Micah Loewinger: Hey, you're listening to On the Media's midweek podcast. I'm Micah Loewinger. Last Friday, Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown sued Kalshi, the so-called prediction market platform where users can place bets on real-world events, such as the number of deportations this year, or the winner of Survivor 50, or football.

Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown: In calling themselves a prediction market, they're misleading Washingtonians because their advertisements talk about a way where to bet on the NFL, even though we live in Washington. They publicly pat themselves on the back for being sneaky and getting around Washington's gambling laws, but it's worse than being sneaky. It's a lie and it's illegal.

Micah Loewinger: Washington's civil lawsuit is now one of 20 waged against Kalshi and follows on the heels of Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filing criminal charges against the company earlier this month. Prediction markets generated almost $64 billion in trading volume last year, hooking not only Kalshi's reportedly five million active users, but also media companies like CNN and Dow Jones, which have partnered respectively with Kalshi and Polymarket, another betting platform, to incorporate prediction market data in their reporting. In late February, after the US and Israel initiated a series of strikes in Tehran, $54 million in bets on Kalshi were spent on wagering whether Ali Khamenei would be out as Supreme Leader by March 1st, and and a single Polymarket user later made over half a million dollars predicting the death of the Ayatollah. Prediction markets are just the intensification of a process that's been slowly transforming our relationship to our bodies, our careers, our hobbies, our lives. Everything is now metrics, and we can't stop counting them and tracking them and comparing them, but what do we lose out on when we become obsessed with numbers or lines moving up or down on a graph?

In his new book, The Score, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen turned to games, yes, games like Twister, Dungeons and Dragons, and Soccer to find answers. As a grad student, he and his friends became obsessed with German board games, playing and discussing them late into the night.

1. Thi Nguyen: I became obsessed with the games of Reiner Knizia. People call him the Mozart of German game design. He just gushed forth hundreds and hundreds of games. One of the things he does incredibly well is he manipulates tiny little details in how the game is scored and how points are accumulated that completely change your relationship to the game.

There's a talk from him at the Game Developers Conference where he says, "The most important tool in my game design toolbox is the scoring system, because the scoring system tells the players what to care about. It sets their desires in the game." There's a part of me, a board game player, who thinks this is something that we all knew. There's a part of me that's a philosopher who went like, "Holy crap, that is so true and so weird. You open up a game and it tells you what to care about."

Micah Loewinger: The way you describe this, it almost feels like a magic spell. You use the example of pickup basketball, and if your best friend is on the other team, you don't care about your relationship with them. All you want to do is steal the ball from them or block their shots. Then if some guy who you hate is on your team, for as long as you're playing the game, he's your best friend. It's wild how much the goals, as dictated by the game, shape what you value.

1. Thi Nguyen: What this is called is the magic circle. This comes from an anthropologist named Johan Huizinga. A game is a special space where you cross into it and the meanings of things change and the roles change. It's so common and it's so everyday that we don't realize how weird it is. You have this magical ability. Open up some words and read them, discover whether or not we're going to be killing each other or cooperating and we just care. We have this ability to flex. What's easy to miss is how incredibly fluid we are.

A lot of the world takes advantage of this fluidity. With games, we're using this fluidity often to have a good time or enjoy ourselves, and in other parts of our life, large scale systems see this about us and know that if they present us with a point system, we'll just orient towards it.

Micah Loewinger: You're kind of talking about what we might call the gamification of real-life scores and systems that make us care very intensely about something and maybe not always in the best way. How did you encounter this concept of gamification in your own life?

1. Thi Nguyen: I got sucked in into philosophy because I thought the questions were cool and I loved them. Then a thing happened that in retrospect should be totally unsurprising. I got professionalized. I went into graduate school and I came out knowing that there was a status ranked ordered list of the journals that we publish in and a status ordered ranked list of different departments and how fancy and important they were, and I had come to care deeply about those.

Micah Loewinger: You wanted to be published in the highest ranked journals. You wanted to work in the highest ranked philosophy department. Your career became a game of sorts.

