everything’s a game… even baptisms
kill switch
Kaleidoscope
4.7 • 635 Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2026
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From language learning to investments to Amazon leaderboards, it seems like everything has become a game. But are these gamified things actually fun, or are we the ones being played? Dexter talks to philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who recently wrote a book about why gamification can suck the life out of things called The Score. They talk about why the same mechanism in games and gamified metrics – the scoring system – works so differently, why gamification can trick you into caring about the wrong thing, and how this phenomenon hits everything… even baptisms.
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Read:
- C. Thi Nguyen’s book, The Score: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735252/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:13.9 | You can get a high score on anything nowadays. |
| 0:17.1 | Duolingo gives you a streak. |
| 0:19.5 | Fitness trackers give you health scores. |
| 0:21.5 | And before we post that TikTok, you're probably thinking about how far you can push up that number of likes and follows. |
| 0:27.6 | It seems like everything in life has become a game. |
| 0:31.4 | The world is constantly scoring us. |
| 0:34.6 | And the scoring systems in games and the scoring systems in the world are actually |
| 0:39.4 | weirdly similar. Teen Wyn is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. He just |
| 0:46.5 | wrote a book called The Score that's about why scoring systems work for games, but how they don't |
| 0:51.4 | work when other things are gamified. So scoring system is some kind of official declaration of how we're going to count things |
| 0:57.9 | together and how we're going to count success together. |
| 1:00.4 | The weird puzzle that got me writing this whole book was that I had one story I'd built |
| 1:06.6 | over a book and some papers about how scoring systems and games made it possible to play and be free |
| 1:12.0 | and be fluid and explore. And then I had another story built in thinking about bureaucracies, |
| 1:19.5 | about how scoring systems were pernicious, drained the life out of communities, drain the joy out |
| 1:25.1 | of things. And then I was like, crap. |
| 1:28.4 | Wait, are these things opposite or is there a bigger picture? |
| 1:31.6 | You might have felt this yourself. |
| 1:33.5 | Maybe it's a gamified app that's supposed to motivate you to exercise or learn, |
| 1:37.7 | but then you end up just hyper-focusing on the numbers, |
... |
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