How to Be Awesome at Your Job 1133: The Philosophy of Scores: How to Measure What Truly Matters and Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game with C. Thi Nguyen
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Mar 2, 2026 
C. Thi Nguyen, associate professor of philosophy who studies games, technology, and value, explores how scores and metrics shape what we care about. He discusses how metrics can hollow out meaning, co-opt values, and privilege narrow skills. He argues metrics act like maps that erase context and suggests making measurements more modifiable and context-aware.
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Scoring Systems Create Desires
- Game scoring systems intentionally set players' desires and create alternate selves to care about new goals.
- Nguyen found scoring to be the core design tool that makes games meaningful yet also a model for harmful gamification.
Trafficking Convictions Can Hide Success
- Sally Engel-Meyer's trafficking example shows conviction rates are a misleading metric for trafficking prevalence.
- Nguyen explains poverty reduction can erase traffickers and thus lower convictions, making success look like failure by that metric.
Charity Ratings Penalized Internal Investment
- Charity Navigator long used a donations-throughput ratio that penalized nonprofits for internal spending.
- Nguyen notes this metric treated nonprofits as pipelines and discouraged investment in expertise or capacity building.
