Design Matters with Debbie Millman

Guest: C. Thi Nguyen

Date: February 23, 2026
Episode Theme:
Examining how games, metrics, and social structures shape human agency, values, and meaning, through the lens of philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s life and work—particularly his books Agency as Art and How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game.

Episode Overview

This episode features a deep and wide-ranging conversation between host Debbie Millman and philosopher C. Thi Nguyen (“T”), exploring how games function as art, how scoring systems and metrics shape not just play but meaning and value in our lives, and the danger of letting external measures capture and distort our real ambitions. Nguyen draws from his personal narrative, philosophical influences, and recent work on the perils of metrics in an era of quantified everything.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Journey: Origins and Influences

• Childhood and Family Background
  • Immigrant roots: T’s parents fled South Vietnam and settled in San Jose, California, after being placed by a church family ([06:02]).
  • Two competing narratives: “One way to tell my story is I’m an immigrant’s child…another way…a math professor's kid is a philosophy professor. What wonders there are.” (Nguyen, [06:02])
• Early Encounters with Games and Technology
  • Father brings home an obsolete Intel computer; T discovers Colossal Cave Adventure at age 10 ([07:46]).
  • “It was blue. It was obsoleted at Intel…I was fascinated by [the game].” (Nguyen, [07:55])
• Teenage Movie Critic Experience
  • At 16, joins San Jose Mercury News as a movie critic, reviewing both art films and blockbusters ([04:29]).
• Academic Path
  • Switches from creative writing and biology to philosophy after being “blown away” by a course with legendary philosopher Stanley Cavell ([19:01]).
• Double Life: Academic and Food Writer
  • Begins food writing for the LA Times after a passionate, drunken defense of Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles on Chowhound ([20:34]).
  • “I was eating it and you know…it’s like there’s this soft chicken and then the sweetness of the maple syrup and the richness of the gravy and then the crispiness. I was like, oh, I know this pattern. This is Peking duck.” (Nguyen, [21:20])

2. Games as Art and Engine of Agency

• Distinctiveness of Games

  • “Art asks us to see and observe. Games ask us to participate.” (Nguyen, summarized by Millman, [27:24])
  • Games are an art form: “Games are designed to make the beauty and the interest emerge in you, the player.” ([28:02])
  • Games sculpt action, interaction, and even mindset: “Game designers tell you what to want…They’re pushing around rules in order to guide you to a kind of action, but not force you.” ([28:02–32:06])
  • Comparison to teaching: “In good teaching, if I just tell you what to think and you think it, I failed…Game designers are doing something really similar.” ([28:02])

• Games as Libraries of Agency

  • Different mindsets are encoded in different rules: “[Soccer] says, don't use your hands, and so you have to discover everything you can do with your feet… Chess forces you into the mindset and style of hyper focusing on geometrical possibilities...” ([32:15])
  • Tabletop roleplaying e.g., “suddenly you’re in the posture of a certain kind of storyteller…Games are these prepackaged agencies.” ([32:15])

• Games, Constraints, and Freedom

  • Quoting Bernard Suits: games create “voluntary obstacles for the sake of struggling against them” ([37:22]).
  • Constraints as creative possibility: “Rules are these weird paradoxes that give us constraints and through those constraints create new possibilities.” ([34:04])
  • Illustrative analogy: “The fewer constraints the more free you are…that’s really false.” ([34:04])

3. Metrics, Measurement, and “Value Capture”

• Metrics in Games vs. Real Life

  • Games provide clear, inarguable scoring systems: “Two points for cows, four points for sheep, go. And you know exactly, exactly how well you've done and you know exactly how to compare yourself to everybody else. And it’s inarguable.” ([47:40])
  • In life, the consequences of metrics are different: “When skateboarding moves to an official context…to make it more readily countable, they change what it's about. Skateboarding becomes less about style and flow and more about height and number of flips, because those are easier to count in public together.” ([47:40])

• Dangers of Value Capture

  • Central thesis: when external metrics replace rich, evolving personal values, we risk losing meaning ([57:24]).
  • “Value capture is what happens when your values are rich and subtle…then you get put in a social setting next to a simple, typically quantified rendition of those values, and then the simple one takes over.” (Nguyen, [57:24])
  • Examples: obsession with Twitter likes, FitBit steps, or Duolingo points (Millman’s own French-learning experience, [59:36]).
  • “When you buy a gamified app, you’re buying a prefabricated extension to your will.” ([60:22])
  • The process is often voluntary and incremental, not forced: “The problem isn’t that no one chose… the problem is the weird fixity of the measure.” ([64:23])
  • Institutional vs. self-created measures: institutional ones succeed via “decontextualized” simplicity ([66:50]).

