From Twister to Twitter: Games and Gamification With C. Thi Nguyen

Philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen is here to deepen our understanding of games and raise a few flags about the gamification of everyday life.

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This video was recorded on February 15, 2023.

David Gardner: Twenty seven, that is the consecutive number of weeks for this podcast that it turns out I have used the word game. At some point in the podcast one or more times. Rule Breaker Investing spends a third of its time on investing, a third of its time on business and a third of its time on live investing, business and life. Yet my transcriber shows that for 27 consecutive weeks I have somehow managed unwittingly, no less to stick in the word game at least once, dating back to July 27th of last year. July 27 when somehow I did not use the word game in a podcast titled somewhat ironically, July Mailbag, The Thrill of Victory and The Agony of Defeat.

Speaking of thrills, I am thrilled to connect this week with gamer, philosopher and author, C. Thi Nguyen . Most of all Thi is going to help you and me get, I think, above the game for awhile this week. See the game outside the games that we play of investing, business and life. Help you and me think through for a bit what games are? Why we play games? Why games are so valuable and sometimes destructive and at a meta game level, whether we're in some games that we don't even realize we're playing as individuals and as a society. From Catan to Twitter, lets range wide and let's use the word game for at least a 28th consecutive week only

I'm more than usually excited for our podcast this week. In fact, I'm going to call this one out right now, like Babe Ruth, mythically pointing to the fence before the next pitch comes in. If I do my job right this week, I think this will be a home run and maybe the year's first bestie. My guest this week C. Thi Nguyen, in his own words, I'm C. Thi Nguyen. This is from his website. I used to be a food writer, now I'm a philosophy professor at the University of Utah. I write about trust, art, games and communities. I'm interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value. My first book is Games, Agency as Art. It was awarded the American Philosophical Associations 2021 book prize.

It's about how games are the art formed at work in the medium of agency. A game designer doesn't just create a world, they create who we are in that world. I'll call it right there. That is his personal intro taken from Thi's Website, objectionable.net. Before I welcome my fascinating guest and likely new best friend, a disclaimer, I have not yet read his book. Games Agencies Art. I certainly expect to do so. I have it on my kindle, but my Foolish listeners should know ahead of time that our talk is not informed by a real working knowledge of his work, our talk is happening now simply because I'm so passionate and excited about this topic. I know you're going to enjoy learning from him as much as I will. With all that said, C. Thi Nguyen welcome to Rule Breaker Investing.

Thi Nguyen: Hello everyone.

David Gardner: First question right off the top, your website objectionable.net, how much did you need to pay for that URL? Who are you bidding against?

Thi Nguyen: No one had it. Everything else I wanted was like $20,000 and then no one was sitting on that. It was like, it's me. That's what I get.

David Gardner: Now, you're lazy interviewer will also disclaim. I haven't actually checked what's it, objectionable.com. I'm not sure I should. Should I check that?

Thi Nguyen: I think it's someone squatting on it asking for $10,000.

David Gardner: Got it. Thi it's a delight to have you and I thought we should start maybe by sharing a few definitions of game. In fact, I've got a couple to share with you. I'd love just to get your take on how right or wrong the definition is. Then of course, i think you might provide your own. You ready to play this game?

Thi Nguyen: Yeah.

David Gardner: Great. This one's from the OED, I believe. Game, a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one, played according to rules and decide to buy skill, strength or luck. What do you think of that definition?

Thi Nguyen: Gross. First of all, sorry, it makes reference to terms. Philosophers trying to take something and give it definition of it in terms of things that are more explicable. If you define a game in terms of sport, then you have defined sport. Most of the good definitions of sport return you to games, so you're just playing a little lovely cycle.

David Gardner: That's the OED. Let's move, I don't know if it's going to get any better, to Merriam-Webster. Thi, here it is. A physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other.

Thi Nguyen: Problem with that definition is it's too big. Two countries vying it out in the UN court also counts as a game under that definition, because it's a rule set and people are interacting. In philosophy whenever I do this with interclasses, there is the too big, too little problem. I think that definition, if I heard it right, would also capture courtroom trials.

