Wie das Führen von Punktespielen Spaß macht und das Leben noch schlimmer macht

*Gary Sernovitz for Bloomberg News*

The central line in *The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game* (Jan. 13, Penguin) appears in its opening chapter: “Games wake us up to a life of play; metrics drive us down into grueling optimization.”

The book follows C. Thi Nguyen’s first, *Games: Agency as Art*, in which the philosophy professor explored games as a form of communication. In *The Score*, Nguyen picks up that thread through chapter-alternating narratives that combine an enthusiast’s celebration of games’ inner workings (think *Dungeons & Dragons* more than basketball) with a lament for the power of metrics to flatten our lives and capture our values.

Counting, winning and quantification are through lines in both books. But the semicolon in *The Score*’s thesis marks a gap that never quite closes. The book is like a Victorian novel in which two protagonists’ stories intersect early and then move forward in parallel. Readers wonder how many more pages it will take before the lives of, say, Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth have anything to do with each other again. So, too, *The Score* ultimately leaves us with two stories mainly on their own tracks.

[Read the full review here.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-09/from-dungeons-dragons-to-wine-ratings-from-dungeons-dragons-to-wine-ratings?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc2Nzk1OTQyMiwiZXhwIjoxNzY4NTY0MjIyLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUOExGV0hLR0lGUUEwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEMzU0MUJFQjhBQUY0QkUwQkFBOUQzNkI3QjlCRjI4OCJ9.4kdJVqeXg-perTzCN7ilmUQBDsPSsDof_5BLasetJm4)