Rule Breaker Investing Authors Series: “Games” With C. Thi Nguyen

In this Rule Breaker Investing podcast, as part of our Authors in August series, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner welcomes back philosopher C. Thi Nguyen to explore the deeper implications of games in our lives. From ancient pastimes to modern video games, we delve into why games matter, how they reflect our agency, and what they teach us about ourselves.

With his book Games: Agency as Art, Nguyen reveals the profound ways games act as a form of artistic expression and how they can even influence the way we navigate life’s challenges. Whether you’re a dedicated gamer or simply curious about the philosophical underpinnings of play, this conversation offers insights that extend far beyond the gaming table.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool’s free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our beginner’s guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on August 28, 2024.

David Gardner: Games. They’re one of our oldest callings as humans. I think it’s fair to say they’re part of what make us human. Plato was reputed to have said you can learn more about a person in an hour of gaming than in a lifetime of conversation. Well I don’t think Plato actually ever said that, still for most of us, especially those of us who love games and game groups and gaming with friends. We can at least nod our heads a little bit in that direction. My author this week for Authors in August is return guest C. Thi Nguyen. We’ll be talking about why games matter, what they teach us about ourselves, and how to make sure you’re not being gamed. His book, Games Agency As Art. C. Thi Nguyen is in the house, only on this week’s Rule Breaker Investing.

Mary Long: It’s the Rule Breaker Investing podcast with Motley Fool Co-founder, David Gardner.

David Gardner: Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Near the end of the month as we are, I want you to know right up front, we have a bonus podcast coming this week. It’s your mailbag. We’ve done one at the end of every month for nearly 9 years now, and that streak will continue. The Rule Breaker Investing August 2024 mailbag will be published to your favorite podcast aggregator near you this Saturday. While many of us in the US will be somewhere on a Labor Day weekend, Rule Breaker Investing will be there for you, perhaps on a drive over or on a drive home. Mailbag this Saturday, just wanted to mention that up front. C. Thi Nguyen is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy. At the University of Utah, he’s a former food critic for the LA Times, and many other things besides, no doubt, for instance, he’s also a big time gamer. ONN author, which is particularly germane to this author’s in August interview where we will discuss his book, Games Agency As Art. I should mention that T joined me last year on February 15, 2023, for our first conversation together. That one was entitled from Twister to Twitter, Games and Gamification with C. Thi Nguyen. This time, now I’ve actually read his full book. The conversation we’re having will have some overlap with things we talked about a year and a half ago. A podcast I think you’ll really enjoy if you enjoy this one, but most of what we’re talking about this week will be original and more book focused. C. Thi Nguyen, great to have you back to Rule Breaker Investing.

Thi Nguyen: It is good to be back.

David Gardner: This time, I’ve actually read the book, and we’re going to talk a lot about that. I’m sure many other things besides, that’s part of the fun of having you on my podcast. Thank you so much for coming back. C. Thi, I thought to start you with the arguably lame prompt that a mediocre professor might give his students. The old I’m going to give you a prompt. Now, agree or disagree and explain. Are you ready?

Thi Nguyen: Yes.

David Gardner: Here it is. You’ll see it on bumper stickers, sometimes T shirts. Here’s the line. Whoever dies with the most toys wins.

Thi Nguyen: I can interpret that in two completely different ways, and one of which is everything I love, and the other of which is the opposite, of everything I love. There’s a way of interpreting that, what that feels to me is play as much as you can. Try on as many things as you can. Like, be why, play as many games as you can. I mean, I’m sure we’re going to talk about this more, but I think a lot of people underestimate the amount that you can travel in play. Maria Legonez, who’s one of my favorite philosophers in her paper, Playfulness World Traveling And The Loving Gaze, tries to give an account of what play is, and what she says play is is traveling between worlds. What she means by a world is she says there’s social worlds, like worlds with different rules, worlds with different values, like the world of the teacher, the world of the philosopher, the world of the investor. What it is to be playful is to travel lightly not to take any of these worlds as sacred and just skip around and sometimes be an investor, and sometimes be a teacher and sometimes we a friend, and sometimes we have bar garmand. I think there’s a way I can hear that bumper sticker as travel as much as you can, play as much as you can.

David Gardner: Love it.

Thi Nguyen: The other way I hear that motto that gives me weird, gross shivers under my skin is collect the maximum number of toys as possible. I’m sure we’re going to talk about this a lot today, but the thing that I’m often the most worried about is this shift from process orientation to outcomes orientation. What I mean is something like a lot of the times, I think the reason we play games is we adopt some goal, some point system, and we try to win, and we do it not because we actually care about winning, but we do it because we care about the process, we care about the struggle. We care about so I try to climb rocks. I think we talked about this last time, but I’m a rock climber.

As a rock climber, on the one hand, galactically, it doesn’t actually matter to me how many times I get to the top of the cliff but the way that I have what I want, which is this, concentrated pure intense experience is by trying really hard to get to the top of the cliff, but a lot of times when we play in this way, when we get ourselves in, we remember afterwards to step back. What we remember is it didn’t really matter whether we got to the top of the cliff. What matters was whether we got to the mental state of purity and intensity, but I think sometimes it’s easy to forget, so what I’m describing is this two step structure where normally in life, you’re just pursuing some goal that’s just important. In games, you take on a temporary goal in order to have a struggle that you really want. The thing that happens, I think, sometimes, is people start that way, and then they shift over and they just become maniacally obsessed with the point structure. I fly fish and one of the things, I think a lot of the reasons people fly fish is that if you go fly fishing, and you spend an entire day trying to catch trout on a river. By the way, if you haven’t fly fished. Do you fly fish?