David Gardner: Yeah, probably not games. Maybe gamified by some, but certainly not games. It also occurs to me is that read through that one again. There are so many wonderful co-op games today. This concept that you're in direct opposition to the person playing the game with you is definitely limited. Let me give you one more before opening it up and giving you the floor. You're probably going to recognize this one. A lot of people won't know the name Bernard Suits and I have not read his work. We'll talk about that maybe in a bit. But here is Bernard Suits definition of a game, this is from his book, The Grasshopper. "The voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs using only means permitted by rules."

Thi Nguyen: That's the correct definition. 

David Gardner: Wow.

Thi Nguyen: That's what I using the book. We can talk a little bit. I want to talk so much about that definition, that's such a good definition. I also think there are a few exceptions to it. It's not a perfect capturing of natural language, but as like getting to the root of what's going on, what makes this special, the suited definition is it. This is his book Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper, Games Life and Utopia. It was published in the '70s, I think a little before its time. It's so funny, it's so rich, it's so deep. It gives you this definition, then it ends in one of the weirdest places. This argument at the end of games are the purpose of life and his argument at the end is this. Imagine utopia where we've solved all our practical problems.

We've solved the medical problems, we've told the therapeutic problems, everyone has enough medicine. What would you do with your time? He says, you would play games or you'd be bored out of your skull. Games must be the purpose of life, which seems weird unless you actually look at his account of game. What Suit is saying is in a game, you are taking on unnecessary obstacles to create this activity of struggle. In some sense, the struggle is the point or crucial to the point. What he's saying is, in every game there is some state you're trying to achieve, but there is always some easier way to get there.

Any game, you're intentionally restricting yourself to some more inefficient means. If you're running a marathon, you could take a shortcut, you could take a lift, you could steal a bicycle, you could get to the finish line first by shooting everyone else's kneecaps out. But when you're running a marathon, you don't do those things because of what you want is to go through the particular struggle of this long right route by using your legs and running. Similar with basketball. The point of basketball isn't just to get the ball through the hoop, because you could do that easily with a step ladder. A basketball game puts off step ladders, forces you to obey these rules and creates a much more rich and complex particular struggle.

Suits idea is that part of a way to think about a game is that what you're trying to do is not just an ordinary state of affairs in the world, it's a particular activity that's constructed by a particular set of constraints. Again look, if I just want to be at that point near the park where the marathon people are going, just because I want cookies that are sold there, like there is good bakery at that point, it doesn't matter. I'll take shortcuts. I'll take the easiest and quickest way to get there. What a marathoner wants to do is, if they take a shortcut, they haven't run the marathon, they haven't crossed the finish line unless they went the long way. Games are things where the goal is partially constituted by a certain set of constraints. Does that make sense?

David Gardner: It does make sense. You're making me think of Rosie Ruiz. I think she was a Cuban American. I think she now thought it was a fraudster because she was declared the winner. Do you remember this? It was 1980 was the Boston Marathon. I'm checking it now, but I think she took a shortcut to the finish line. I guess in some senses Rosie Ruiz was playing her own game, it was just a different game or really she wasn't playing the game because she wasn't playing by the rules. Thi, that's something that recurs. We're going to use that word a lot in our time together this week, the word rule and rules. It seems to me games have rules. That's one of the things that make up games.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah. This is crucial. What Bernard Suits say is that, a cheater creates the appearance of a win, but they haven't actually won because they haven't done it in the proper way. Maybe they're doing it for status. I think he thinks that sometimes people just misunderstand what the point is. They don't understand the point of a game is to go through this difficult activity. One more important thing is that the constraints and rules are voluntary. Suits has this great moment where he says, "Look, here's another thing we're doing where we're constrained by rules, morality."

But morality if you believe in it, those rules are necessary, you have to follow them. Games are these things where you add extra unnecessary rules so the point of them he thinks has to be the rules create this structured interesting, difficult activity. Now, I'm bleeding in my own language now. It's constraints, but it's also required constraints. If you are investing and you're following certain rules because you don't want to go to jail, that's not a game. If you are walking up a mountain and you're following certain rules because it will make your walk more interesting and rich, that's a game.

