Play up! play up! and play the game!

 

Although no-one much reads my blog apart from a few bots, I’m eternally grateful to my younger self (OK, middle-aged, let’s face facts) for starting it up. I’ve just finished reading C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score - review further down - and can see that I’ve been Ranting about Ratings since December 2013. 

Measurement has been a frequent theme in this blog since then - here and here for example. 

And so, to The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Here’s what I thought:

----------

I first came across C. Thi Nguyen’s work a couple of years back when I read his paper on “Value Capture”. This was about the tendency in today’s world to obsess about rankings and ratings, about performance and optimisation, better and best in all areas of life. This resonated with me - the idea and danger of metrics (“indicators” from an external source) becoming goals becoming personal internal values to live by.

This book expands this line of thought - and a very good one it is, too. There is so much evidence today of people losing sight of what really matters and spending energy instead on chasing easily-measured vampiric metrics. The book is full of insight - on the distinction between goal and purpose, the psychology of games in the broadest sense, the idea of outsourcing values to an istitutional metric. And the distinction between what’s easy to measure and what really matters. 

In describing metrics, Nguyen introduces “The Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy: Rules, Scale, Parts and Control.” In work situations, we’re constantly under pressure from these four to be transparent, to be clear, to KISS. But are transparency and clarity always a good thing? Nguyen shows how transparency can undermine expertise when experts feel demand to explain and justify themselves to non-experts. We cannot understand everything, so sometimes we need to put trust in the specialists. 

“Sometimes vague language is better because it expresses the truth that things are unclear or unsettled.” 

However, although there’s so much good stuff in this book, the author is an unapologetic games enthusiast. His boisterous ebullience starts charmingly enough with anecdotes about fly-fishing, yo-yos, rock-climbing and all manner of “weird sh*t” in the way of board and online games. But after a while this started to grate and even alienate me. Everything is “glorious” or “delicious."

I have never played D&D. At university there was a group who were into that but I wanted nothing to do with it - I was too busy living my life. I do have games I enjoy, and hobbies and pastimes that I’m quite wrapped in. But I know that others aren’t fascinated by my trumpet-playing or writing children’s adventures. I’ve never understood the “thrill" of watching others playing video games, or got into esports - and I loathe being bullied by family and friends into playing games that I really don’t fancy. 

Overall, there are some brilliant ideas here, but the book is repetitive and needs editing. I found it too black and white regarding the grey, life-sucking institutionalised metrics vs. the delightful, playful, individual world of games.

----------

I gave the book 4 stars on amazon and 3 on GoodReads (just to be perverse). As I said back then, in 2013, in remarkably few words:

I have written reviews on amazon for years, for books mostly, and I still feel uneasy about giving out stars. Quite frankly, I'd much rather just write a review of the book. But the trend is going such that the stars and ratings and averages are becoming far more important than what people actually think or feel.

It's the same in marketing. There is a growing tendency for KPIs to become goals or objectives in themselves. It becomes more important to achieve a certain score on some numerical indicator than to work out what we want to do with our brand.