When Work Becomes a Dangerous Game

When the concept of ‘gamifying life’ comes up, scoring is transparent and portable but strips nuance, creating a gap between what’s measurable and what matters. When codifying everything through metrics, massive amounts of nuance is lost, so how can we utilize game theory without reducing everything to a high score?

C. Thi Nguyen is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. He is also the author of the books The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Games, and Games: Agency As Art.

Greg and Thi discuss the differences between genuine gameplay and institutional metrics and gamification. Thi explains Huizinga’s “magic circle” concept, where games create a temporary space with altered meanings and low real-world stakes, enabling intense striving without value capture. Drawing also on Bernard Suits, Thi frames games as voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles and distinguishes achievement play (valuing winning) from striving play (valuing the struggle), separating these from intrinsic vs extrinsic motivations. 

They discuss how clear scoring is transparent and portable but strips nuance, creating a gap between what’s measurable and what matters; transparency can reduce bias yet undermine expertise. Examples include social media likes, quotas, education metrics, sports rule changes, cooking “recipe vs dish,” and academia’s citation and ranking pressures.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

The paradox on inefficiency

08:31: To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles,  to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them, which I find, it’s got to be to be inefficient, but interestingly not fully inefficient. So we're not trying to be as inefficient as possible. One of the ways to put the paradox of games is we take on an inefficiency and then we try to be as efficient as possible inside that inefficiency.

The trap of simple scoring

04:00: One of the biggest differences between real games and the kinds of gamifications of work and education that we find is that gamifications are attempts to modify things into line with simple scoring systems that occur continuously with the rest of life that have direct connections to valuable resources.

Collapsing the magic circle

05:08: Twitter likes and citation rates and gamified work are modifications of something that has preexisting value, preexisting activity. So I think the important thing about Twitter, X, Facebook is those scoring systems don't occur in a magic circle. They don't occur in a space with separated meaning. They modify our activities in the real world and change our attitudes and interactions over real world resources. So I think exactly like this easy glide from games or grudge to like we should gamify everything ignores one of the most crucial elements, which is some version of this magic circle is basically active in a lot of genuine gameplay, but is completely inactive, is completely canceled. We have the superficiality of scoring systems and game-ishness, but deep down we don't have the core guts of transferring into a temporary alternate meaning space whose meanings kind of can be held relatively isolated.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Johan Huizinga
• Lusory Attitude
• Dungeons & Dragons
• John Dewey
• Goodhart's Law
• Onora O'Neill
• John Thorne
• Theodore Porter
• Autotelic
• Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at the University of Utah
• Thi Nguyen’s Website
• Wikipedia Profile
• Social Profile on X

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game
• The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Games
• Games: Agency As Art

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