David Gardner: Yeah, and that's a really important point. Rules exist outside of games, but rules seem fundamental to games because they throw up the hurdles that make a game into a game. I also think about win-loss conditions, that feels to me true of most games I can think of. I do remember a really bad game, I think it was called the Ungame, at one point I had a boxed version of it when I was like 10 in the mid-'70s. It really was trying to be the Ungame, but I don't remember it being fun and I certainly don't remember whether you could win or lose. I think winning and losing matters a lot, but whether or not you'd agree Thi, I know one thing we need to talk about next is the games very often have scores, and that itself changes the nature of our activity within a game.

Thi Nguyen: I think not all games have scores, but all games have is a goal, and some games have a score. One way to put it in the Suitian-sense is that a game is telling you what you're trying to do, a game is giving you a direction to go. Sometimes that's specified with a score and a lot of times, the way that the goal is expressed is through a score or a win condition, but that's not always the way. There are a lot of, I think aesthetic games so think about skateboarders try to do the coolest trick or surfers trying to do the loveliest run. There's a case where there's a goal that is not exactly a win-loss condition and it's not clear enough to have a score. In fact, you might come away. You could all go to the park and skate and all have the goal of doing the coolest trick and you might not agree about who did it even though you have the same goal.

One of the things you actually see the history of skateboarding is in the movement from free-form hangout skateboarding to official ESPN skateboarding is that the goal shifts a little to admit of basically objective scoring. It looks like one of the places where you need to have a score and a clear decision procedure to tell you who won is when you need to declare a single winner in some official circumstance. My friends and I played this game, I think this was obviously a game. Everyone brings random ingredients, we all get drunk and we each improvise a dish together and we tried to make the best dish.  It's definitely a game, we're definitely competing. Everyone walks away, you don't have to agree in that case about who won. But you're still playing the game.

David Gardner: You know the goal and I get that. Games have impediments we might call rules, games have goals. I certainly agree, not every game has a score, but I know that how we score games or how we set the goal is so fundamental to how the game is played. Two years ago, this month in fact, I had and I know it's somebody you admire, a friend of mine Reiner Knizia, join us on this podcast. Reiner said or wrote something years ago that made a real impression on UT, what was that?

Thi Nguyen: Let me give you a little background. I was starting to do philosophy of art, which is not really a thing you're supposed to do anymore because it's a dying part of the world, we can talk about that. I think it's not just in philosophy I think world cares less about art, whatever. I'm trying to talk about what games are, and I read a bunch of stuff and all of that stuff talked about games is fiction or a movie, a very special movie that use graphics in interactive way.

You could read all of these books talking about why games were amazing, and they would never talk about skill or difficulty or choice. What they would talk about is characters and fiction and dialogue. That's all in games, it's true that there are plenty of video games that have their cinematic narratives, but I have also felt like it was missing something and one of the things you know from the history of art is that when a new art form comes around, people always try to squish it into the box and the family from the old art form and make like, I don't know, try to force photography to look like impressionist paintings and stuff.

David Gardner: Also, these things are always going to corrupt us and it's generally the youth that will, and I remember that novels we're going to, fiction was going to corrupt specifically young women and give them some fancy notions. How much has been said about video games that's negative?

Thi Nguyen: I don't know for sure, but I would place a bet that every single new artistic medium that comes about, there's going to be some group of people be like, "Oh my God, it's going to destroy the youth and the morality of the nation." Let's go back. What Knizia said in this game developer talk that blew my mind was he said the most important tool in the game designer's toolbox is the scoring system because the scoring system sets the players' motivations.

It tells the players what to want in the game. As a game player, this makes perfect sense, you open the box and it tells you, "Oh, you're collecting sheep. Oh, you're trying to kill the other side. Oh, you're all cooperating, it's off the pandemic." Think about this, I often play board games with my wife, we get a new one and I've forgotten what it is. We open it and the game literally tells us whether we're trying to kill each other or cooperate. We just learn the basic structure of our relationship from the game and we just execute it. In some sense, this is completely natural as a game player and in some sense as a philosopher who studies this stuff.