David Gardner: I have done so at the Orvis Fly Fishing school for two days 30 years ago and never really gone back to the sport. I’m sorry to say I don’t really, but I have some facility.

Thi Nguyen: I suspect if you actually did it with some ferocity, you would come to love it, but I think one of the things about fly fishing, the thing it does is if you’re fly fishing the way I like to fly fish, you actually have to look to see signs of trout feeding on the river. You have to stare at the surface of the river until you see trout like drifting to the surface and gently eating little things like mosquitoes. What you do, what you get when you have that experience, is this like intense experience of perceptual attunement. I mean, this is where all the stupid words come in, like, deep oneness and relationship with nature but it’s really weird. You spend that much time staring at the surface of river, trying to get into the minds of trout you start to have this intense perception of ecosystems, and this weird. I think it’s very meditative. I think a lot of especially dude’s fly fish because.

David Gardner: Sure.

Thi Nguyen: They are allergic to meditation, but they need it, and fly fishing is like cover so they get to meditate. I think for a lot of us I mean, we catch and release fish. The number of fish you catch doesn’t actually matter. What matters for a lot of us is that when you try to catch fish, it creates this mental state, this high flow, high meditative, high attune mental state. It doesn’t matter what you catch, but then sometimes you meet people, and I think what’s happened is, they started they fell in love with fly fishing because of this and then they got obsessed with the numbers game to the point that destroyed the meditative aspect and destroyed this sensory aspect. I run it to people on the river who are just miserable. They’re just like, I haven’t caught enough fish today. I remember running this guy. He’s like, normally, I catch 20 or 25 fish by this time. I’ve only caught 10, and he was just totally angry, totally out of it. The day it was winter. It was snowing, there was snow. The sun and he wasn’t seeing any of it. He was just obsessed with how he hadn’t caught enough fish. I think what’s happened is this transition where at one point, you play the game to have fun or to have some meditative state and the outcome, the goal. That was just this little thing you used to get yourself into a mental state but it’s so easy to forget that and just start pursuing the goal so hard that it drains what’s good out of the game.

David Gardner: An excellent example.

Thi Nguyen: I’m worried that there’s a transition that some of us have between deeply engaging in play and then getting obsessed with this other thing. That collecting as many toys as possible. For some people, maybe that’s the most wonderful play. I’m worried that what’s happening is the joy and the richness is getting drained out as we up some number, and that number is, how many games have I played? How many games do I own? That is my double sided reaction.

David Gardner: I like people who can see it both ways. I really appreciate you pointing to, on the one hand, toy equals travel equals play for its own sake, and it’s enjoyment. Then, on the other hand, counting. Just the act of counting can be such a powerful good, and it can also be taken too far. I think it’s so helpful for us to have a well rounded view of the possibilities of life, which is what I think you speak to at a number of points in your book, Games Agency As Art. In fact, there are four types of play early on in the book, Thi that you speak to. I now know these, and I have the language for them because I’ve read the book, but maybe you can make the Intelligible for each of us. I’m going to say them up front the four phrases and ask you to give quick examples for each. There’s intrinsic achievement play and extrinsic achievement play. There’s intrinsic striving play and extrinsic striving play. C. Thi Nguyen, can you break down those four for the rest of us?

Thi Nguyen: Amazing. I’m glad you keyed into those terms. Those terms, I think are some I care the most about, and I wasn’t sure that people would like get excited about them.

David Gardner: I do. They’re big building blocks for you.

Thi Nguyen: I know, one of the things that was important to me about this book was putting names to things that we already knew. I think a lot of the times, there’s a stuff that you feel in Cately and you want to gesture at, but until you have a clear set of terms for it, it just like slips in and out of memory. I think I find the stuff a lot in games and play. Like we developed so much language for drama and art and economics and so little language for games and play. This was just my attempt to give you words. Let me go back. The first thing is to understand what a game is. There are a lot of attempts to define games, but the one that I find the most useful and that I used for my entire book is Bernard Suits definition from the grasshopper. Bernard Suits was a philosopher. He worked on games before almost anyone was willing to in the ’70s. He had this incredible book, and here’s his definition of games. There’s a short version and a long version. The short version is this. To play a game is to take on unnecessary obstacles to create the activity of struggling to overcome them. Let me say that one more time.

Playing a game is voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the activity of struggling to overcome them. One way he puts it is that a game goal is, let me see if this is too philosophy walkie for you, a game goal is constraint constituted. What this means is that the goal of the game intrinsically demands that you achieve it inside certain constraints. A simple example, crossing the finish line of a marathon. If you cross the finish line of a marathon, you have to do it obeying certain rules. You cannot take a lift or use a bicycle. If you take a lift or you used a bicycle, you technically did a thing where you moved across a certain space and time, but you didn’t cross the finish line of the race. Similarly, if you make a basket and you use a step ladder, you didn’t make a basket. You moved the ball through the net, but making the basket involves actually having to do it inside this set of constraints. What Suits thought was like, look, OK, intuitively, what we know is moving the ball through the net, using a step ladder. Taking a step ladder to the basketball court and just setting it up and putting the ball through the net. That’s stupid. That doesn’t get the point of the activity.

