Are you an achievement player or a striving player? What’s the difference between a goal and a purpose? Philosopher C Thi Nguyen talks to Tom Hodgkinson about the games we play

The tech bros have gamified the world. That sounds like it might be fun – but it really isn’t. Measurement systems in the workplace feel oppressive. I interviewed philosopher C Thi Nguyen, author of The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game, who has thought long and hard about both the games we play for fun and the games we’re forced to play at work.

Tom Hodgkinson You remind us in your book that a lot of us do a lot of playing, whether it’s sports, board games, video games or whatever.

C Thi Nguyen I think games and play are really different concepts, and we have to think about which one we want to talk about. So [the philosopher] Bernard Suits has an incredibly useful notion of a game: voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them. I love this definition. And what it really means is that games are kind of voluntary inefficiencies. So when you’re running a marathon, you’re trying to get to a point in space. But that’s not what actually matters, because if that mattered, you would just go there by the most efficient means possible. You would use a bicycle.

TH I was playing pinball with my dad and brother, and we had a great time. There’s a score, someone wins, someone loses. But in the workplace, it’s not so fun when it becomes a competition and a score. What’s the difference?

CTN This is the core puzzle. I was an administrator at a university, and complained relentlessly about the idiotic metrics and rankings I was forced to use to justify my existence as a philosophy professor… and then I went home and, for fun, picked up a board game and played with my spouse. I escaped from rankings and then I voluntarily took on ranking systems.

I think one really important thing about games is how specific the scoring system is. And I think it’s really important for fly fishing. Yes, I do find fishing very meditative. But if you just took me to the river and told me to meditate, I couldn’t do it. I need a very specific structure. In general, scoring systems in games are carefully designed to make the experience better, whereas scoring systems in large-scale institutions are not. But I think the more important point is: you can stop playing a game. You can step back from a game. You can decide the scoring system doesn’t work for you. You can change games. You can modify games. We’re free to do that. But the essential functioning methodology of how metrics work in institutions is different. They gain power, and they hang on to it if we don’t modify the scoring system and all count in a similar way. Their institutional functionality comes from our being in lockstep. So they prevent us, by their intrinsic nature, from varying them.

TH Are games political? It’s often said that Monopoly is there to teach capitalism. Are some of these games – war games, fighting games, business games, investing games, games where you screw other people out of money – a form of propaganda?

CTN Monopoly was originally made by a socialist [Elizabeth Magie]. She was trying to teach an object lesson on the evils of capitalism. So she made a game that had two different rule sets – the socialist rule set and the capitalist rule set. The socialist rule set was supposed to be nice, pleasant and cooperative, and the capitalist rule set was supposed to be arbitrary, unfair and boring. Parker Brothers stole it, removed the socialist rule set, and now we play the capitalist rule set. I don’t like Monopoly.

But also, we’re happy to think we’re mature enough to read fiction and not immediately become like the protagonist. With games, we can learn mental states and have them in our inventory, but not be overtaken by them. For instance, I played Imperial [where shadowy investors make money out of World War II], and I didn’t become an evil capitalist. But I can now simulate evil capitalists in my mind, which I think is a useful thing to be able to do. There’s a long tradition in sociology and anthropology that thinks games are there to bleed off our worst impulses, to give us catharsis: we’re all homicidal maniacs, and part of the civilising process is that we figured out a place where we could stuff our murderous impulses, and instead of killing each other, have fun.

TH When we think about the difference between the games that we play voluntarily with our friends and the gamification of the workplace, isn’t there a fundamental difference, like holidays and everyday working life? People on holiday can be quite busy. You might have a busy day at the end of which you’ll be fairly tired. You might have done more work, in a sense, than we do in the office. The difference is that you have chosen to do it. So isn’t that a condition of a game being fun? That it’s freely chosen by you and your co-participants?

