Reading The Score by C Thi Nguyen for the Telegraph, 2 January 2026
In the Domesday Book of 1086, C Thi Nguyen tells us, English surveyors measured land by the “hide”: the area an average family needed to sustain themselves. A useful measure, obviously; but you need local knowledge to use it. Some places are more productive than others. So how much land, exactly, would the average English family need? It could be 40 acres, or 60, or 120.
If decisions are taken locally, there’s little issue. But as soon as authority begins to centralise, units such as the “hide” disappear, replaced by standardised measures that are easier to record and act upon. Local knowledge becomes forgotten. The more centralisation advances – and in our modern age, it has only advanced – the greater the problem grows.
The Score is part-polemic and part-philosophical inquiry. Nguyen’s argument, in essence, is that in an effort to be objective and unprejudiced, our governments have turned metrics into targets, and built rules around them. The result: our civic life has become a superficially efficient but fundamentally amoral – not to mention inescapable – game. Nguyen himself is a philosopher, but also a lover of board games, video games, technical climbing and yo-yoing: in other words, he understands the utility of rules. But, he writes, in the desire to make life ever more frictionless and reasonable, we’ve let metrics twist our values.
Skateboarders can spend an afternoon competing to come up with the coolest tricks, and go home satisfied without ever having had to definitively settle on who actually won. In formal skateboarding competitions, though, nature of the activity changes: aesthetic elements are discarded in favour of clearer, more quantifiable goals, such as jump height and number of spins. As with sports, so with the Church: Nguyen mentions a pastor who, instructed to meet a baptism quota, finds himself ignoring the pastoral needs of the rest of his flock. And Academia, to no-one’s ggreat surprise, is far from immune. Nguyen argues that the U.S. News & World Report’s university rankings have suppressed diversity because prospective students now outsource their reasoning to the U.S. News algorithm. Do you want to fight for social justice, or make a killing on Wall Street? Either way, you’ll apply to the same law school — the one at the top of the list.
The dean and the pastor and even the professional skateboarder at least work in settings where these problems can be aired. For the rest of us, fixated on their annual targets at work, the number of likes on their social media, and the number of steps recorded on their fitness doo-dad , the external metrics work beneath their notice to replace their original values. I have a thousand friends and took ten thousand steps today — that makes me healthy and popular!
More ominous examples follow. There is, for example, a US Department of State metric called TIPS, which measures the effectiveness of policies to reduce modern slavery, and sex trafficking in particular. We know that slavery flourishes in areas of extreme poverty. But if a country reduces its ambient poverty and as a result reduces sex trafficking, the TIPS report’s metrics indicate failure – because the conviction numbers drop off. As Nguyen explains, the metric only “incentivises countries to keep sex trafficking around so that there will be plenty of traffickers to convict.”
Nguyen’s most profound insight lies in plain sight: to quote Wordsworth, “our meddling intellect misshapes the beauteous forms of things”. Games do exactly that, and offer a refreshing refuge–for a few minutes or a few hours–from the ambiguities of the real world. The gamification of real life, on the other hand, traps us all, with no prospect of ending.
So how do we escape a gamified world? Read more books! Take up the violin! Stick it to The Man wherever you can! This doesn’t sound like much of a call to revolution to me, and I’m not sure Nguyen’s heart is in the fight. Individuals may recover their individual agency, and this book will help them do so, but it’s hard to see why businesses, governments and bureaucracies of all stripes would ever abandon their self-empowering rhetoric of “objective” metrics.
Early on, Nguyen says: “I had an entire theory about games, in which clear and simple scoring systems were the magic ingredient that opened the door to a whole world of delightful play. And I had an entire theory about metrics, in which clear and simple scoring systems killed what really mattered.” This is well put, but if I had a criticism of this otherwise trenchant and entertaining book, it’s that Nguyen follows the rules of his genre so very closely. Like every “popular thinker” on the shelf, he can’t resist sharing with us his personal journey to enlightenment. If you’ve ever read The Hungry Caterpillar to children, you’ll know how much young readers delight in repetition. Nguyen, to me, is the Eric Carle of philosophy. If you’re even roughly up to speed with his topic, his steady circumspection may prove exasperating.
But don’t discard him. A book, too, is a kind of game, in which “we adopt a goal in order to get the struggle that we really want.” It’s about going the long way, a particular way, using a particular method. 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.