1. Thi Nguyen: Yes, it became a game, and it's not just me. This is a common pattern across the academy, across the rest of the world. Now that I'm in the publishing world, the bestseller list becomes this thing that everyone's attention is towards in the sciences, the size of your grants. One of the things that seems to happen is that you enter the train for really large and rich reasons. Then the train gives you some very simple scoring system and you orient. I came up with a term for this. I call it value capture, which is when you start orienting towards an external source of values.

Micah Loewinger: As an example of value capture, you talk about the US News & World Report's law school rankings and you lay out the pros and cons of that system.

1. Thi Nguyen: I love this case, because a lot of times when people are thinking about this stuff, they're imagining some evil, Machiavellian, mustache twiddling villain trying to manipulate people. It's pretty clear to me that the US News & World Report started ranking law schools for very good reason.

Originally, there was just Barron's, a book that had qualitative descriptions of the different missions and visions of each law school, but since they were self-reported mission statements, a lot of people knew that they were BS, something that the PR department wrote up, and so some people could get access to the information behind the scenes. If you were from a family that had a lot of lawyers, a lot of internal knowledge of law schools, you could ask around. For people like me, an immigrant's kid with no family connections, how was I supposed to know anything?

The US News & World Report tries to compile that information. Some of it is based on incoming class GPA, incoming class LSAT score, outgoing class employment at the nine-month mark. What ranking systems do is they compress all that information into one single ranking. Instead of a plural set of values, everyone is now pointed towards exactly the kinds of things that are measured in that system.

One way for me to think about it is that value capture is a kind of outsourcing of your values. Instead of different law schools trying to figure out what they valued and different students trying to figure out what they valued, instead everyone's outsourcing their value system to the US News & World Report. The entire process sucks out independent deliberation from the system.

Micah Loewinger: The latter part of your book is about how to stop metrics from defining our values. To get there, you say that it's important to understand how metrics came to take over our world and how their overwhelming popularity feels like an inevitable consequence of our collective attempt to understand each other. Can you explain how we got to this state in our world where politicians and bureaucrats and many more of us compulsively reach for numbers to constantly justify what they're doing? You point to the work of Theodore Porter, a historian of quantification.

1. Thi Nguyen: To understand this, you have to really understand the difference between qualitative and quantitative information. He says they're good at different things, and the problem comes from compulsively overreaching for quantitative information, even when it's inappropriate. "Qualitative information," he says, "Is open ended and dynamic and rich, but it travels badly between contexts." The written response I give to my students, essays rely on a lot of shared information to understand, and they travel badly to, say, someone in HR.

To get around this, we create quantitative information, like letter grades. If I give my student a B, that information can quickly travel and be immediately understood by someone in the law school or someone hiring in Silicon Valley, and it can aggregate instantly. What enables it to do that is precisely that we've removed high context and high nuance, and we fixed ourselves into informational buckets that are precisely there because everyone can understand them in the same way. We're getting portability at the price of nuance. That, to me, is terrifying.

Micah Loewinger: We've been talking about the harms of using metrics and game logic in real life, but I want to explore the irony at the heart of your idea. How come those very same things, metrics and scoring systems, are what actually make games fun?

1. Thi Nguyen: One of my inspirations for understanding games is this philosopher, Bernard Suits, who wrote this cult classic, The Grasshopper. What he says a game is, "To play a game is to take on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them." What he means is that in games we take on artificial goals and we take on artificial constraints. That understanding is central to understanding, for me, not just games and play, but life.

What he's saying is that what we're doing in games is not just trying to do it for the outcome itself. If you're trying to run a marathon, you're not just trying to get to that particular point in space, because if that was all you cared about, you would take a taxi.

Micah Loewinger: You wouldn't run in a big circle.

1. Thi Nguyen: A lot of times the start line and the finish line are the same place. I'm a rock climber. If I cared about getting to the top efficiently, most of the time, the climbs we do, there's an easy path up the back. The fact that we forbid certain efficiencies means that what we care about is doing it a particular way. Suit literally puts it that games are a case where we try to do it the hard way or we go the long way. What this exposes for me is that games are a place that force you to confront the value of processes, the value of doing things in an interesting way. We know this in our hearts. We have motivational posters about this. Like, the journey is the destination. That's what this means.

