Best of Design Matters: C. Thi Nguyen

Design Matters with Debbie Millman

Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen discusses his book 'The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game' with Debbie Millman on Design Matters, ex

Key takeaways

• Metrics such as grades, likes, and rankings subtly dictate what we value and how we measure success.
• Games function as 'libraries of agency,' teaching us about decision-making, self-reflection, and the consequences of our choices.

Main topics

• The influence of metrics on human behavior
• Games as models for real-life agency

Notable quotes

"Games are designed to make the beauty and the interest emerge in you, the player."

"The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game" examines how external metrics narrow our understanding of what makes life meaningful.

Conclusion

Nguyen's conversation with Millman reveals how deeply embedded systems—like

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This episode of Design Matters originally appeared in February of 2026. The fact that I say, I love this game, I want to play it. Why? Because, I don't know, it's got weird, deep social vibes. I can't say more, right? That's permissible. And you can modify games. From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. Speaker 1 (0:29) On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, a conversation with C.T. Nguyen about what games teach us about the real world and about ourselves. Games are designed to make the beauty and the interest emerge in you, the player. Speaker 1 (0:57) Support comes from WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global. Your money should be too. Some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers. Don't be fooled. Extra costs often hide in bloated exchange rates. Choose WISE. You can send, spend and receive money in over 40 currencies. Count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get WISE. Visit WISE.com. Speaker 1 (1:26) T's and C's apply. C.T. Nguyen is a philosopher who has spent much of his life examining the invisible architectures that shape human experience, the systems that tell us what matters, what counts, and how to measure whether we are succeeding. T. is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and the author of Games, Agency as Art, which has won the American Philosophical Association's Book Prize. His latest book, The Score, How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game examines how metrics, from grades to social media to professional rankings, can narrow our understanding of what makes life meaningful. T. Huynh, welcome to Design Matters. Thank you. It's good to be here. Your introduction also, like, stabbed at the heart of my being. Like, you got... Speaker 1 (2:20) The soul and everything I'm interested in exactly right. I actually didn't understand this for a long time. I had all these weird obsessions I was writing about in philosophy. I was writing about social media, and I was writing about games, and I was writing about trust structures, and I was writing about computing. People would ask me what brought it all together, and I didn't know. And actually, there's this thing called midterm review when you're a young professor. reviews all your work. And this philosopher, Brandon Cook, read everything. And he wrote this letter and he said, you might think that T's interests are zany and all over the place, but what he cares about is how the outside world, how social structures and technological structures change how we value and think. And I was like, oh my God, suddenly I make sense to myself. Speaker 1 (3:08) Oh, good. Well, I'm glad. I'm glad I've spent a lot of time with you over the last couple of weeks, whether or not you realized it. And so I love to look for those threads that knit everything together. However, you do have a somewhat surprising origin story. Is it true you were a teenage movie critic for the San Jose Mercury News? You look that up! Amazing! Yeah, that was my... Yeah. So when I was in high school, the San Jose Mercury News was looking for teenage movie critics and they held an essay contest and they got three of us. And I think what they were looking for was like it was supposed to be the teenage view. And I think they were looking for like kids who would talk about kid action movies. And because they held an essay contest, they got the three most pretentious. Speaker 1 (4:01) artsy fartsy like nothing is good but late altman weirdos and um i so i ended up yeah writing a bunch of uh weird movie reviews that i think if we went back to look at them which i haven't in years are probably unbearably pretentious um that was that was my first writing gig what what kind of films were you reviewing at that point like adult movies kids movies i was 16 or 17 but like i mean We would have fights because I, you know, I was an art kid. I always wanted to, like, review art. They did let me review, like, Krzysztof Kieślowski's Red. But they also wanted, you know, the Teenage Reviewer should review, like, Jurassic Park. So I would do that, too. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And I was much less generous back then than I would have been now. I was a much more rigid, fancy artist, better kid. I have a more expansive view now. Speaker 1 (4:55) Your parents came to the U.S. from South Vietnam. What made them decide to settle down in Southern California? I think when you're a Vietnamese war refugee, the government just sends you someplace and you end up there. I think they were going through a lot of local churches to place immigrants with families. And so there was a family that just volunteered to open their home to a refugee family. And they took in my parents. And it happened to be in San Jose. And by an enormous amount of luck, I mean, okay. There are two ways I can tell my story. One way to tell my story is I'm an immigrant's child. I grew up poor with people that had nothing. And then I fought my way to a fancy college. And I fought my way to a professor gig. Here's another