My response is Oh, my God, what? I was like that's correct and that's completely surprising, that we can just have this thing and we'll talk about later. There's a creepy side to this too. Where you just give a point system to people and everyone just orients themselves and says, "Yes, that's what I'm going to try to do." We're very fluid so one of the things I think this teaches us is that we as human beings have very fluid desires, we can literally do this thing where someone writes a point system in a rule set and we can be like, "I'm on it," and then all of our desires and cares change in a second.

But what I ended up saying in the book is that this teaches us what games actually are. What they are is the art form that works in the medium of agency itself. What that means for me is that it's not just that a game designer create a world. They do. It's not just that a game designer creates abilities. They do. They tell you what you want. They give you a package of abilities and ways to achieve things and a goal together. They're sculpting an agency for you to step into. I think what they're doing with that is using an agential language to shape interesting and rich activity.

You take up a game and it tells you, you are, so I'm a rock climber, you are trying to get to the top of this cliff and you're not allowed to pull on the rope, all you can do is use your hands and feet on the cliff. Here's the cliff you should attack. Suddenly you've created this incredibly rich, subtle, absorbed form of movement that you wouldn't have been doing before. If you didn't have the restrictions of rock-climbing, you just walk up the path on the back or you just throw a rope on a tree and hold yourself up the rope. It's the restrictions, the goal and the environment together that shape this when it's good, something fascinating and lovely.

David Gardner: I first heard about your work a couple of years ago. It's probably right around when your book came out, it was 2021. You were talking to somebody and I'd love for you to do so now. A little bit about John Dewey, the American philosopher, an educator, his view of art. Art crystallizing our experience of each of our humans senses or capabilities. I'll just start you a little bit because I know what you'll say, so I'll just start you by saying that for Dewey, apparently, and I'm not that familiar with this work. I remember some of the cultural literacy, E. D. Hirsch stuff going on in the '99s rounds, but anyway, Dewey says that what is painting except a crystallization? Just the beauty, the quintessence of human site and what does music, except the same thing for our hearing, of course. Thi, you went on to say what are games.

Thi Nguyen: Except the crystallization of action itself. One of the things that Dewey is really interested in is that art isn't this weird exception from life. He thought that life had these natural aesthetic richnesses. Beauties and graces and elegant and wonders and thrills. That art just took those, found natural unities and then concentrated them. You're looking around the world, things are beautiful, are sublime are gloomy and are intense. A painting or photographs accentuates a certain part of that, crystallizes that little bit and finds a nugget that we can carry around with that. Same thing with fiction.

There's this natural thing we tell of storytelling and it's not like fiction is some weird, new, completely original invention. It is taking the things that happened in storytelling and extracting the most intense, wonderful parts and crystallizing them. I think the same thing, with games, there're all these things we do in ordinary life. One of my favorite things in life to do is pack too much stuff into a van. If you had this experience like when I was a college student. There's just all this junk and you're like, I couldn't possibly fit it and then you're like, let me rotate the couch this way.

If I get the lamp like just the right, oh my God, I've got like, it's all in. Normally you would only get to do that A, once in a real while and B, it would also be super stressful and miserable as you're doing it. But then someone makes Tetris. Tetris just concentrate and extracts that particular pleasure and satisfaction. I think we feel it all the time, I remember at a bar, someone got really mad at me and they threw a punch at me and I just dodged perfectly. I got that thrill once in my life, but if you want it all the time, go to martial arts trainings box. You can create a circumstance that accentuates the intensity and likeliness of that interesting action.

This is one of the things, by the way, that makes games really different from other art forms that we're familiar with. I think a lot of other art forms. That thing that's beautiful or elegant is in the thing, the movie. The movie is thrilling, the book is moving. The painting is overwhelming. But games are distinctive, and if you try to look for the beauty in the game, you won't see all of it. I think games are a thing where they are shaped and designed for the beauty to emerge in you. Your movement, your ideas, your epiphany, and chests. When you're playing some complex incentive manipulation board game and then you see just the subtle way you could reincentivize everyone.

David Gardner: Especially if it's a discovery for you, especially if you all of a sudden have that aha moment right in the middle of the game. Really good games, Thi, I think do that on a regular, recurring basis and great games reward replayability and deeper insight. I think we have to talk about art a little bit because I think you've already started us and this is where you started apparently. Your academic career where you thought you might go. I think what I want to say about art briefly is first of all, I am a common Fool, so I'm not studied particularly steeped in this, but I have read some things over the course of time and one of my favorites, and I'm curious if you read this book, I wouldn't be surprised if you have is came from the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, which was written in 1993, itself a comic book. Good.