Whatever is important is not about the goal in and of itself, move the ball through the net. What’s important about it is doing it in a certain way. That the obstacles are intrinsic to what makes the activity valuable. That’s suit as definition of a game. When I was looking at this thing, I think the suit’s didn’t say explicitly, but the definition implied for me that there were two really different motivational states you could play during a game. I named them striving play and achievement play. Achievement play is playing because you actually care about winning and striving play is playing because you care about the process of play. The achievement player actually cares about the win, and the striving player temporarily gets themselves to care about the win in order to have and experience the process. One way you can tell, what matters is not how intense people are during the game. It’s not like I’m saying, like achievement players are serious, and striving players are just like whatever chill. Both striving players and achievement players can be super intense, but they’re intense for different reasons. The achievement players intense because they actually care about winning, the striving players intense because they like the experience of struggling intensely. The one way to tell the difference is that for the achievement player, whether they win or lost really changes how they value the activity. For the striving player they try really hard to win during the game, but after the game, it doesn’t actually matter if they won or lost.

The desire to win is something they inhabit intensely during the game, but then they just throw away after the game is through. When I talk about this stuff, some people are like, of course, striving play, that makes perfect sense. Other people are like, that nut, that makes no sense.

David Gardner: Those are the achievement players, Thi who are saying that back.

Thi Nguyen: There are a lot of people who, I think, either are achievement players or think that achievement play is the only possible play. There are two kinds of people that don’t believe in striving play, people that love playing games and are achievement players. I think a certain kind of person who hates playing games because they don’t see the point of trying to win. They dismiss game playing because they think achievement play is the only game playing, and it seems stupid to them because why would you care about winning these ludicrous little points? Here’s an example I think of what for most of us is a case of striving play. If you hang out with your friends and you decide to play charades to have fun and break the ice, and then you play charades, and you all have a great time, and everyone laughs. Then your team loses.

When the game is over, most people who are not jerks do not feel like they failed or wasted their evening because they lost your charades. Does that make sense? You play charades because you try to win and that breaks the ice and lets you have fun. But it doesn’t actually matter if you win, most people don’t care if they want or not. They understand that the value of the activity was having a collective fun and a kind of social chilling out. That’s striving play, and that’s achievement play. Possibly my single favorite part of the book was the following argument for the existence of striving play. Consider the category of stupid games. A stupid game is a game where the fun part is failing, but it’s only fun if you are genuinely trying to win for a little while. Like Twister. Twister, the fun part is when people fall over. But it’s not funny if you intentionally take a fall. It’s only funny if you’re genuinely trying as hard as you can not to fall, and then you fall. Because what’s funny is failure, and if you do it intentionally, it’s not actually funny. Twister proves that striving play is real. What you’re doing when you’re playing Twister is you’re temporarily trying to win a Twister, but what you really want is to see yourself and other people fail because it’s funny. That’s driving an achievement play. Does that make sense?

David Gardner: It’s a really great example. I really do appreciate your point about stupid games. I agree with you. I think it clearly does prove the existence of striving play. I am a striving player and I love my stupid games. Telestrations is a great stupid game. Galaxy Trucker, if you want to spend a little bit more time and complexity on your game table is another fantastic stupid game. I really appreciate that distinction between achievement play and striving play. T, what about intrinsic and extrinsic?

Thi Nguyen: Let me explain this to you how I came into it. In philosophy, there’s this distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value. Intrinsic value is something that’s valuable in and of itself, and extrinsic value is something that’s valuable because something you get out of it in the end. I think for a lot of us, happiness and family are intrinsic values. If someone’s like, why do you want to be happy? You’re like, because it’s good bro, what are you talking about? On the other hand, for a lot of us, things like money, gasoline, these are extrinsically valuable. If you just have gasoline in your house, unless you’re a certain weird, it’s not going to be that meaningful, it would be weird for me to just hug my barrels of gas in the garage (laughs) That’s useful because it gets me something else. When I started presenting this distinction between striving and achievement play, I realized people were confusing it with the notion of intrinsic and extrinsic value, that they thought that achievement players cared about things for something that followed, and striving players just cared about it for just the doing itself. That’s actually not what that distinction is about.

The difference between striving play and achievement play is just about where the value is located in game playing, is it in the activity or the victory? You can actually have intrinsic achievement play and extrinsic achievement play. Intrinsic achievement play is someone that just cares about winning period. They don’t care about anything that follows from it. They’re not doing it for money or status, they’re just doing it because they love winning, period. The extrinsic achievement player is someone that wants to win because of what follows from victory. If someone is playing poker just for money, they need to win, but they don’t just care about winning, they care about the money that follows from winning. If someone is in the Olympics for glory or to become famous, then they want to win because of what will follow from winning. You can see the same for striving play. You can have intrinsic and extrinsic striving play. So the intrinsic striving player just plays to be playing, it’s just valuable for them to be doing the thing, exercising their skills is valuable, the experience of doing it is just valuable in itself. But you can also have extrinsic striving play, someone that engages in it for what follows from the process. I think those examples are just like people that exercise for their health. If you run a marathon for your health, it’s extrinsic because you’re not doing it for the pure love of marathon.

David Gardner: That’s right.

Thi Nguyen: You’re doing it because you’re getting health gains. But the crucial thing is, the reason they’re striving players is you can get the goods without winning. If I ran a marathon, I would come and last and get the health benefits because the health benefits come from the process and not. Here’s another way to put it. One of the reasons I rock climb is it actually gets my brain to shut up. I have way too many anxieties and thoughts up here. Rock climbing is one of the things that’s intense enough and convenient enough that I can just do it after a day of work, and it’ll actually get my brain to shut up and get me to rest. In that case, I am an extrinsic striving player.

