Games & Metrics: Agency as Art & Artifice with C. Thi Nguyen

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About This Episode

This week’s guest is C. Thi Nguyen (Website | Wikipedia | X), associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and a specialist in the philosophy of games, the philosophy of technology, and the theory of value. In our first conversation on Future Fossils, we explored his writing on games as an art form in which agency is the medium. His new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, takes that logic further and reveals the games that bind society together with institutional metrics — one of the most powerful, pervasive, and invisible technologies of all time.

Thi’s thesis hinges on the observation that a metric is never just a number. It’s a value judgment dressed up in the costume of objectivity, a down-sampling of our richly multidimensional world into proxies that can travel efficiently between strangers. And with every subsequent compression of meaning into portable, scalable, decontextualized form, our metrics progressively displace place itself — the nuance of our singular, non-fungible lives — and define what we can even aspire to be.

Thi calls this kind of cognitive enclosure “value capture”: when an institution uses metrics to coordinate across distance and difference, it engineers a context-invariant kernel that can travel between strangers without requiring shared background, history, or care. The power of these abstractions is real. So is their violence.

We can use metrics instrumentally, holding them lightly as useful fictions. But more often than not we forget things like GPA, GDP, or KPIs started life as somebody else’s choices — that someone, somewhere, decided what to count and what to ignore — and we begin to inhabit the metric as if it were reality itself: optimizing our lives, desires, and identities for a scoring system we didn’t author and may never have consciously accepted.

Games show us another way. By Thi’s account, games are a medium for the transmission of different kinds of agency, a technology for practicing the very awareness that metrics erode: that metrics are cultural constructs, and we still hav