way to tell my story. Speaker 1 (5:49) In Vietnam, my dad was a professor of math at the University of Saigon. And then he went and he ended up in San Jose as a math person with a math background in the late 70s. And he figured out about this thing happening called computers. And he retrained and he applied his math background. And he ended up at Intel doing coding. So he rode the Silicon Valley boom. surprise of all surprise, a math professor's kid is a philosophy professor. What wonders there are, you know? One of the, I think, wonderful things about retrospection is how we can decide which narrative means more to us. I love how your dad's job at Intel Speaker 1 (6:39) set the stage for so much of what you're doing now. I read that when you were 10 years old, he brought home a massive early computer. And rather than coding, you used it to play Colossal Cave Adventure. How did you even discover that game at that time, T? My first computer was the size of a fridge. It was blue. It was obsoleted at Intel. And so Intel would sell off old... stock to employees. And so my dad got this thing, massive thing. Floppy disks were a foot wide. And I do think it just came with a bunch of floppies that already had stuff pre-installed. And one of them was what I didn't realize at the time was the first text adventure game, like Colossal Caves. And I clumsily dealt with this text parser in a cold... Speaker 1 (7:32) which is where we kept it, to play this thing that I was fascinated by. Please tell me that you still have that computer somewhere. There's no way. That thing is gone decades ago. Do you remember what you felt the first time you realized that a machine could create an entire inhabitable world? No. I think I am probably the first gen. To not be able to remember clearly that experience because it's the way things were like the my growing up, like I think there wasn't a transition point. Some of the earliest games I can remember were computer and video. So I think I was right at the breaking point where I was one of the first people for whom that was natural. That was just the way games happened. Speaker 1 (8:24) But that experience ultimately sparked what is now a lifelong devotion to and fascination with games. What was it about gaming that so intrigued you at that point? Yeah, I don't, I mean, it wasn't just the computer stuff. I grew up playing all kinds of games. I grew up playing card games. I grew up playing, my dad taught me to play chess. When I was 12, my sister's boyfriend. taught me to play Go, which is the great Japanese, Chinese, Korean cultural equivalent of chess. And in an alternate life, I just would have played that. And I think, I don't know if there's a way to say what united them. Like actually, maybe I should say that when I started writing, I mean, they were such a natural part of my life. I only asked the question you're asking 30 years down the line when I started writing philosophically about games. They were so natural for me that Speaker 1 (9:19) It wasn't until I had to explain to an outsider's eye why the hell someone would love and spend so much time on such weird views that I was forced to produce a unifying story. Before that, I just knew that I loved games, right? They were awesome. That's what I did in my spare time. Two kinds of games kept me sane in graduate school. One kind of game is during graduate school, I discovered... with a couple of friends of mine, including my best friend in grad school, the philosopher David Eby. After school and work, we would find random European board games. This was when we were getting this huge influx of this massive explosion of really incredibly well-designed games from Germany and the rest of Europe. And we'd play these things that were so interesting, so elegant, had such interesting... Speaker 1 (10:09) design mechanics and made us interact in weird, interesting ways. Like if you grow up in kind of the American game landscape, a lot of the games are very war gamey. And then a lot of the German games coming at the time are about these intricate auctions and market manipulations. It turns out there's a history to this. The history that I understand is after World War II, Germany turned away from kind of chess and other direct war games. And there's also a long tradition of playing family games. I think, I don't even know, I don't know if it's still true, but when I was looking into it in like the 90s, there was information that the average German family played more board games together than watched TV, which is wild. So there's this huge market and this impulse to discover different kinds of interactions besides direct conflict. So a lot of the German board games were about... Speaker 1 (10:54) being in a market or an auction together and subtly manipulating the incentives to try to manipulate other people. And these were just so interesting. So I would do philosophy work and then I would play games with a bunch of people, but especially David Ebrey. And then we would sit around and talk late into the night about what made the game good. And at the time, I had no idea this would be part of my professional career. I thought this would be a waste. Nobody in philosophy studied games. Like that's not a serious topic. And I remember at some point telling somebody, Speaker 1 (11:23) I was like, you know, I love art and I would have loved to have been around as an art critic in the 50s to talk about jazz as it was happening. Wouldn't that have been great? And not really reflecting on the fact that what I was doing at the time was spending all this time playing all these new board games or coming out of this board game revolution in Europe and then going online to Board Game Geek and trying to write criticism to like. express what made this game so interesting. And it took me like, again, years to be able to tell myself, oh, what I'm trying to do is participate in being like part of the critical reception of this glorious, like explosion of interesting design of what I think is like the most exciting new art form, which is like