• Choice, Reflection, and Resisting Value Capture

  • The importance of periodically asking: “Is this the game you really want to be playing?” ([43:46])
  • Suggested reflection: “Is this interesting? Does this make me happy in the long run?...Is this system doing what really matters?” ([69:26])

4. Achievement vs. Striving Play

• Defining ‘Striving Play’
  • “Achievement play is playing in order to win, and striving play is taking an interest in winning…in order to experience the process.” ([53:06])
  • “In normal life we take the means for the sake of the ends, but in striving play, you take the ends for the sake of the means.” ([53:06])
• Implications for Life
  • “The points actually don’t matter in striving play, you just cared about them temporarily to have the process and you can just throw them away again.” ([53:06])
• Cultivating Detachment
  • “Striving play is partially a cultivated psychological skill…focus on the thing that really should matter…which is your experience of the process.” ([56:17])
  • For Debbie’s personal dilemma with games: “Was that game interesting? Was that a fascinating game? …That cultivates an attitude of distance.” ([56:17])

5. The Beauty and Social Meaning of Games

• Memorable Passages and Art as Game
  • Debbie reads a favorite paragraph about the magic of games: “Well-designed games make beautiful action more likely. They call it forth…They create the background conditions that make it likely that your own actions will be elegant, fascinating, and thrilling.” (Millman quoting Nguyen, [46:04])
  • Nguyen asserts, “I think art is a game…What we actually care about is making it ourselves.” ([38:29])
• On the Game Go
  • “Go is about 10 different fights that interrelate to each other, but they’re separate…To play Go well, you have to cultivate…an emotional outlook of constantly asking whether this fight is worthwhile.” ([72:33])

Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On personal synthesis:

  “What [T] cares about is how the outside world, how social structures and technological structures change how we value and think. And I was like, oh my God, suddenly I make sense to myself.”
  (Nguyen quoting a colleague, [03:12])

• On games as participatory art:

  “Games are designed to make the beauty and the interest emerge in you, the player.”
  (Nguyen, [28:02])

• On agency and play:

  “Games are these prepackaged agencies… At its best, the world of games is a world where you can dance between these prepackaged mindsets.”
  (Nguyen, [32:15])

• On constraints and freedom:

  “Rules are these weird paradoxes that give us constraints and through those constraints create new possibilities.”
  (Nguyen, [34:04])

• On Suits and life’s meaning:

  “What would we do with our time [in Utopia]? We would play games, or we would be bored out of our minds. So if games are what we play in Utopia, then they must be the meaning of life.”
  (Nguyen, [37:49])

• On value capture:

  “Value capture is what happens when your values are rich and subtle or developing in that direction, and then you get put in a social setting next to a simple, typically quantified rendition of those values, and then the simple one takes over.”
  (Nguyen, [57:24])

• On breaking away from imposed metrics:

  “You have to articulate what actually matters and then ask as a question whether the metric captures it without presupposing that the thing that's easily measured automatically is what's important…”
  (Nguyen, [69:26])

• On the emotional impact of reaching readers:

  “I am about to cry… This little patch of books behind me is my carefully constructed zoom window. This is the cold, buggy, disgusting basement that I spent three years alone in writing this book, mostly convinced that no one would ever give a crap. And so to hear you react like that is like, you know, unbelievably gratifying and moving. So thank you.”
  (Nguyen, [74:19])

Key Memorable Moments

• Pivotal Email from a Student:
  A student’s email describing how Nguyen’s ideas about games and metrics freed her from years of depression and misdirected striving became the inspiration and first chapter title of his latest book: “Is this the game you really want to be playing?” ([43:46])

• Personal Reflection and Life Change:
  Millman’s confession about Duolingo: shifting from learning French to optimizing for Diamond League points, then realizing she wasn’t learning any more ([59:36]).

Important Segments by Timestamp

• [03:12] Nguyen’s synthesis of his philosophical interests
• [07:46] Colossal Cave Adventure and early computer games
• [27:24] Distinction between art and games
• [32:06] “Library of agencies" concept
• [34:04] Constraints creating freedom; Suits and Rousseau
• [37:22] On obstacles and meaning (Bernard Suits)
• [46:04] Memorable paragraph on the beauty of action in games
• [57:24] Definition of “value capture”
• [69:26] Reflective questions for changing one's metrics-driven life
• [72:33] Go and the cultivation of reflective perspective

Conclusion

This probing episode weaves philosophy, personal storytelling, cultural critique, and practical advice. Nguyen compellingly argues for conscious choice and reflection in a world saturated with metrics and scoring. He urges us to ask, “Is this the game you really want to be playing?” and to keep hold of our capacity to define—and redefine—what really matters in life.