I really enjoyed McCloud because what he does, and this is even a throwaway. Pager to, this is not the point of understanding comics, but what I remember anyway is at one point he talks about what is art. In so many words, or in this case, comic strip's, he says, art is not procreation which we do to survive as a species. It's not eating because that's also what we need to do to survive as individuals, but it's almost everything else. In my mind, and I maybe slightly misquoting, this is my memory of a book I read two decades ago, but in my mind, he opened up this idea for me anyway, that art is almost everything.

If you view art as well, the word I just chose to say was a choice. I chose that word, diction, not that other word. What I'm wearing today, what I chose to wear today was a choice and how I chose to build this framework within my business, that itself is a creative art. At least for me, I feel as if agency is so human and it's so constant, it's all around us with everything that we do, art has already happened in the first 20 minutes of the podcast this week. I guess I want to ask you, Thi first of all, how much are you on board with that concept? Then if you're totally on board with that concept, which I hope you're not, it starts begging the question, what isn't art?

Thi Nguyen: There's a sense in which McCloud's comment is on the side that I'm on. There's a way of thinking where you think look, art has to be different from the world as we completely distinct. There's something that makes art artistic experience like completely SUI, generous completely, it's precious, not that thing you'd encounter in everyday life. I'm on the side of Dewey. It's not weird that you see beauty in paintings, and walking around with the mountains. There is a basic continuity there. There's something that McCloud says, I think that's incredibly important, but I don't have this perfectly in memory, but if you're recreation is right.

It makes this account in the right space but a little too broad. There is this notion in philosophy of activity that's auto-autotelic, that means activity that's worth doing for its own sake. You can loosely distinguish between instrumental activity and autotelic activity. Instrumental activity is the stuff you do to get something else you need, if you work the job just to get the money, if you're hunting just to get the food, if you're exercising just to get fitter. Autotelic activity is the activity that you do for it's own sake. I think for a lot of people, not everyone, part of what makes art art is that it's valuable autotelicaly, that the point of art is not just to learn something or get better or invest, but the point of art is that the engagement is one in which looking for it's own sake, listening, hearing a story is valuable in its own sake, or doing the action is valuable in its own sake.

Again, this isn't going to strongly differentiate art from life, but I think art is the stuff you make to concentrate that. Some looking around the world is really valuable for itself and then art is the stuff made for you to look for it's own sake. You can find physical movement or intellectual activity valuable for it's own sake in life, but games are the stuff where you've tuned the entire system just to accentuate that. That's the doing and answer. But I think there's one more thing you said, where McCloud is so right on, and what is one of the most interesting thing. I used to think there was nothing valuable in the art versus non-art distinction debate, like there's a really boring part of philosophy. Then I found the most interesting stuff actually in the literature about art versus porn.

Like what's the distinction between art and porn? One of my favorite philosopher Is Anne Eaton, this incredible feminist philosopher of art. Has this moment where she says, this is old account that what makes something porn is that it's demeaning or objectifying of women. She says that can't be right because there's plenty of art in the museum, that's also misogynist, demeaning and objectifying. That can't be the right definition. What is the difference between art and porn? There's this really interesting old tradition that you can draw on. People talk about the difference between sentimentalism in kitsch and then art.

At first you might think this is super leaders but the actual account really interesting. What it looks like is sentimental stuff, is stuff that you go to looking for a particular mechanical relationship. You want to tear jerker, it'll make you cry. You know what you want and it gives you what you want. One way to put it is the way that Jerrold Levinson, who's a philosopher of art who writes in this space put it is, if you take it to porn, what porn is is you want it to give you a certain mechanical effect, like you want to be stimulated in a certain way and you don't care what the technique is, you just want the thing at the end. With art, he says, you care about how the subtleties of technique that got you to a certain effect.