CTN Voluntariness here is part of the story, but it’s not the whole story. There’s another story about how game design works. My philosophy advisor and mentor Barbara Herman says we always have to distinguish between a goal and a purpose. So the goal of charades is to communicate with people and win; the purpose is to have fun and relax with people. Or the goal in rock climbing is to get to the top of the cliff. The purpose is to relax and enter a kind of silent mental state. So one of the core distinctions in my book is between what I call “achievement play” and “striving play”. Achievement play is when you play for the value of winning, while striving play is when you temporarily become interested in winning in order to have a particular struggle. And one of the ways you can tell that you’re a striving player is that you don’t actually care if you win, but in order to have the fun, you have to get yourself invested. Drinking games and party games usually have that structure, and in fact a lot of games are carefully designed for the purpose of having an interesting experience – a designer has carefully tweaked the scoring system to create a rich, fascinating experience. Institutions don’t do that. They typically use the scoring system to track outputs, and that’s a very different purpose.

TH The phrase “striving play” strikes a chord with me. For example, when I play tennis people say, “You’re very competitive.” I sort of think – well, yeah, it is a competition. So when I’m playing tennis, I do actually want to win, but the second it’s over you return to the real world and you don’t care anymore. Then you have achievement play, where the only point is winning. Captains of industry often talk about winning. There’s a famous book called Winning by Jack Welch, who was CEO of General Electric. Young men buy these books because they want to win. Life is a game where someone comes first. But that’s not the kind of game you’re talking about, is it?

CTN We use the word “competitive”, but I think there are two different things that are lying underneath. Some people can become deeply absorbed in a game, but they’re not competitive in the full sense, because they don’t actually care if they win outside the game. I think I’m naturally a striving player. Sometimes my wife and I find a game we’re perfectly balanced at. We have very different skills. She’s a chemist, so she’s extremely good at spatial reasoning. I’m terrible at spatial reasoning, but I’m good at deceit and social manipulation. So when we play a game where we’re balanced, it’s really interesting. Now, I could source a strategy guide to the game and I would probably win, but I don’t do that because I’m interested in the struggle.

TH A friend had a phase of playing draughts with his girlfriend. He became quite obsessed and would secretly read guides to draughts so he could win. Now that’s competitive!

CTN If you’re an achievement player, all that matters to you is winning, and if you’re a striving player, the desire to win is just something you adopt for some other reason. We distinguished earlier between games and play. The philosopher Maria Laguna says playfulness is the ability to move in and out of rule sets and worlds easily. A deeply competitive person cares about winning before the game, during the game and after the game. They feel terrible if they lose and great if they win. The playful person, outside of the game, is like – whatever, I don’t care if I win. The thing they cared about was that everyone had fun. In normal life, activity is a means to an end. If you’re a striving player, the activity is the end. You chase the goal because the activity is fascinating, and if you truly understand that’s why you’re doing it, I think that enables a lightness in your attitude towards winning that also gives you the ability to really absorb yourself in rich and fascinating activities that other people have sculpted for you.

TH So some people don’t play games at all – because they’re so competitive that they get very angry if they lose. They are, in your terms, achievement players to a ridiculous degree, to a degree that actually stops them playing games.

CTN I think there’s a skill to be able to flex your way in and out of caring. It’s a skill that you can learn, and it’s a very useful skill. Playfulness is a fluidity with your cares. It’s the ability to care about fake stuff. That’s the skill that lets us read fiction too. And with fiction we absorb ourselves, we care about these people, and then we end and we put them away again. We are not shattered for life if a beloved fictional character dies. If you have that skill with fiction, you can do the same thing with games. If you have the skill to be able to go into and out of desire to win, you can experience these different landscapes where someone has shaped an interesting and different action for you. If people don’t know, the world of games right now is having this abundant flourishing. It feels like the world of jazz did in the 1950s, with people just inventing new storytelling games, new board games. And many of them are just so much more intricate and fascinating than what I grew up with. They’re elegant designs.

The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game is published by Penguin, £25.

This article is from Idler #110.

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