David Gardner: That is beautifully broken down by the man who basically made these distinctions inspired by Bernard Suzy’s work. I think it’s amazing that Suzy you’re crediting him, you know him, you know his work. I don’t, I just know it through you. With being a visionary, a genius, an early player here in the field of thinking about the value of games, games as art games, philosophy games, and yet the 1970s. I mean, games have been played for thousands of years, you’d think that there would have been more examination at an academic, or cultural, for centuries you’d think that we would all have these understandings down in some of our language. Yet we really didn’t. We’ve been playing games for so long, but not really thinking about what we’re doing. Is that fair?

Thi Nguyen: Yeah. It’ll depend on who you’re talking to, child psychologists have thought a lot about games and play, and anthropologists often think about games and play. But if you look at the history of the philosophy of art, here’s a related claim, you will see hundreds and thousands of books about drama and tragedy and the serious stuff. You’ll find like ten books on humor. There’s something about laughter, there’s something about play that strikes people as unserious and therefore unimportant. What I’m giving you is a lot of technical language. There’s actually something really meaningful in the unserious. In fact, the unserious might be the most meaningful. Actually, I’m really curious what you got out of this intrinsic, extrinsic achievement striving play distinction because it seems to have meant something to you. That makes me really happy, but I want to know what it is.

David Gardner: Thank you, T. I would say, for me, you helped explain me to myself, especially that concept of striving play in contrast to achievement play. By the way, I think you’d agree people can be both, you can have both motivations, or maybe you’re not just a pure one or pure the other. But most of us when we think about games, especially people who think about why they don’t like games, they were probably raised or influenced by an achievement oriented person who beat them silly at games, maybe an older sibling as a kid or a mean uncle. They end up saying, I don’t like games, I don’t play games as an adult because they were dominated by achievement oriented people. Now, I am somebody who absolutely love games. I’ve taught so many games to people, and I routinely teach someone, and then they beat me at the game that I just taught them. That hurt, initially when it started happening, especially when it was my 12-year-old son. But at the same time, I started to realize, I actually don’t mind that that much, I don’t think winning is that important for me. Now I go in it to win, but I recognize your distinction about striving play and where suits was headed there. I think that’s really helpful for a lot of us to hear and understand. There are many things I learned from your book, but that was early on a big one.

Thi Nguyen: I just realized since you’re an economics thinker, I can tell you maybe something interesting about how I came to make the distinction so clearly. It was because there was a set of arguments I was looking at that were saying that games were immoral or a waste of time because they were zero sum activities (laughs) Because if it was valuable to win and bad to lose, and two people played, there was only one winner and one loser, so you didn’t create any value. In fact, the argument went, if you have five people playing a board game, there’s only one winner and four losers, and it’s actually just, design sense so it’s just terrible. I was like, this makes no sense, and so here’s the explanation. If everyone’s an achievement player, and one person wins and one person loses, then one person got something good and one person got something terrible. But if everyone’s a striving player, the interest in winning is just temporary. What really matters is an interesting struggle, and it’s possible for both the winner and the loser to have interesting struggles. It’s not a zero sum activity at all if you’re a striving player.

David Gardner: I so appreciate that point. In fact, let’s talk briefly about chess. T, this is not a game I enjoy that much or have played that much, I love so many games. Chess is not really one of them for me. But I know that you have, for a long time, been a chess player. Two things that I think about when I think about a chess player, and specifically you. The first is that it’s kind of a gift to each other to play chess with each other. If you agree on striving play, and you agree on the benefits of thinking hard, being focused, getting away from the world briefly, we really are cooperatively helping each other in this otherwise zero sum brutal abstract timeless game. Thought number one is, we’re actually helping each other, even though we look like opponents. But thought number 2, I know chess has helped you with philosophy. You alluded to this a little bit in your book games (inaudible) Thi, has chess helped you as a professional, and do you agree with the whole we’re cooping even though we’re competing.

Thi Nguyen: The first article I ever wrote in games was called Competition is Cooperation, and it was about the zero sumness. I’m not sure if you’re quietly looting or we’re just on psychic vibes.

David Gardner: No, I had no idea of that.

Thi Nguyen: Really? Awesome. That’s the thought, right? It’s funky because in games, if you’re both striving players, on the surface, it looks like you’re competing, but when you actually do it, if you think about the process by which we play a game, you can see this weird multilayered structure. I think some people who are mean about it, make other people play games that only the first person enjoys. But most of us do this other thing. We’re like, let’s pick a game that both of us will enjoy. We try to find one, we’re about the same skill level that maybe will suit us in different ways. For example, I’m very good at social manipulation and deceit games, and my spouse is incredibly good at geometrical manipulation games, and we’ll often, zero in on the games that give you a little bit of both so that each of us. We’re doing this thing where we know we will have a really good time together if we can find the right game to balance out our skills and interests, and then we play it. Then during the game, you just go all in. This experience is the thing that was the most interesting for me to think about games. You go all in, you attack each other, and in fact, you know that the fun will happen if you go all in. You also know the game design makes going in all in safe. If we didn’t have a game design at all, and we just be like attack each other.

You might, I don’t know, grab sticks or say cruel things about each other’s like psyches. But a game like basketball or chess safes it, it takes all out aggression and it turns it into something that hopefully the other person will find interesting. Remember, Suzy’s claim, games are unnecessary obstacles to create the struggle. What I think a lot of games do is they kind of take hostile impulses, and they channel them into really lovely experiences, they’re transformers of aggression. When we engage in these games, we are literally cooperating with each other. This is not guaranteed, you can be a complete jerk in the game and try to just make people unhappy. But it is possible that you can go into a game is a cooperative attempt to have this beautiful event together where you make a gorgeous game together. Then you do it by attacking each other. I play chess, I also play golf, one of the most beautiful games ever. There’s this guy that taught me, this mentor. I had Joe at the LA Golf Club, who is just this wonderful saint of play. You just to remember one of these times, golf is a game with handicaps, so novices can play against much better people. I had this big handicap, so we were playing, and I was like, we were having this incredible game, we were like, we could definitely tell we were in each other’s minds, and at one moment, I made a move, and I could see the life drain out of him, and he just sighed, and I was just like, what? He was like, we were having such a good game. (laughs) I turned out, I screwed up. I’d lost. What he showed me was his mindset was not, oh boy, I get to win, his mindset was, oh, we’re having this gorgeous, challenging game. I made a mistake, and his victory was obvious, and the game stopped being beautiful.

