The Score: Games and Metrics

After finishing the Aeon article I spoke about in the last post, I moved to the book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, by C. Thi Nguyen. This time the focus is more on metrics, exploring their history, the reason they’ve become ubiquitous, how they are similar and different from the scoring systems used in games.

The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game

The book goes more deeply into the idea of metrics and how they’ve become a pillar of many people’s lives, for better or worse. He approaches it by comparing and contrasting the “score” a metric gives, versus the score you get in a game - and how the latter enriches lives and can be adopted or dropped easily, while the former can coopt the persons goals and be very hard to change.

The central question he investigates is - if the way metrics work is similar to how games are scored, why is it that games can be taken up or dropped at will, while metrics tend to change how a person approaches their life. Some examples he gives for metrics are: using weight as a proxy for health, or ascending a difficulty ladder as a proxy for progress in rock climbing.

In both cases, once you start to interrogate the metric a little bit it falls apart as a comprehensive indicator. Weight is part of health, but doesn’t necessarily reflect the day to day experience - can you do the things you want, are you uncomfortable or in pain, etc. For the rock-climbing, he relates how he realized that what he enjoyed and gave him the experience he wanted wasn’t tied to increasing difficulty - it was gaining mastery of a climb - having a smooth, meditative session, without wasted motion or rush.

But where did these sorts of metrics come from originally, what purpose do they serve and why are they ubiquitous?

He places the origin of metrics with a growing emphasis on transparency - where the actions of one group are judged by another, in particular when they’re judged by non-experts. Expert decisions require trust, because it’s impossible to fully explain without the audience either a) already being experts themselves or b) gaining expertise so they can understand all of the nuances. Accepting expert opinions comes with some risk, they might be manipulating things in their favor somehow using complexity as a cover; to combat that you need external checks, ideally by someone outside the experts sphere of influence. This is where metrics come in, by choosing a simple set of quantifiable measures, you make judgement easy for anyone - without needing special training; and it comes with the side benefit of being comparable across a wide range of circumstances.

Transparency is a worthy goal, but comes with a trade-off. Every metric is the result of a set of decisions, which are specific to a certain context and come with built-in biases - not least of which is the need for something that is easily quantifiable. Once a metric is established, it’s easy to forget the process and decisions that went into forming it and creating the sense that it’s natural order for the metric to be what it is - that it couldn’t be otherwise. Likewise, all of the things which are excluded from the metric can be lost in plain sight, along with the specific context that surrounds every implementation of the metric.

There’s much more to the book than what I can cover in a quick overview. I’ll wrap up with one of his conclusions on how to move forward toward a world where metrics haven’t completely flattened all nuance.

An Aesthetic Approach

At the end of the book, after describing game scoring and metrics, their history, and how both set (or at least shape) the goals we work toward, he offers an idea on how to square the circle - after rejecting the idea of “gamification” which has been gaining popularity.

The possible path forward is to take what he calls an Aesthetic Approach to metrics.

That means:

• approach every metric non-judgmentally
• observe the broader context in which the metric operates, for example:
  • what was the goal for the metric?
  • what isn’t being measured/tracked/noticed?
  • what decisions and priorities led to this specific thing being tracked over anything else?
  • what are the specific circumstances about your implementation that do/don’t fit it?
• don’t be beholden to others assumptions about what you observe, let the situation/process show you what’s really important/correct/sustainable/etc.

Conclusion

Overall I liked The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, and think it’s worth a read by anyone interested in the topic. He’s a philosopher, but the book doesn’t read like a philosophy treatise - it was an easy read overall. The writing style was OK, but I can’t say it really sucked me in, but I don’t think anyone is likely to hate it.

He did a good job laying out his thought process, covering the history of these ideas in a way that makes sense and flows together. I’m not 100% convinced about the comparison of metrics with games, but the general conclusions and concerns strike me as on-point.

I’ve been wrestling with reports for the Kantan Kanban program - what could be useful, but wouldn’t become a distraction over reaching the users goals. This book didn’t completely solidify things for me, but did give me a new set of tools to use when considering what reports could be useful.

Take away

Take a bit of time and consider - what metrics are you using (personally and professionally), what goals are they serving, and are they actually helping you meet those goals?

Approach these metrics, and ones you come across in the future with an Aesthetic Approach:

• view them non-judgmentally (they are not inherently right or wrong)
• observe the metric in context - what isn’t being tracked/what nuances would be lost in this metric and how important are they?
• don’t assume - let your observations of the situation/process show you what’s really important/correct/sustainable/etc. and let that guide you

You may use the same metric after this, but you will be using it with a better understanding of what purpose it serves, and what it doesn’t capture.

Next Time

I think I’ll try and cover a bit of the craziness going on around West Asia, and what steps seem prudent to take in preparation for its consequences.

Photo credit: Photo by Foto Micha on Unsplash