The Score

'Lucid, entertaining and precise... a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life' Tim Clare, Guardian<BR><BR>Is this the game you want to be playing?<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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 meaningful to us.<BR><BR>A life-long lover of online and board games himself, Nguyen argues that we should not stop playing games but rather take a step back and become more aware of their immersive and profound power, so that we might chart a way towards more creative and joyful lives. To start playing our own game.<BR>

Games are a unique art form. Games work in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be and what to care about during the game. Game designers sculpt alternate agencies, and game players submerge themselves in those alternate agencies. Thus, the fact that we play games demonstrates the fluidity of our own agency. We can throw ourselves, for a little while, into a different and temporary motivations. This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on their unique value. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part our systems of communication and our art. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. When we play games, we can pursue a goal, not for its own value, but for the value of the struggle. Thus, playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life. We adopt an interest in winning temporarily, so we can experience the beauty of the struggle. Games offer us a temporary experience of life under utterly clear values, in a world engineered to fit to our abilities and goals.Games also let us to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, it turns out, are a special technique for communication. They are a technology that lets us record and transmit forms of agency. Our games form a "library of agency" and we can explore that library to develop our autonomy. Games use temporary restrictions to force us into new postures of agency.

Die unheimliche Macht der Scores - wie Rankings und Punktesysteme unser Leben kapern <BR> <BR> Klickzahlen, Fitnesstracker, Bestsellerlisten, Politikerrankings: Unsere Gesellschaft ist besessen von Scores. Überall bestimmen Punktesysteme, was und wer als wertvoll gilt. Doch wann kippen Orientierungshilfen in Instrumente der Beherrschung? Der Philosoph C. Thi Nguyen deckt auf, wie Scores zu einem der prägendsten Werkzeuge unserer Zeit geworden sind - und warum wir dringend ihre Wirkungsweise verstehen müssen. <BR> <BR> Was macht "Scores" so mächtig und attraktiv? Statt uns mit der irritierenden Vielfalt von Meinungen und Werten zu konfrontieren, reduzieren sie diese Vielfalt auf simple Zahlen. Dadurch sagen sie uns, was wichtig ist und wonach wir streben sollten - und bringen eine verführerische Klarheit in unser Handeln. Nguyen demonstriert an lebensnahen Beispielen, dass diese scheinbar harmlosen Zahlen uns tatsächlich dazu verleiten, fremde Werte unhinterfragt zu übernehmen. Ob wir unsere Gesundheit durch Fitnesstracker optimieren, unsere Hobbys in Instagram- Likes messen oder unseren beruflichen Erfolg an Quartalszielen festmachen: Überall werden vielschichtige Motivationen durch eindimensionale Kennzahlen ersetzt. Wenn aber in unserer Beziehung zu unserer Gesundheit, unseren Jobs oder Lieblingsbeschäftigungen nur noch Scores zählen, verarmt unser Leben. Dagegen entwickelt Nguyen eine neue Philosophie der Bewertung: Er zeigt, wie wir spielerisch und bewusst mit Scores umgehen können, ohne von ihnen vereinnahmt zu werden. Ein wunderbares Buch über die Kunst, in einer quantifizierten Welt die Kontrolle über die eigenen Werte zu behalten.