There’s a story. One of my favorite stories about G is that one of the great historical medieval Japanese go players, was two levels beyond everyone else in the world. He always had to play games and give other people handicaps, and he never had a gorgeous, even game. One day he met this young 10-year-old prodigy, and he got so excited, then he spent much of his life training up this young prodigy to be good enough so they could actually have an even game. For once in his life, he could have an actual full challenging struggle. I think you can tell, this is not a person who would ever undercut his proteges training to be able to win. This is a person that wants to have that even game, wants to have a perfect delicious struggle, and doesn’t care if they win. In fact, might be happy if they trained their protege to beat them.

David Gardner: What a telling story. I love the story of Go Joe. Let’s break away from the book briefly. We’re still there, but tenuously connected with this next question, Tuan. Well, help me think about an example. What is something that actually is a game that most people don’t realize is a game. Then other side of the coin, Tuan, what is something that is not a game that most people think of as a game?

Thi Nguyen: Awesome question. In suits is definition, games are voluntary obstacles and constraints that you do to have a particular kind of struggle. Any case where you take on an extra constraint. Suits often talks about games as going the long way. You have a direct route. There’s a most efficient route, you could go home on the freeway, but sometimes you take the long way on purpose. You add constraints because the long way is interesting or cool. There are a lot of things we do like this. I think for a lot of us, cooking by hand is like this. You could get something more quickly and often deliciously. A lot of frozen food is not as good, but there’s a really good Italian place near me that hand-makes ravioli and freezes them, fresh made. I will tell you, those ravioli are definitely better than what I can make. But I also sometimes make ravioli, and the explanation is that the process does it make sense? The process of stuffing and rolling that’s the thing I want. There’s a classical game case.

There’s an easier, more efficient way, and trust me. It’s not me making ravioli by hand is cheaper. Than buying a bag of frozen ravioli from the good Italian store next door. There’s a faster way to get there. But I go the slow way. I take on a constraint, which forces me in a particular activity because I love the activity. I think a lot of there are a lot of things like this. I think a lot of what people dismiss as Hips artisanal BS. For example, I know people that really prefer hand grinding their coffee in the morning instead of popping it into an electric machine. If you talk to them at why, they might make up something about how it’ll be a little bit better. But I think actually, what’s important is they’re adding a constraint that adds a ritualistic element to their lives. Actually, maybe you like this. This is my theory about vinyl. My theory about vinyl, and why people get into vinyl is not that it actually sounds better, but that most music listening, I’m holding up my phone now. It’s so friction less that you don’t have to pay that much attention to it. If you add the constraint of I’d listen on vinyl, which makes everything harder. You actually have to go through this procedure where you pick it out, and you clean it, and you put it down carefully. I think this tunes you in more, and it becomes more of a I’ve noticed, for example, that when my spouse and I listen on streaming, we’re much more likely to ignore it and background it. If we listen to a piece of vinyl, we’re much more likely to just sit and listen. I don’t think that’s audio quality. I think we’ve created a ritual that tunes us in by taking on constraints.

David Gardner: Those are some great examples of something that actually is a game by suits is in your definition. Most people don’t think of it that way, or realize that. I really appreciate those, and I will take those forward. I don’t actually make my own coffee in the morning, but I totally get how cooking, in particular, really jumps out as a game. The other side of that coin, what is something that is not a game, but people think it’s a game.

Thi Nguyen: The gamification of work in education. Sorry.

David Gardner: There’s no sorry. That’s really fun.

Thi Nguyen: I’ve got a chip on my shoulder, if you can tell. A lot of people think that those are games because they have the apparatus, people add levels and point structures and experience points to, public schooling or to working in Amazon Warehouse. I read there’s this incredibly a depressing account about how Disney gamified its hospitality workforce. They were one of the early people. So at some of the Disney hotels for people that are doing the cleaning, they created, leader boards and live updated, who was folding more clothes and who was, getting rooms clean faster. What happened was, workplace injuries went up. People reported getting so intensely into it that they didn’t pee and platter damage. Everyone hated it and called it the electronic whip. This has a lot of the externalities of a game, but remember that the center of a game is that it’s voluntary. A game is something that you enter in to create the struggle by taking on unnecessary obstacles. If someone imposes obstacles and game structure on you, if someone says, you have to go to school, in order to get a degree, and then you have to do this stuff. That is not a game.

That’s actually, I think a perversion of the spirit of games, using the skin of games in order to do the opposite of play. Remember, play is about lightness and traveling and voluntarily entering into alternate experiences. Striving play in particular. Intrinsic striving play is about sculpting and picking your experiences because you love them. For me, someone using the apparatus and the look and feel and technology of game design, and imposing it on people voluntarily and not giving people a choice about the kind of activity is a perversion of play.

David Gardner: I enjoyed reading that sad Disney example in your book, and it is there in games Agency as art. I was curious. Do you know how that ended up playing out? Obviously, I think we’re talking about something Disney no longer does. Has there been any case studies or stories about how it ended?

