Bankless Podcast: Playing the Right Games—Why Scores Quietly Replace Meaning | C. Thi Nguyen

Date: January 13, 2026
Host(s): Ryan Sean Adams & David Hoffman
Guest: C. Thi Nguyen, philosopher of games, author of "How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game"

Episode Overview

In this episode, Ryan and David speak with philosopher C. Thi Nguyen about the pervasive nature of "games" and scoring systems in modern life, particularly as they relate to crypto, finance, and social platforms. They explore Nguyen's core ideas around the philosophy of games, the seductive power of metrics and scores, how gamified systems shape our values, and what it means to play your own game versus one society hands you. The discussion is practical and reflective, touching on everything from Rotten Tomatoes to social media likes, personal happiness, and the tradeoffs between clarity and meaning.

Key Themes & Insights

1. What Is a Game? The Bernard Suits Definition

[06:04]

• A game, per Bernard Suits (author of "The Grasshopper"), is “voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of the activity of struggling to overcome them.”
• The distinction: In games, the process matters as much as—or more than—the end result, unlike in everyday life where efficiency and outcomes rule.
• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "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..." [06:27]

2. Serious Life Games: The Metrification of Everything

[11:22]

• Modern life is filled with “game-like” systems: GPA, job performance metrics, likes/followers, net worth, business KPIs, etc.
• Not all scoring systems are true ‘games.’ For something to be a real game, your motivation must include a genuine striving within the constraints, not just targeting external rewards.
• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "A lot of people respond to ranking systems just because they are incentives that are connected to money... that's right next to games. But if we can find something that intuitively feels to you, like cheating... what's crucial to Suits is... we care about the method that we did it." [13:01]

3. Social Media: A Superficially Game-Like, Not-So-Fun System

[16:24]

• Social media platforms are gamified via explicit scoring (likes, retweets, follows), but differ from true games:

  • They're not detached from real world outcomes.
  • They reduce multidimensional value conversations to single-point metrics, flattening nuance and rewarding “safe” over “risky” or deeply meaningful content.

• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "The crucial thing it has is a scoring system... yields an instant, clear verdict... there's no way to argue it." [16:58]

• The Magic Circle:

  • “Real games” happen within a "magic circle": a context where consequences don't spill over into regular life and you can care deeply about the score, but it ends at the boundary.
  • Social media’s scores spill into status, livelihood, mental health, and more.

• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "In a game, if I go all out... nothing changes in the world. When the game is over, it does not matter if I slayed my spouse or my spouse slayed me... but on social media... it's not in a magic circle." [22:45]

4. The Limits and Dangers of Metrics: Rotten Tomatoes, Value Flattening, and Portability

[24:21]

• Metrics flatten complex meaning and push us towards safe, consensus choices.

  • Rotten Tomatoes: Aggregates critical opinions and thus disadvantages polarizing or daring works—surface-level popularity crowds out deep, passionate, but minority engagement.
  • Social Media Likes: Don’t register depth, only count quantity and binary pro/con, discouraging unique and nuanced output.

• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "Good movies are often controversial... Rotten Tomatoes are... the movies that are engineered or made so that everyone will get... not daring movies, not subtle movies, not provocative movies." [25:50]

• Portability Theory of Data:

  • Metrics trade context, nuance, and fullness for transportability and instant comprehension across systems.
  • “A B does not carry the information”—it strips out explanation or depth, but is instantly useful and widely understood.

• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "What quantitative data does... is it trades away high context, high sensitivity and multidimensionality in exchange for portability." [36:15]

5. Value Capture: Outsourcing What Matters

[37:28]

• Value Capture is when you let a system’s shallow, quantifiable measures overwrite your own, richer, more personal (and often quieter) values.

• Examples: Caring more about GPA than actual learning, BMI/weight than real health, or net worth instead of life satisfaction.

• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "Value capture is any case where your values are rich and subtle... and then you get parked in an institutional setting that gives you a simplified, typically quantified rendition of those values and then you intake and let take over that simplified quantified version." [37:28]

• Loud Values Crowd Out Quiet Ones:

  • External, easily communicated values (net worth, academic ranking) feel safer and can dominate hard-to-articulate but important factors (community, joy, fulfillment).

• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "...having a meaningful life... having good friendships, these are all like, they're kind of quiet and then other things are very loud." [40:39]

6. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave & Metrics as Shadows

[44:34]

• Plato’s Cave allegory updated: Metrics and scores are the "shadows on the wall", sometimes mistaken for reality, but are only projections of what matters.
• Metrics are excellent for some things (e.g., very context-invariant qualities), but miss context-dependent, personal, subtle or qualitative goods.
• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "The cave for me is when we start treating as reality only the things that we have metrics and data for..." [46:21]

7. Society, Scale, and Tradeoffs

[55:09]

• Metrics and scoring systems enable scale, coordination, and trust in society, but:
  • Incentivize us to focus on the things we can agree to measure, not necessarily what matters most to us as individuals.
  • We can't escape all metrics; we must make tradeoffs.
• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "There's all these things that are important in life and then there's a few things that are very easy for people to count together... and in the metrified world, what, what's happening... is that all our attention is fixated on the things that are easy to count together." [55:09]

8. Agency, Specialization, and Outsourcing Decisions

[57:15]

