The Score

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Home C. Thi Nguyen The Score Book cover of The Score by C. Thi Nguyen Released 13/01/2026 The Score by C. Thi Nguyen How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game Format: Hardback Ebook Audio Download Pre-order: Amazon Opens in a new tab Blackwells Opens in a new tab Bookshop.org Opens in a new tab Foyles Opens in a new tab Hive Opens in a new tab Waterstones Opens in a new tab WHSmith Opens in a new tab Scoring systems are everywhere. Underpinning our daily lives – whether it’s the fit bits on our wrists, likes on social media, and even school rankings – they have become pervasive and increasingly dangerous, warping our desires and outsourcing our values to external institutions. Instead of encouraging us to be more playful, to take pleasure in the journey of striving towards a goal, institutions, corporations and bureaucracies weaponize scoring systems to impose their own interests. No matter what, we always seem to be playing by someone else’s rules.

In The Score, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen shows us how this newly ‘gamified’ world has fundamentally captured our value systems, turning what might be moral or personal life choices into numerical data, and forcing us to prioritise what can be measured and monetized over what is truly meaningful to us.

A life-long lover of online and board games himself, Nguyen argues that we should not stop playing games but rather take a step back and become more aware of their immersive and profound power, so that we might chart a way towards more creative and joyful lives. To start playing our own game.