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The Score
How to Stop Playing Someone Elseโs Game
Brief Description
A thought-provoking exploration of the scoring systems in our everyday lives - how we succumb to their values and how we regain control. Scoring systems are everywhere. Underpinning our daily lives - whether it's the fit bits on our wrists, likes on social media, and even...
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The Score
$6500
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Description
A thought-provoking exploration of the scoring systems in our everyday lives - how we succumb to their values and how we regain control.
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 weaponise 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 monetised over what is truly meaningful to us.
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.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780241653975
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 13 January 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Allen Lane
Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 35.0mm
Width: 166.0mm
Height: 241.0mm
Weight: 576g
Pages: 368
About the Author
C. Thi Nguyen is 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. A former food writer for the Los Angeles Times, Nguyen is active in public philosophy, writing for the New York Times, Washington Post, New Statesman, and elsewhere.
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