One of my favorite board games, The Mind, you play it with a team of people. The game gives you random cards from a deck of 1 to 100. The task is play the cards in order without talking or communicating or signaling. You have to develop a kind of telepathic sense of timing. The game teaches you that it's possible and that it's beautiful, this experience of near telepathy in your sense of timing. I never knew I wanted that until the game gave me that with a very simple rule system and scoring system.

Micah Loewinger: It's the journey over the destination, but what about winning? Where does winning fit into your theory of games?

1. Thi Nguyen: One of my philosophy advisors, Barbara Herman, in grad school, casually said in the middle of a seminar that the most important thing here was to remember the difference between a goal and a purpose. I was like, "That's dumb. There's no difference in a goal and a purpose." She said, "Sure there is. When you have your friends over for a knight of cards, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun."

A lot of the times, for some people, I call them achievement players, the goal and the purpose are one. They play to win, and what they want is to win. I suspect a lot of Olympians are like that, but a lot of us in other contexts aren't like that. A lot of us know in our hearts that if you play charades with people, you got to try to win to have fun, but winning doesn't actually matter. In our hearts, we know that goal and purpose are separate.

For this kind of play, and I call this striving play, what you're doing is you're taking on an interest in winning temporarily to have this incredible struggle. This is, I think, a thing games teach us, that a lot of us are weird and flexible enough that we can take on goals temporarily for the joy of doing the thing. It's in the basic experience of playing Twister. What you want out of Twister is falling, because that's funny, but if you fall on purpose, that will not be funny. To play Twister, you have to take on the weirdest mental posture. You have to get yourself to try to win and really be invested in it in order to make possible the joy of hilarious failure.

Micah Loewinger: Basically what you're saying is that the scoring system in games give us a very clear objective that allows us to have fun, that striving to have the highest score creates the conditions to have a good time even if you don't win that. That we may be tempted to employ these simple scoring systems in real life, but in the real world, they don't work out so cleanly.

1. Thi Nguyen: That's such a pretty way of putting it. I think one of the things that makes the difference in games and metrics possible is that in games, what we're doing often is deeply tied up with this weird goal purpose angle. Like, I am trying to make points in basketball, and the points in basketball are really narrow and really artificial, but that's okay because there was no natural, true basketball goal before we simplified it to basketball points. Points in a basketball or something, we just made up and we just tuned and we changed to give us this kind of interesting, cooperative, competitive, fluid activity.

Things are different in metrics, where the kind of clear, simple scoring system is of something else. Like, Twitter likes and Follows are claiming to be about something in reality, which is communication. Rotten Tomatoes is claiming to be about something, which is the value of a movie, the goodness of a movie. That, I think, is a massive difference. We're transforming something that was real, that was standing, some rich value, by trying to condense it down to a scoring system.

Micah Loewinger: We want to know what the best movie is, so we look on Rotten Tomatoes, but what's being measured may not be what's the best art, it may be the movie that most neatly meets the expectations of a certain set of critics.

1. Thi Nguyen: Yes. The Rotten Tomatoes example, I think, is a really rich one. If you think about the way Rotten Tomatoes works, it presents itself as objective, but it's doing an enormous information deletion. My friend Matt Stroll, who's a philosopher of art, put it this way, if you actually look at a lot of great movies, critics are often really divided about them. You'll get some people being like, "I love this. This was fantastic," and other people being like, "This is weird, incomprehensible garbage."

When you have those intense reactions, Rotten Tomatoes says 50%. The kinds of movies that get 99% on Rotten Tomatoes are the kinds of movies where everyone's like, "That was pretty good." I think the last Harry Potter movie got like 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, and if you looked at the reviews, everyone's like, "That was fine, that was pretty good," but that information gets deleted in the process of harvesting a simple binary that's aggregatable.

Micah Loewinger: This is what you refer to as the gap, the distance between what's being measured and what actually matters.