Another way to put it that other people in the space have said is something like look, with porn or with sentimentalism, you know the emotion or feeling that's going to be provoked. With art you don't, you're open, you're interested. Does that make sense? There's mechanical stimulus response relationship in sentimentalism and porn, and with art you're open both to seeing new interesting ways that the medium was used to get to that effect. It matters how either a painter made a certain line or a game designer put down a particular rule, and you're open to new kinds of experience in beauty that you haven't seen before.

David Gardner: I really appreciate that definition and that distinction and you've given me a new word, autotelic. I suspect many of our listeners have a new word this week. Thi, thank you. I want to go two directions here and yet I want to get to investing in business, which is a third direction. Real me back in but briefly let's trot down the primrose path, and off the path briefly and then come back. One of those directions is video games, because while you and I are going to probably talk more about tabletop games, and there's a weekend extra that's going to be about tabletop games that I'm looking forward to mentioning a little bit later in the show that'll be coming up this weekend, very tabletop game focus but in a lot of ways, video games and I've had this discussion with my sons who are also video gamers like me, I don't think it's unique to us.

I'm sure it's out there in the literature, but our video games is actually the highest form of art, in the sense that they combine agency very explicitly, like I almost was bored watching Avatar: The Way of Water because at different points in those long action scenes, I was almost falling asleep and my wife is like, how can you be falling asleep? I was like, well the reason is because I can't play this. I just have to sit there and watch this happen and I can't play it. You already have agency but then you also have sound and visuals, and you have so much that immerses you within video games. There's a little bit of the, what do you think of video games as high high art? Let's not go too long on this but what's your take?

Thi Nguyen: I can't see any reason why video games couldn't be one of the highest forms of art. I think Sturgeon's rule is really useful here. Do you know Sturgeon rule?

David Gardner: No.

Thi Nguyen: Theodore Sturgeon was a sci-fi writer. Someone said, why is 90% of sci-fi crap? His response was, well 90% of everything is crap. I think one of the things that happens is people will compare super boring corporate product in video games with the most interesting fancy high art film. Every realm has its corporate crap and its dumb stuff and its sentimental junk, and then this is little realm of interesting, neat stuff. But I will 100% resist the claim that it's the highest. Try this argument, hey, comics are better than painting because they add words too. I don't think games are better than movies because they add stuff to movies, I think every art form hold something fixed and that leads you into a particular place, and you get something different from each thing.

I think for example with non-interactive fiction, someone can sculpt a precise storyline better for you to appreciate. With games, something else is going to happen. The storyline can't be as precisely sculpted. Instead, you get to interact. The game designer isn't, except in particular cases, going to give you as finely tuned up specific storyline, instead they're going to give you an opportunity to act. Imagine someone saying, look van Gogh would have been a lot better if he could've been animated. Each form fixes a particular thing and you get to have that experience based on what the artist control. It's great that in some cases, people are fixing a visual appearance or a musical sound.

David Gardner: I love that question. Thi gave you an opportunity to relive your early days as a philosopher of art. Apparently a dying area of the philosophy but we got to go there a little bit. I said there was one other brief distraction before we get back on track, and let me read you this Helena Bonham Carter quote, you may have come across this one before. My sister afforded this to me last month and she said this is how our mom felt. This is such a beautiful quote.

You don't have to agree or like my mom, my sister or this quote. I'm just curious it speaks to this conversation and leaves me still slightly confused, so tie up this loose end. Here's the Bonham Carter quote, "I think everything in life is art," she said, "what you do. How you dress. The way you love someone and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in and all your dreams. The way you drink tea. How you decorate your home or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How you're writing looks, and the way you feel. Life is art."

Thi Nguyen: I am almost onboard, but I think that's a little too optimistic. I would buy that if you change it to, could be. Everything in life could be hard. There's no part of life that couldn't be taken up with the aesthetic attitude for the reason of finding beauty and richness, or express all those qualities. But I think everything can also be done in a crappy on thought. Part of what was going on in our conversation before, we were talking about McCloud and talking about the porn stuff. What seems in a lot of art is every detail matters.

You don't just ignore some of the junk. It's like the way Miles Davis plays every single note, every stop, that matters. Every single detail about the graphics, the music, the opportunities, all of that is potentially expressive. I think like yes, sometimes when you cook, you can be trying to find aesthetic richness and expression and all the beauty that's possible with food or you can be cramming protein bars into your face after a lift to feed. That's not an autotelic relationship. That's a relationship of pure instrumentality.