Thi Nguyen: I haven’t followed up on that particular gamification instead, I’ve been tracking the rise of gamifications across the workplace and education. In general, most people seem to treat it as an effective tool and are just willing to use it relentlessly. There’s a superficial gamification where you add, levels and achievements and leader boards to things, but I think there’s a deeper gamification that’s been going on for much longer, and that gamification is the existence of clear ranking systems. I think one of the actual best studies of the emotional effect of a gamification is this book engines of anxiety by Wendy Esplin and Michael Sauder. Have you read this? I referenced this briefly in the book.

David Gardner: I have not read it.

Thi Nguyen: If there are two books, I can get you to read. I want you to read, theater reporters trust in numbers, which is a social history of how we came to over trust quantified information even when it’s not appropriate or even when the metric is clearly bad. Engines and anxiety is a study of how, the US News and World Report Law School rankings completely transformed legal culture. One of their main messages is that drove value plurality out of legal culture by imposing a single clear ranking system where before people had a diversity of valuational systems. One of the things you learned is that for example, They talk about how before the news US News and World Report law school rankings. Different law schools seem to genuinely pursue genuinely different missions. Some were interested in corporate law, some were interested in research. Some were interested in outreach to local underserved communities. Some were interested in promoting more ethical work. But if once the US News and World Report comes in and all the incentives get tied to doing well on that ranking, that ranking doesn’t measure most of that stuff. That ranking doesn’t measure, the ethical consciousness you help teacher. It doesn’t measure local outreach. It measures some very mostly measures incoming class GPA, incoming class LSAT, rejection rates, and outgoing class employment rates. What the book really shows you is that it actually drives everyone in the space toward pursuing a set of values that they didn’t initially share, and it narrows the value of space.

David Gardner: A daunting modern day example. I know a lot of this happens, T, because some combination of, we want to impose something that allows us to look across a huge data set and start to rate and rank. We want to be able to say grade point average, and what was yours and what was hers, and that way we can compare you. We want to be able to rank these things, but the oversimplification of what we’re doing. On the one hand, is bad, but even worse, as you point out in your book, is when the student themselves or the system themselves are all just trying to max GPA, and therefore losing all of the other benefits of education. When you and I talked a year and a half ago, I asked you a buy seller hold question about ChatGPT. You said, Well, on the one hand I have to write a lot of stuff as an academic that’s bureaucratic, and man, can it be helpful. But on the other hand, I as a teacher, you said a year and a half ago. One of my greatest joys is getting students to articulate in their own words their thoughts. If it looks great but was written by Machine, why are we doing this?

Thi Nguyen: I can put it a little clearer now, maybe because I’ve been thinking about this a lot more. One way to put it in the language we’ve been given is what really matters is whether you care about outcomes or processes. A lot of the times people make the mistake of thinking that what matters is just the outcome. But in a lot of times what we actually care about is that trying for some outcome leads you through some rich process. ChatGPT gets you the outcome shorn of the process. If what you wanted was just a piece of writing that was clear maybe he didn’t give it to you. If you what you wanted was to be engaged in a process of independent thought and composition, then ChatGPT will skip that. I’m sure we didn’t talk about this last time. Did I tell you about the philosopher of technology Borgman?

David Gardner: No.

Thi Nguyen: Borgman incredibly interesting philosopher wrote a lot in the 80s about what technology was. He said that technology, he said was, something that promoted what he called the device paradigm. The device paradigm was something that skipped you to the output and skipped over the rich and complex, skilled and social activity that was normally traditionally the process. Here’s one example he says. He says, frozen food is a classic device. Before, without frozen food, you’d have this complex process where you have to learn to cook, if you can make cooking decisions, and you can tailor the food to yourself, but also, you’re engaged in this process of smelling and looking and deciding and often interacting with other people and making something together, and frozen food skips you all that. It just gets you the food. Again, if what you just wanted was the outcome, awesome. If the outcome was there to inspire a rich and interesting human activity. If what was actually important was that people think for themselves and write for themselves and come to decisions about themselves and process information for themselves, then you actually skipped over the important part.

David Gardner: Very well said. Changing gears just slightly you’re quoting, and you just have done a course throughout this interview, and respectfully so, you’re quoting many peers, many academic peers, sometimes across a couple of generations, not just people living today. As I read your views of what they’ve said, in the past a recurring number of times, I thought, do these academic commentators about games actually really know games, though? As in, do they play games? Because part of my trust in your work is your facil with Spy fall and El Grande and a Galaxy Trucker and 1830 and root. I kept thinking of all of your many commentating peers. Have you ever actually gotten to play tabletop board games with any of your peers?

Thi Nguyen: So many. Good. There’s a few things to talk about. If you’re talking about the current generation, my peers only play games. We got through COVID with online tabletop role playing sessions with each other. The current generation, I think of people that think about games. The world of games is very rich and available. For the earlier generation the landscape of games is really different, but maybe also not that different depending on what you can as a game. Bernard Suits is writing in the 70s. The 70s are, video games are just getting invented. He he never probably never touched one or heard of one, the European board gaming revolution that we’ve gone through that gives us all these incredible games like Galaxy Trucker. That was a distant future twinkle. What Tuts did have was access to the world of sports and traditional games. I think if you see things that broadly, if you think of all of these things as structured activities where you take on constraints and goals and they reshape how you do things, Suits was soaked in it. He was soaked in the life of his own examples to me suggest that he likes card games and traditional games like chess.

