the fact that I say, I love this game. I want to play it. Why? Because I don't know, it's got weird, deep social vibes. I can't say more, right? That's permissible. And you can modify games.

From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Milman.

On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on.

On this episode, a conversation with C.T. Nguyen about what games teach us about the real world and about ourselves.

Games are designed to make the beauty and the interest emerge in you, the player.

C.T. Nguyen is a philosopher who has spent much of his life examining the invisible architectures that shape human experience, the systems that tell us what matters, what counts, and how to measure whether we are succeeding.

T is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and the author of Games, Agency as Art,

which has won the American Philosophical Association's book prize.

His latest book, The Score, How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game,

examines how metrics, from grades to social media to professional rankings,

can narrow our understanding of what makes life meaningful.

T. Hwin, welcome to Design Matters.

Thank you. It's good to be here. Your introduction also like stabbed at the heart of my being.

Like you got the soul and everything I'm interested in exactly right. You know, I actually didn't understand

this for a long time. Like, I had all these weird obsessions I was writing about in philosophy.

I was writing about, like, social media, and I was writing about games, and I was writing about

trust structures, and I was writing about computing. And I, people would ask me what brought

it all together, and I didn't know. And actually, like, there's this thing called midterm review when you're a young professor, someone else reviews all your work. And this philosopher, Brandon Cook, read everything. And he wrote this letter and he said, you might think that T's interests are zanian all over the place. But what he cares about is how the outside world, how social

structures and technological structures, change how we value and think. And I was like, oh, my God,

suddenly I make sense to myself. Okay. Well, I'm glad. I'm glad. I've spent a lot of time with

you over the last couple of weeks, whether or not you realized it.

And so I love to look for those threads that knit everything together.

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