the people like get it. Maybe like one one person it like totally moves them. I can see in their face that they're that their life has been changed in that moment.

Now let's see say that instead of looking at their faces, I'm interacting with them on a social media platform. I do a post and most people do not like it and one person hits like. Like doesn't register the intensity of their relationship to it. It doesn't m doesn't register the fact that their life was changed by it. It simply counts one. Right? So, an important thing about likes on social media is there's there's a flattening aspect. It only picks up like it only picks up whether or not someone was pro or con and then aggregates.

So, let me back out. So, um you're giving me a very suspicious look. So, let me try try this. Let's say that your audience is 1,000 people. one one one tweet that you have is kind of slightly clever and a little bit funny and all 10,000 people mildly like find it mildly funny and then forget about it in 20 minutes. That tweet will probably pick up like a thousand likes or like 500 likes. Imagine you say something else that's weird and thoughtful and almost no one gets it except two people have their life changed by it. that tweet will pick up two likes.

I think what you're saying here is the the metric itself is like boiling all of the variance out of the the signal here and it's kind of flattening things and it's onedimensionalizing things. And you're probably going to say that same argument applies to my Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb rankings. So I don't get any of the high variance type movies. I just get kind of the low variance popular mediocre but popular things.

Yep. This is Matt Stroll's point that if you look if you go back and you look at the reviews of like movies that are like generally considered great now I mean and I'm kind of dodging here because I'm using this like now they're considered great but if you look back at most of them most of them were incredibly divided. You had critics exploding like with this is the most amazing thing ever and other people being like this makes no goddamn sense like the everything is incoherent and weird and like that that when you when you take that to Rotten Tomatoes that's going to show up as 50%. your mediocre crap creme will show up as 50% but so will that okay I I just want to add one thing then isn't that just a problem with the metric itself we can devise better metrics right so t your point yeah the metrics are imperfect here is there's two different games trying to be played there are the there's the critics game which is people who watch movies in a particular way that the average member of society does not watch movies in that they're not playing the same game.

And like me guessing, hypothesizing why Ryan is trying to watch a movie. He is trying to watch a movie so he can sit down, laugh at some stuff, you know, forget about life, forget about the internet, and like have a good time for two hours and then resume life. And I don't think he wants to watch a movie that like is like gritty and thought there's a movie I was watching not too long ago called Mickey 17 and it was like I think a critic would love that movie because it was a good movie but part of that movie I was watching and I was just uncomfortable the whole time cuz the whole thing was just gritty and kind of difficult to watch intentionally so the movie did a good job of what it was trying to do which is make me uncomfortable. able and like you know squirm in my seat and it wasn't enjoyable by any m by any means but a critic I think would have enjoyed that. Nothing about this has to be great weirdass comedies like some of my favorite busting hysterical comedies also don't do great on Rotten Tomatoes because they only appeal to like there's nothing here that says gritty, right? Some of this is just about particularity.

But I let let's let's separate there's so many things in this Rotten Tomatoes point but let me separate a few things. There are two questions. One is whether Rotten Tomatoes will accurately give you what you're what you want. Yeah. And even if it's a funny light experience, the claim is something like no, it's going to steer you towards kind of the average funny light experience and not like the weird peculiar funniness that's that you'll find. And then there's a bigger point that I think we should shell for a bit and come back to which is like being worried that you won't develop your own sensibility, right? That that you're giving up some profound independence.

So, let me I'm just going to give names to this because I don't want to forget either because I think these are the two these are the things I want to talk to you the most. The first one I'm gonna let's call portability. The second one is the value capture stuff that I've been thinking about. So, so let me let me let me go uh let me let me let's do portability first. So here's let me give you the kind of like stepped back philosophical answer to what what you're talking about. So so you say and I suspect you're just teeing me up to say this so thank you. You say look shouldn't we just make better metrics right? Is this a problem of a particular of this particular metric? Couldn't we just improve them?

It's true that one of the things I've said is something like, oh