Sports but when you see a lot of this older material, you see a lot more focus on sports, and I think that’s because there’s been a cultural shift, and there’s a lot of things that are different between video games and sports, but if you look for me, the root of creating an interesting activity by shaping constraints, there’s this one great ecosystem of design to play.

David Gardner: That is a really good point and it does beg the question and I don’t know the answer to this question, which is why I like to ask you? Why are there so many games today? I certainly grew up in a world where there weren’t that many games, there were parlor games and some card games and things and then Dungeons and Dragons. I bought an early box copy as a 10-year-old kid and it started and then video games, and then mobile phone games and social games and party games and stupid games and unbelievably deep, wonderful games like Ark Nova. I’m not going to say thousands. I’m going to say probably millions of games no, that is an unprecedented situation in human history.

Thi Nguyen: I’m not totally sure it’s unprecedented. I suspect there’s an earlier era where you can find millions and millions of variations of card games, for example, but they never got transmitted. In a lot of my research, I’ll find these things of people charting. In an earlier generation, what this looks like is people house ruling Poker. If you look at books about the history of Poker, what you’ll find is untold tens of thousands of variations of poker. I do think something happened though. Historically, a lot of the stuff boil, a lot of the board gaming Revolution boiled out of Germany in the ’80s and ’90s’, and there’s a super interesting history about it. You might be interested in this, so a few things happened. One, apparently, Germany collectively turned against chess and other war simulations after World War II and tried to move away from war simulations and around the time, there was this American Sid Sackson, who was developing a lot of economic bidding games, so roots of the board gaming revolution got laid by people in the ’60s and there’s another important difference between Germany and America is from what I understand historically, I don’t know if it’s still true, but at least like 10 years ago, the average German family played more board games together than watch television together, which is just this incredibly rich cultural ground to grow all this stuff.

But I think I’ve got a bigger answer for you. Why are there so many games? I think the answer is what makes games good is that there’s so many of them, because what games give you is choice of activities. I can say this more clearly now because I’ve been working on a new book about this stuff, but one way to put it is that, when you’re engaged in practical activities, actually trying to do stuff in the world, there’s only one world, and your goals are pretty fixed, and if you want something like money or medicine, there’s not a lot of ways to get it, the world pushes you. There’s a pretty limited set of jobs, they have to fit your skills. The world is not that fluid, and games are the place where you have the freedom to jump around between different goals and different skills to find the action that we love.

David Gardner: Even in your book, Games Agency is art, you were starting to say things like, I think I’m going to work on this sum in future and I remember when we talked a year and a half ago, you talked about what your next book might be. Let me just quote briefly. You were talking in your book about, “I plan to explore the broader category of the process arts in future work.” Now, that may or may not be your next thing and for those who haven’t read the book and don’t know the jargon, process art versus object art is something that many of us may not have an immediate understanding of but I know process. We’ve spoken to that, and process art is part of your fascination. No value capture is something a real concern of yours, Thi, what is your next work?

Thi Nguyen: Since I wrote the games book, the book ended with a brief discussion of this concept I’m calling value capture, which is when metrics show up and suddenly they change your values, and they swamp what you care about. In between, what I’ve been doing is doing this huge dive on the nature of data, and especially I’ve had this funky suspicion that there’s some things it’s easy to gather data on like mortality rates, and there’s some things that it’s really hard to measure like values or cares, and that something funky happens when you try to get a metric for something as complicated as well being or happiness. I’ve been trying to understand this and I think I have the beginnings of a picture, and I’m writing a popular book right now that’s half about the game stuff and the other half all new stuff about what happens when we try to apply metrics and database approaches to these big rich human values about art and play and joy and happiness. The book is currently the working title is the score games metrics and the meaning of life.

Here’s a teaser for you. I was writing the stuff about games and my love of games, I was writing the stuff about metrics. By the way, if you’re interested, a little bit of the stuff is out, there’s a paper I have called Transparency Surveillance, about the downside of transparency and accountability and its demand for quick public accessibility. There’s another short piece I wrote called the Limits of Data, which is summarizing a lot of the work that’s gone before, about the way that database approaches are right about what they’re write about, but systematically filter other things out of our vision. I was writing about all this stuff and writing about value capture, and I had this theory about what these clear, simple metrics do to us, and I looked at the theory, and I was like, but if I’m right, then games should never be fun. Here’s the main question to my new book. There are these clear, simple things around us, they’re called mechanical scoring systems. They just tell you exactly how things are scored, and they get everyone to agree on how things are scored. My experience has been in large scale institutional life, they often suck the joy out of everything but with games, there’s the seat of fun and joy. What’s the difference? I’ve just spent two years trying to figure it out.

David Gardner: That’s phenomenal. You and I talked a year and a half ago, and I remember asking you, what is fun? At the time, you said, “I have no idea. I’ve tried to find fun for a decade and failed.” Well, a word like fun, which really is just too loose and has no tight agreed upon definition, and is even hard to understand what it means. Nevertheless, I feel like this conversation has been fun, reading your books has been fun. I will say, to me anyway, life is fun. We should be trying to make it even more fun and sometimes when I think about life and apply some of your terms, T, and I wonder what you think of this, I wonder, is all of life a striving game?

Thi Nguyen: Is a great question. What I want to say is not yet. Suits actually at the end of the grasshopper has this great argument where he says, “Imagine utopia, where you solved all your practical problems, what would you do with your time if all the practical problems were solved? You would play games or you would be bored?” If games are you what you do in utopia, they must be the meaning of life.

David Gardner: I love it.

