The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game

'Lucid, entertaining and precise... a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life' Tim Clare, GuardianIs this the game you want to be playing?Scoring systems are everywhere.Underpinning our daily lives - whether it’s the fit bits on our wrists, likes on social media, and even school rankings - they have become pervasive and increasingly dangerous, warping our desires and outsourcing our values to external institutions.Instead of encouraging us to be more playful, to take pleasure in the journey of striving towards a goal, institutions, corporations and bureaucracies weaponize scoring systems to impose their own interests.No matter what, we always seem to be playing by someone else’s rules. In The Score, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen shows us how this newly ‘gamified’ world has fundamentally captured our value systems, turning what might be moral or personal life choices into numerical data, and forcing us to prioritise what can be measured and monetized over what is truly mea