designing play and designing interaction by designing rule systems. Speaker 1 (12:11) And yeah, it took me, I was doing it long before I realized what I was doing. I just thought I was like writing little capsule reviews of my geeky little community about this game I played last night that I loved. There was a tiny little self-descriptor in this score that I picked up on and underlined and want to ask you about. You said you were a bit of a smartass growing up. Speaker 1 (12:38) That's a lie. Bit is a lie. I was a complete smartass. So in what way? How were you smart? How did that manifest? Now that you ask the question, I realize that it manifested in a form that just became professionalized as philosophy. Like, I was as smart as because I always was looking for the fast, quick response, the quick, like, oh, that's not true what you said. Here's a quick counter example. Or like, you said this general thing, but what? Like, I would love a fast, clever, funny refutation. And what I've done is entered a profession where that is what you're supposed to do professionally. And so. Speaker 1 (13:15) I only don't self-describe as a smartass now because it's been normalized for the job I do. Your parents wanted you to be a doctor or a lawyer or a programmer and thought you were throwing away your chance at a safe and productive career, even though you were going to Harvard? I mean, the point was I went to Harvard and then afterwards I started pursuing philosophy and the rest of my family were like, what are you doing? I mean, I think in my family, there's like. In my gen, there's like dozens of computer programmers, three doctors, and then this weirdo that threw away a Harvard education. Even by the time I was an assistant professor of philosophy and had my first job, which is an incredible fight, my mom was still calling me up asking me when I would quit and get a real job and be a programmer. But a PhD is also a doctor. Doesn't count. Speaker 1 (14:10) I believe that you intended for philosophy to be a part-time backup job for what you considered your real work, which was creative writing and becoming a novelist. So what made you actually choose philosophy? Wow, you have done your homework. Yes. Yeah. No, I was originally going to be a creative writer, and I was interested in philosophy, and I... Started on that. And I mean, I had this image of like, I could teach and that would support and be, and I really did love philosophy, but I thought creative writing was the main thing. I actually have two literary novels and one science fiction novel on my desktop that I wrote during this period. Speaker 1 (14:49) And then at some point, I mean, first I realized I wasn't going to do well just because of the way the world is. I didn't have the time to do well in both. I had to choose one. And I didn't know what to do. And actually, there's a mentor, Elijah Milgram, a philosopher who shows up a few places in this book. And I gave him a draft of my literary novel. And I gave him one of the earliest half-written drafts of my first games book. And I was like, I don't know what to do with my life. And he read them and he came back and said, they're both very good. The literary novel is very well written, but it is very much like many other literary novels written by many people that want to create a writing program before. And the games book is not like anything I have seen before. And I was like, well, okay. Speaker 1 (15:36) I actually want to point out that he was rather brutal. He said that your novel, and this is a quote from you, that your novel was well-written and artful, but that it was entirely familiar and very much like other nice little literary novels he'd recently read. And you're still good friends. Yeah, no, I mean, like I said, philosophers are professional smartasses. This is the loving treatment we give each other all the time. Though I will say... Speaker 1 (16:05) I spent years in creative writing programs developing what I thought was a writerly voice that was myself. And the professional philosophy mostly said, no, that's not professional. You need to sound like a neutral. And so I learned this other voice. I have quietly referred to it as robot voice. In the novels I was writing, I now realize I kind of had to suppress my desire to be very geeky and philosophical. And the opportunity to write a public philosophy book was very freeing. Because that world is a world that really accepts both kind of intellectual interest in complex geeky stuff and narrative. And it let me pursue something that I think I had truly and had never really articulated that I wanted to pursue, which was a format in which. Speaker 1 (16:53) I could be emotional and narrative and tell stories and give arguments and give social historical analyses and cut between them and try to have them. I realized I had an aesthetic that I'd never gotten to indulge before, which was having a philosophical argument and then telling a story and having the core idea from the argument and the emotional hit of the story hit together at the same moment. And I was permitted to like chase that and refine that with my amazing editor. And yeah, so it felt. Speaker 1 (17:22) Until I'd written this new book, I'd always been kind of craving kind of creative outlets because philosophy wasn't quite creative enough. And now since I've been writing this, my craving for other creative outlets is gone. This feels like everything in me that wanted to be a novelist and everything in me that wanted to be a philosopher getting to play together for the first time. Despite your parents' desire to see you as what I guess they would consider to be a real doctor. or your desire at the time to be a novelist, you then enrolled in the graduate program in philosophy at UCLA. What made you decide to commit to philosophy at that time rather than fiction or gaming? I was still trying to write in the background, like stories. But of all the academic disciplines, philosophy had become obviously the one for me. So when I went to college, I thought my interests were either