1. Thi Nguyen: I think a nearby example of the gap that I became obsessed with was screen time. I'm a parent. Everyone tells you to worry about your kid's screen time, and I started worrying about screen time too. One day I was looking at at it, and that measure lumps together all kinds of things that are profoundly different. Sometimes when my kid is on his iPad, he's watching idiotic YouTube videos, sometimes he's watching YouTube videos about the history of World War II, sometimes he's playing dumb clickers, and sometimes he's building his own freeform architectural masterpieces in Minecraft.

Those are the differences that actually matter, but we don't have a large scale automated method for capturing everything, so w just use screen time. I kind of think we use screen time because you don't need to have a conversation with your kids about the difference between creativity and mindless clicker games. You can just let a machine count it, but maybe what you actually need to do was to have the conversation with your kid. What metrics tempt us to do is to let something decide for us what counts as valuable just because it's easily measured.

Micah Loewinger: How should we approach real-life metrics? Should I stop using Yelp to find restaurants? Should I stop looking at the highest reviewed washer dryer on Amazon?

1. Thi Nguyen: We need someone to make decisions for us sometimes. If I had to research, find the values of and figure out what I cared about for every single object I interact with and purchase, I wouldn't have time to get anything done. What we're doing is outsourcing values. We have to do that sometimes, but we have to be careful about whether we're outsourcing something at our periphery or something at our core.

Games actually kind of suggest the right way to do it. Games suggest that we take on scoring systems intentionally with a sense that it's up to us about whether we're entangled with them or not. I think we can do the same thing with the other world. We can look at metrics and rankings knowing that they're highly simplified, highly accessible information compression systems, and we can decide whether we're willing to bear that cost in that case.

A lot of the times the answer might be, "I don't have time to do it," but there's a huge difference between making a decision about which scoring systems you want to rule you and just passively letting the world reach in wherever it presents you with a metric and letting it overwrite your values without a worry.

Micah Loewinger: You're saying that basically by playing games, we train ourselves to see scoring systems and decide which ones we like or fit our lives, that by playing games and traveling between different scoring systems, we can go out into the real world and say, "Do I want to be in this rat race or that rat race?"

1. Thi Nguyen: Yes, I don't want to go too far down this line, because when you read a lot of stuff in psychology and education, it always says games and play are valuable when they help us get better, when they help us get smarter and stronger. The worst version of this for me is justifying gameplay because it de stresses me so I can get more work out of myself. The philosopher Bernard Suits, at the end of his book, what he says is, imagine a utopia where we've solved all our practical problems. What would we do with our time? We would play, or we would be bored out of our minds, so play is the meaning of life.

This sounds silly to some people, but he's an Aristotle scholar. What Aristotle says is the meaning of human life comes in the exercise of our capacities and abilities, not in the outcomes and products of those. This is something I do the start of every Internet philosophy class, I ask students, "What are you here for?" They're like, "To get a grade." "Why are you getting that?" "To get a job." "Why are you getting that?" "To get money." "Why are you getting that?" "To get a car." Then I'm like, "Why are you doing that?" Around then students are like, "I need a car to get to work." Then suddenly this horrible cycle opens up to them.

What Aristotle says, what Suits is saying, is that where this stuff grounds out is not in piles of more stuff, but in rich, fascinating action. Games are these structures that are arranged, where you chase points, and those points are meaningless except that they inspire a rich, fascinating process. Either games are the dumbest thing ever and we should get rid of them and just get back to being more efficient, or they're the most angelic vision of what actually matters to us, and the curse is that we've forgotten that a meaningful life comes from processes, and we've tried to squeeze out games and play in a life of ever more optimizing our productivity and outcomes, and that what we should actually remember was the purpose of it all was to be engaged in beautiful doing.

Micah Loewinger: Thi, thank you very much.

1. Thi Nguyen: Thank you so much.

Micah Loewinger: C. Thi Nguyen is a philosophy professor at the University of Utah. His most recent book is The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. That's it for the midweek podcast. Don't forget to listen to the big show on Friday. In the meantime, consider following OTM on Instagram and TikTok. You can see videos of Brooke and I talking about things that we cover on the show. You can see clips from some of our interviews. We'd love to know what you think, so drop us a line. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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