Several weeks ago, thrown off by a change in routine brought about by the holiday period, I forgot to play Wordle, ending a 200+ day streak of success.
I was bummed out, maybe worse than bummed out. I was angry at myself for failing to keep on top of things, severing my streak after I’d set the personal goal of hitting a full year of consecutive correct Wordles.
The next day, encouraged by the app to start a new streak, I successfully completed the Wordle, sighed at the thought of the mountain I had to climb to get back to where I’d been, and started wondering why I’d invested that much emotional energy in a game.
The day after that, when I opened the app I had a sudden, powerful urge to not play Wordle, an urge I listened to, an urge which has over the last few weeks become my new habit of not doing something that I had been doing every day for literally years.
(I can’t identify the precise date I started my daily practice, but in January 2022 I wrote a post for one of my personal newsletters praising the level of challenge of Wordle as good pedagogy.)
I have not missed playing Wordle at all. Neither have I missed Spelling Bee and Connections, two other New York Times games that I engaged with daily. I’d already been souring on Spelling Bee as I’d experienced an occasionally distressing time suck on trying to get to “Genius” on every single puzzle, as though that mattered. I’d been enjoying Connections for a few months as I learned the nuances of how the game worked, but that experience was also increasingly rote.
This experience was fresh in my mind when I picked up Utah University philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen’s fascinating new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Nguyen’s project is to use the lens of games and scores to illuminate human motivation and action as it relates to achievement, happiness and the very ways we move through the world.
In many ways, this is not a book for me. Nguyen writes from the perspective of a high achieving, driven, ambitious personality who found validation in good grades, publishing in highly ranked academic journals, and other clear, external markers of success, such as the difficulty rating of a particular route in his chosen activity of mountain climbing.
But also, as someone fascinated by games, a fascination which has included producing significant scholarship on the subject, Nguyen recognized when his choices would edge away from the pleasure games can provide and instead become strictures where we’ve ceded our agency and enjoyment to a structure that no longer advances our interests.
Unlike Nguyen I have been—often to my own detriment—nearly impossible to motivate by external metrics or outside validation. I could only invest myself in things I found genuinely involving, and no amount of gamifying something like housework, homework or career advancement was going to work. I have literally no ambition beyond figuring out how to do things that are interesting to me.
I have near zero grit.
I also thought I was largely immune to the behaviorist nudges of datafication and self-surveillance. Years back I ended my three-month relationship with a Fitbit when I woke up one morning thinking I felt pretty good, but then saw the sleep tracker declare many minutes of restlessness during the night, and instantly feeling exhausted.
I don’t live a metric-free lifestyle, but I thought it was all well under my control. I allow the Peloton app to know my exercise activities that are part of the platform, but I also do many other things that are not tracked or trackable. I do my best to check in with and trust my feelings and my mood to help me figure out what’s going to help me live a happy life.
So, I was a little surprised and chagrined to read The Score and see that I’d fallen into several of the pitfalls Nguyen outlines. None of us is as self-aware as we might wish, including Nguyen, who uses his own life experiences as illuminating and entertaining examples of the concepts he discusses.
One of the strengths of the book is that as Nguyen presents these concepts, after doing so, the observations sound almost commonsensical, but of course if they were so common sense, we wouldn’t fall into these pits.
My Wordle situation was a clear case of substituting external, structural values for the thing that drew many of us to Wordle in the first place, the novelty and fun of the challenge. Four years of Wordle is more than enough time to map all of the game’s nuances, and indeed, over time I’d started giving myself challenges like deliberately picking lousy first guesses in order to keep myself interested.
When that was largely exhausted, all I had left was that streak, and when I let that slip away, I realized I had nothing.
To be a game, there must be an objective that signals completion and, in a good game, that objective connects to the experience we’re trying to foster. As Nguyen observes there are many games that appear competitive with clear objectives (e.g., Twister), but where winning is not the actual object for the vast majority of players. Objectives often require metrics, the mechanism for scoring and ultimately the games themselves and how we play them can come to be defined by those metrics.
And when nongames become something like games, well, bad things can result.
Regular readers are probably waiting to tie these observations to what’s happening these days with the intersection of AI and academia, but I think most of what we can tease out really is common sense.
The mass generation of AI-automated research slop should be a scandal because it is the kind of thing which could topple the entire pillar of the enterprise, and yet the detectable levels of distress are relatively low. Ben Williamson of the University of Edinburgh found dozens of citations of a paper he did not write, but which was apparently hallucinated in some other list of sources.
These “zombie citations” are proliferating across every single discipline which, in Williamson’s words, “compromises” every single publication that cites one, given that those articles are citing something that does not exist. This is not a situation that academic scholarship and research can survive if we’re meant to attach any meaning to this research.
Obviously, the game of academic publication which values volume of productivity is driving this behavior. This was always a dumb game, including back in 2018 when I expressed my extreme animus for a proposal from a couple of big-time profs at MIT for a “Moneyball for Professors” that would use analytics to predict who would deserve tenure based on their publishing record. The productivity “rate” is the proxy for quality scholarship and good scholars. That metric had limited meaning then and it’s likely now negatively correlated with good scholarship as it may be an indicator of an AI slop merchant.
Similarly, the “game” of school that we’ve constructed for students, a transactional system where scores (grades) matter more than experiences (learning) was a problem before AI, now it has been significantly destabilized.
But as The Score shows, we humans have the capacity to change the metrics of the game so they’re meaningful, or opt out of the game if it isn’t fun or productive, or recognize that the thing we thought could be a game is not actually a game.
