The Score review: Can we battle the downsides of a rule-based world, asks a new book

The score
C. Thi Nguyen
Allan Lane

THIS time last year I wrote an article for New scientist on the ideal way to cook the classic pasta dish cacio e pepe, according to physicists. The meal’s smooth, shiny emulsion of black pepper, pecorino cheese and water is difficult to make without lumps. Ivan Di Terlizzi of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany and his colleagues cooked cacio e pepe hundreds of times until they produced a rigorous, foolproof method.

The story proved popular with readers. When I recently met with one of the scientists involved and asked him why, he replied that perhaps it was because the research seemed to find order in a “world that looks like a mess if you don’t look at it very closely with the eyes of rigor and mathematics.”

Seeing the world this way can be seductive, but it can also be dangerous, argues C. Thi Nguyen in his book The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game. Nguyen, a former food writer and now a philosophy professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, uses recipes that guarantee a perfect result as a warning.

Hidden behind their apparent authority, he writes, they are in fact making a value judgment, “an exercise of taste and preference” about how food should be. They use scientific rigor, with precise measurements and sequences, to produce reproducible results. But in doing so, they reduce the diversity of possible outcomes and the inherent human messiness that can make food so fun.

Cuisine is just one example of how the modern drive to categorize, rate, and impose order on a chaotic reality, often driven by homogenized nation-states and centralized bureaucracies, can lead to less than ideal results. Nguyen paints a portrait of a world full of them.

Take his own academic career, where he had to struggle with university and journal rankings. In philosophy, these rankings are determined by websites that rank departments based on metrics, such as the prestige of the journals in which their scholars publish, which depend, in turn, on how well they answer “fairly obscure technical questions,” he writes.

It was the opposite of the “crazy, unmanageable questions” that had drawn Nguyen to the field in the first place, but he was starting to feel the ranking system getting under his skin. He has experienced what he calls “value capture,” where measures designed to be useful end up governing us.

One way to cope with the abundance of rules-based systems today is to actively choose to play by the rules, in the form of games, says Nguyen, an avid hobbyist and game player. The book is full of his vast experience of the game, Dungeons & Dragons and from rock climbing to yoga and yo-yoing.

Nguyen convincingly shows why choosing to play by the rules of games’ artificial sandbox can help us explore, be open, and expose ourselves to the richness of life, acting as a kind of “spiritual vaccine” for the institutional grading systems we grudgingly accept in everyday life, like school exam grades. The idea that games can save us is perhaps a tall order, and it’s certainly a decidedly optimistic and personal worldview. But overall, Nguyen makes a good case for this point.

Most of the ideas in his book are not new, as Nguyen readily admits, referencing many of the philosophers and scholars who have shaped his intellectual journey. Their work includes Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall, who looks at the “geo” in geopolitics, and View as a state by James C. Scott, who examines why scientifically planned societies so often fail.

Nguyen’s playful formulation of the arguments, consistent with the central thesis of his book, however, gives an air of freshness to the debate. This is a good starting point.