• Humans must outsource most decisions—it's unavoidable given the complexity of the world and limited time.
• The real loss is abdicating agency where it matters, such as art or meaning-making, by always deferring to metrics or crowd tastes.
• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "Developing your own tastes and finding things that please you is far more important than deference to experts. Because the experience of art is essentially personal." [58:46]

Reflective Control and Playfulness: How to Reclaim Agency

1. Goal vs. Purpose; Use Playfulness to Re-examine the Rules

[62:07]

• Systems and technologies have “interests”—they nudge us to certain behaviors and values.
• Learn to distinguish goal from purpose: The goal is what the system measures; the purpose is why you do it.
• Games are unique in allowing you to change systems to serve your own values.
• Playfulness: The ability to notice that you're within a rule set, to move between rule sets, to “try on” different ways of living and scoring, and to choose mindfully which games you want to play.
• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "Playfulness is the spirit of moving lightly and easily between rule sets and normative worlds... and try on and off different conceptions of how we're supposed to do and what we're supposed to do." [62:07]

2. Reflective Control: Questioning and Adapting the Game

[70:53]

• “Reflective control” means seeing systems as contingent—not immutable—and making choices to accept, adapt, or reject the metrics shaping your life.
• But: Not all metrics can be ignored; often, the answer is finding balance—participate where you must, but don’t internalize them as the only value.
• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "...recognize it as a merely external system, then you will, as we say, like, play the game to some extent, but then distance yourself from it and take control where you can." [71:55]

3. The Tradeoff at Scale: Yes, We Need Measures—But Not At All Costs

[75:48]

• Metrics brought enormous power and efficiency but also the risk of crowding out what’s deeply meaningful but hard to count.
• Be mindful of which systems you internalize, and remember the tradeoff.
• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "So I'm not saying go back. I am saying exactly... that the vast power of scale also comes with this, the seductive call to forget that there's anything else outside of what the institution can measure." [75:48]

4. Agency-Promoting Structures: Encourage Experimentation

[79:23]

• Seek external structures (like cookbooks with dueling viewpoints, open-ended games, and customizable systems) that encourage exploration over prescription.
• Don't let systems define you; use them as guides, not masters.
• Quote (C. Thi Nguyen):

  "It would be really ironic if I wrote a book about agency and exploration and ended it telling... people what they should think. So... it's just supposed to be my own version of the Jacques and Julia cook at home. Like, here's a happy ending and a sad ending—you choose." [80:16]

Actionable Ideas and Takeaways

• Notice the games and metrics shaping your life. Ask: "Is this the game I really want to be playing?" [01:00]
• Distinguish between goals (system) and purposes (your values).
• Guard against value capture: Don’t let simple metrics override richer, subtler values, especially in areas central to your personal satisfaction.
• Practice playfulness: Regularly step back and experiment with “playing” different games, rule sets, and value systems.
• Exercise reflective control: Don’t take imposed metrics as given—adapt, question, and switch up the systems when possible.
• Recognize the scale-efficiency tradeoff: Use metrics and large systems consciously, knowing what they’re good for—and what they’re not.
• Encourage agency-promoting external structures: Look for, or create, environments that foster experimentation and individual meaning.

Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On games and motivation:

  "What a game is is something where we care about the method... we care that we did it out of this particular talent or using this particular ability." (C. Thi Nguyen) [13:01]

• On the limits of scoring:

  "Scoring systems are really interesting to me... you can have a game without having a scoring system... what a scoring system is, is it something that yields an instant, clear verdict that everyone agrees to." (C. Thi Nguyen) [16:58]

• On the flattening effect of metrics:

  "If you use Rotten Tomatoes as a measure, what you're going to pick up on, the kinds of movies that do well... are precisely the movies that... everyone will get... not daring movies, not subtle movies, not provocative movies." (C. Thi Nguyen) [25:50]

• On value capture:

  "You're not developing a sense of what matters to you. You're accepting a pre-made value system from outside." (C. Thi Nguyen) [37:28]

• On agency and scale:

  "The bigger the scale and the more we can coordinate on some clear measure, the more efficient we are at hitting exactly what we've coordinated on. And also the more likely we are to miss anything that we're not coordinating on." (C. Thi Nguyen) [75:48]

• On agency-promoting systems:

  "Agency-promoting [structures]... let you try out different ways... and I think that's agency promoting." (C. Thi Nguyen) [80:16]

• On choosing your ending:

  "It would be really ironic if I wrote a book about agency and exploration and ended it telling people what they should think. So... it's just supposed to be my own version of Jacques and Julia cook at home. Like, here's a happy ending and a sad ending—you choose." (C. Thi Nguyen) [80:16]

Memorable Moment

• Ryan’s Rotten Tomatoes marital debate (24:21):
  The argument about whether consulting movie ratings flattens experience and stifles personal taste—it's funny, relatable, and exemplifies the core episode dilemma.

Conclusion

C. Thi Nguyen urges us to be mindful and playful with the games and metrics structured into modern life. Appreciate what they’re good for, but don’t let them “capture your values.” Where you can, experiment with different rules, reclaim agency, and ensure you play the right games—your games, not just the ones handed to you.

Final advice:

“Play better games for you. If the game sucks for you... make the games you're playing better.” (C. Thi Nguyen) [82:35]