“Games work because they have scores, which tell us what to aim for and which player won. Yet the very sorts of scoring systems that enable riffing and invention on a board tend to stifle us when they are applied in institutional contexts . . . So argues the brilliant and wildly original philosopher C. Thi Nguyen in his new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. This subtitle, with its whiff of self-help and didacticism, sells Nguyen’s profound, rigorous and frequently beautiful book short . . . The Score has an ambitious mission. It seeks to explain why the constraints imposed by scoring systems in games are so liberating, while the constraints imposed by institutional metrics are so deadening. In doing so, it aspires to explain a quintessential contemporary tragedy: the extent to which optimization has gutted our lives. Even without this larger argument, The Score would brim with local insights. Nguyen is a connoisseur of games, and his musings about them are ingenious and entertaining . . . Quite anomalously for a work of philosophy, The Score is socially attentive, historically literate and imbued with sensual glee. It is exuberantly eclectic, full of passionate digressions into the history of algorithms or the nature of classification systems or the workings of skateboarding competitions . . . All this would make the book well worth reading even without its argumentative pièce de résistance, its inspired comparison of games and institutional metrics.” —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
“In [Nguyen’s] previous book, Games: Agency as Art—a philosophical smash hit, which won the American Philosophical Association’s Book Prize, in 2021—he argued that games let us ‘flirt’ with different ‘modes of agency’ . . . In The Score, Nguyen extends these ideas. Games, he writes, can train us to focus on value, by teaching us ‘the distinction between goals and purposes.’” —Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker
“Nguyen is lucid, entertaining and precise . . . The Score is a compelling read, urgent but never alarmist. For Nguyen, wonder, absorption and play are central to human flourishing . . . I came away enriched and uplifted.” —Tim Clare, The Guardian
“Quirky and enthusiastic . . . In The Score, Nguyen . . . combines an enthusiast’s celebration of games’ inner workings with a lament for the power of metrics to flatten our lives and capture our values . . . Nguyen helps us see how games transform instincts into something beautiful, valuable and meditative. . . Nguyen is engaging in his criticisms, with clear-voiced popularizations of sociology, history and philosophy . . . The Score shows how to be more alert to the insidious ways metrics operate in narrower arenas, from law-school applications to any-wine-but-a-fruity-cabernet taste-making. It also sharpens our appreciation of the meditative joy and interior meaning games can offer.” —Bloomberg
“Like a latter-day Socrates . . . [Nguyen] advocat[es] a kind of playful rebellion against rules and metrics. I’m more cynical: I suspect the evisceration of our values by scoring systems will continue . . . I would love to be proved wrong. In the meantime, I give this excellent book five stars.” —Stuart Jeffries, Financial Times
“If we truly want to understand our civic plight—and not just tick off some talking points—then we should read The Score. We’ll find that Nguyen has planned this particular long way round with skill.” —The Telegraph
“[A] trenchant philosophical investigation . . . Illustrating his ideas with lucid philosophy and descriptions of his own innumerable hobbies (Tetris, bouldering, yo-yo), Nguyen skillfully explores the ways in which humans think about progress, creativity, and play. It makes for a captivating look at how imperfect measures of success shape society.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Delightfully irreverent . . . [The Score offers] an engaging look at the games we play and whatever freedom we might have as we do so.” —Kirkus
“One of the most exciting non-fiction titles of 2026.” —Matt D’Ancona, The New World
“The parts in which [Nguyen is] . . . enjoying himself are quite beautiful. There are, and I mean this sincerely, several meditative passages about yo-yoing, and the mastery of certain yo-yo tricks that contain ‘an ouroboros of play’ . . . . I would read a whole book about this, and I would feel alive at the end.” —Harper’s
“As a long-time fan of games, I was delighted to find a philosophical look at how we make choices in life. If you love gaming, this is the best book on the topic you’ll ever find.” —Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple
“One of the most clever and revealing books I have read in a long time. It genuinely changed how I think.” —Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus and Chasing the Scream
“You wouldn’t expect that careful thinking about games and how they work would produce bracing new insights about how powerful forces reach in and modify our values without our even noticing, and what we can do about it, but that’s because you haven’t read C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score. You probably should.” —Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not to Be Wrong
“I do not care about games. Or at least, I didn’t think that I did. But I was riveted from start to finish by THE SCORE, which made me rethink my relationship with my health, my bank account, and even my writing, in this moment of increasing gamification via substack. Such is the power and scope of this brilliant and timely book.” —Kate Manne, author of Down Girl
“Almost everything you do at work, at home, and in even in your relationships, has been turned into a game with scores that supposedly show how well you’re doing it. And yet, you probably feel punished rather than rewarded by all those measures. The Score explains why and how you can wrest yourself free of the bad games that have captured you.” —Ian Bogost, Professor of Film & Media Studies and Computer Science & Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis and designer of the game Cow Clicker
“The Score isn’t an instruction manual for life; it’s something deeper. It teaches you to rewrite the rules, so you can live the way that suits you. Thi Nguyen is a mad genius, sharing the secret sauce to his cool.” —Scott Hershovitz, author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short
“This is a book about the quantitative vs. the qualitative: what happens to our sense of humanity when we submit to institutional demands that reduce the world to a set of rules? The Score is a call to reconnect with play—in our leisure time, in our experience of art, and in how we interact with friends and loved ones. And that sounds like fun to me.” —Eric Zimmerman, founding faculty and Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center
“There are certain concepts that, once they’re explained to you, you start to see everywhere. Thi Nguyen’s notion of value capture is exactly this kind of idea—it’s deceptively simple but profoundly insightful. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. This book beautifully encapsulates Nguyen’s thinking on the relationship between our values, our goals, and the metrics by which we measure ourselves and others. Nguyen is one of the rare academics who can render a complex theory accessible and engaging without dumbing it down. The net result is an outstanding piece of philosophy that experts and non-experts can both enjoy. But consider yourself warned: you might not be able to stop thinking about it either.” —Elizabeth Barnes, author of Health Problems
“Superb philosophy, beautifully written, lovely insights, and gripping in its presentation.” —Sanford Goldberg, Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University
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