Thi Nguyen: I think his way of putting it is, if you actually managed to get rid of all the practical problems, if there wasn’t medical problems, if there wasn’t starvation, if there wasn’t inequity, and you had enough financial support to do what you liked, then life could be all striving play, that’s a big if. For Suits, it’s not a game, for me it’s not striving play. If the world is forcing you to do it in order to survive, in order to get medicine, in order to keep a roof over your head. I think not yet, but I buy Suits argument is basically if your practical problems are solved, then you just get to choose the activity that’s satisfying to you and choose your obstacles, and that is literally just a game. That’s the future.

David Gardner: Well, that definitely preaches to this choir. Thank you, T. Let’s close it out with the game, you played this with me last time, let’s play it again. You’re a gamer, I am too. The game is buy sell or hold. This is how we close each of our authors in August interviews. I’ll be asking you about things that are not stocks, but if they were stocks, would you be buying, you’re a fan, selling, you’re not a fan or holding? Come see come and of course, a couple of sentences as to why. C. Thi Nguyen, are you ready?

Thi Nguyen: Yes.

David Gardner: All right. Let’s start with the rise of the six-hour workday and or not working from Offices. Buy sell, or hold?

Thi Nguyen: Buy. One of the strangest things you find reading about technology is as we get more and more technologies that make things easier and make things more convenient, we could just do less. We could spend more of our life playing and less of our time working but instead, for some reason, the work week has expanded and I think the galactic worry is that we are chasing optimum targets of productivity and profits all the way up and neglecting the fact that, maybe the point is you don’t need to do this stuff as much, but this is related to the last comment that maybe utopia is a utopia play.

David Gardner: Love it. Next one up. Buy, sell or hold, Dungeons and Dragons?

Thi Nguyen: Do you mean to be asking about Dungeons and Dragons in particular or about tabletop role playing in general?

David Gardner: Let’s go. I’m going to ask you both, because why not? Both end.

Thi Nguyen: Okay. Tabletop role playing by Dungeons and Dragon sell maybe hold. I’m a gamer from a long time ago, I loved Dungeons and Dragons when I was a kid, but I had certain problems with it, and there’s this world of Indie tabletop role playing designers who basically diagnosed my problems with Dungeons and Dragons and invented new games. Incredible games. We’re talking about things like apocalypse world. We’re talking about games like blades in the dark and these games are laser oriented toward building good narrative. For example, here’s one of my favorite rules in Lady Blackbird. When you run out of stamina and health points, you get them all back by having a refreshment scene with another player character where you invent shared backstory. When you get rules like that, you just get these like, bounties of creativity and the people who came up with this stuff, their criticisms of Dungeons and Dragons the original game are something like Dungeons and Dragons is a rule set that is finely tuned toward killing and shopping and less so toward narrative play. One thing I do know is that the new Dungeons and Dragons rule sets have adopted a lot of the devices have been invented by the Indie folks but still, once I played the Indie stuff, that everyone is clear that they came out of Dungeons and Dragons, once I’ve seen the new stuff, I can’t go back to Dungeons and Dragons. The amount of creativity in the new scene is amazing.

David Gardner: Here you on all counts. To more for you, Thi. Corporate sponsorship of academic research, if it were a stock, buy sell, or hold?

Thi Nguyen: Sell so fast. Besides everything else, there’s so much meta research about the degree to which corporate sponsorship tends to bias research, I’ll tell you about one, you’ll like the study, so Jacob Stegenga, who’s a philosopher of medicine, in his book about philosophy of medicine, there are a lot of meta studies about whether pharmaceutical particular pharmaceutical works or not, and there’s often conflict between them and so there’s a meta study trying to predict whether meta studies would be for against certain pharmaceuticals? It turns out by far, the best predictor is corporate sponsorship. Corporate sponsored meta studies tend to come down heavily in favor of the pharmaceuticals, and non corporate sponsored meta studies tend to show much less efficacy. Skepticism.

David Gardner: All right. Last one, for you at Thi. How about the revival of classic arcade games, buy, sell, or hold?

Thi Nguyen: I’m going to say buy. I think a lot of people are reaching back toward classic arcade games and retro revivals in part for a certain purity of difficulty and skill. I think there’s this movement toward thinking like new school games have a lot of hand holding and structure, and a lot of the older school games are just like these raw pure environments of either exploration in a lot of the old school computer games or raw platforming skill in a lot of the arcade games. I think people want that.

David Gardner: I hear you. You mentioned vinyl earlier nostalgia is always going to run through, I think every culture, but what we look back on nostalgically says a lot about us. I have so many fond memories of inserting quarters one after another in machines to give myself video game joy as a kid. Fortunately, things have gotten a lot easier these days, but I think that’s a fun one to end on and I was going to go with gameified employee training programs, but I’m pretty sure we know what you would think of those for the most part. C. Thi Nguyen, it has been a delight catching up one rule breaker to another here in 2024. I’m really fascinated by your next book. Is it going to be coming out in 2025?

Thi Nguyen: I think so if I get my stuff together.

David Gardner: All right. Well, in that case, we should end this podcast right now and let you get back to work. You’ve been very generous with your time, so enjoy your work. Fool on, my friend.

Thi Nguyen: See you.

David Gardner: All right. Thanks again to C. Thi. That concludes Authors in August. Thank you again to John Mackey, to David Eagleman, and to C. Thi Nguyen. Also, thanks to all my Foolish poets who made the first week for this podcast this month sing. Just a reminder your August 2024 mailbag is in production right now, it will be coming out this Saturday as a special bonus. Of course, it’s the end of the month we have to have your mailbag. In the meantime Fool on.

Mary Long: As always, people on this program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don’t buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Learn more about Rule Breaker investing at rbi.fool.com.