Are We Measuring Our Lives in All the Wrong Ways?

EZRA KLEIN: One thing I like about analytics is that outside of the context of simply argue about the flaws of analytics, not having them allows you to bullshit yourself a lot. Allows you to bullshit yourself about whether or not people are reading you, what you’re really doing here, are you serving an audience. But then having them allows you... See more

EZRA KLEIN: What might be true is if you spend all your time in point-scoring environments, you will become used to life being about scoring points. And you will begin to adopt that approach and begin to adopt those values without even realizing it. You’ll become habituated. The game will change you. That is a second principle I want to put ou... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: Twitter is doing two things simultaneously. One thing it’s doing is it’s flattening all the kind of rich reactions you have into likes. So already you have not only a binary filter— like or dislike— that pushes you in the direction of aggregated numbers instead of a few deep connections, but you also get this timing filter where peop... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: Reiner Knizia, one of my favorite game designers— I was trying to figure out what games do and how they work and what makes them special— and I found this interview where he just casually says, “The most important thing in my game designer toolbox is the point system because the point system tells the players what to care about.”

EZRA KLEIN: [C. Thi Nguyen] believes games are a unique kind of not just art form, but just form, medium, because what they manipulate is our agency. You can think of visual arts, like painting, as manipulating what we see. You could think of music as manipulating what we hear. But games— games manipulate what we do, how we do it, why we do i

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C. THI NGUYEN: But I think the most important thing about games is the way they manipulate our agency. The way we enter into this alternate self. And that’s I think where you can see the greatest power of games and their greatest danger. The greatest power of games is that you can explore this landscape of different agencies. The greatest danger of... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: If the wonder of real games is the possibility of flexing through this wide landscape of possibility, then the gamification of activities in the world is doing two things to us. One, it’s funneling our values down one particular pre-established path for a real world activity, for something that’s connected out to politics and the wor... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: I n games, for once in your life, you know exactly what you’re doing and you know exactly that you can do it. And then you have just the right amount of ability to do it. It’s a feeling of concentrated, crystallized action. For me, solving puzzles, or balancing over in a rock climb, or seeing a trap ahead in chess, this is ecstasy. A... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: The way I navigate the world right now is I’ve developed a fair amount of defensive suspicion about certain kinds of pleasure. A marker of design game-like systems is that they’re very pleasurable to operate in.

C. THI NGUYEN: So the essential insight that I got from Suits is that in so many games, the target isn’t the point. The point is this rich experience along the way. And I think a lot of the mistakes we make with games is we get into these things and we forget about these larger purposes. The fact that they can be fun. The fact that they can be beau... See more