David Gardner: Instrumentality, yeah.

Thi Nguyen: You're just trying to use it to get some outcome out of it. You don't care about the particulars of the details.

David Gardner: This is such an important distinction.

Thi Nguyen: Yeah. I don't think everything in life is art, I think most of things in life, including games and film, are instrumental crap  but everything could be.

David Gardner: Everything could be art. I really appreciate that distinction. Let's briefly talk about fun. I'm a sometime listener of the Tabletop Gaming podcast too would for a week. One of the things that host who reviews board games on the podcast, and they against, is reviewers and reviews that label games as fun. Fun because, well that doesn't really explain anything or help people figure out if it's a game they'd like, if it would be fun for them, but that said, fun. But then on the other side, there's a small industry in the book tray dedicated to creating fun, even just in the workplace alone. Titles like The Power of Fun, Fun At Work, 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work, etc. As long as you'll let me ask you really simple, potentially very deep question, Thi, what is fun?

Thi Nguyen: I have no idea, or I should say I think I can know a lot of examples, but as a philosophers, but to give definitions, I've tried to define fun for a decade and failed. It's incredibly difficult. Suits gave us a good definition of games. There are a couple accounts of play that I find plausible, but fun is so hard. But one thing I should say is, I totally get, and I'm of two minds about this resistance to fun. I understand what the resistance is. There are two forms of the resistance. One, if fun is your generic praise for any game then it's contentless as your viewer say. I think there's something else, which is wanting things to be pleasurable in the simplest way is a barrier to the widening of something as an art form.

I think with film, if you're an artsy film person, you don't just say, oh, I go to the films that are fun. You think, there's all this stuff that film can do. It can be sad, it can be evocative, it can be expressive, you can show the pain of a particular person situation lifelike. Look at the wildness and of the potential. If you just want movies to be fun, then you've emptied out a lot of that potential. I think a lot of games, and a lot of the games I find the most interesting, they're not necessarily fun, specially like the world of Indie Tabletop role-playing game, the games right now.

This is this game I'm fascinated with called The Quiet Year, which is this co-operative game where you co-tell the story of a village surviving for a year after the apocalypse, struggling, and where that games takes you is to place of spooky sad intimate sorrow. I run a game design class at The University of Utah, a game design program, and I have my students play this. No one thinks it's fun. Everyone thinks it's one of the best experiences they've had. They think things like it's deep, it's rich, it's evocative, it's sorrowful, it's moving, known as fun. I totally understand that resistance. On the other side, I do think that one of the reasons that games get crapped on is because people don't respect fund enough, and games are really good at making things fun.

There are a bunch of games I have that are just the easiest and most reliable route to relax hilarity. It's like a design miracle. They're these party games like Spyfall, is this incredible party game, every time I played it, the Whole and Codenames. These are games where you can just render a group of uncomfortable distant stiff strangers into this warm convivial. Sometimes I think those are master art works, and what these game designers are doing with games like Codenames is they're playing our sociality like a violin. Think about how the hell did someone design something where I can find any group of people, strangers, friends, any level of discomfort, and almost always it renders them into friendly, happy, laughing people. That's a miracle.

David Gardner: It really is, and it's so beautiful the way you said that. Those are games that certainly I'm familiar with and in some cases have I talked about in this podcast over the years, games that take five minutes to teach and welcome everybody usually of all ages and give them experience that's meaningful. We just played a game called Wavelength. Have you played wavelength?

Thi Nguyen: No.

David Gardner: I think you'd really enjoyed it. It's right in that same genre of bringing strangers together, but Wavelength simply has, one person puts a card up on the table and it'll say, boring, stimulating, and so you're thinking about a spectrum, and then unbeknownst to the people who he'll be giving the clue to, he sees a visual behind a hidden window of where on the spectrum the actual answer is. I'm waving my hands around, and you can see me doing this, but podcast listeners can't. Maybe this is a little confusing but basically behind a hidden window you see 180 degrees of a circle, and somewhere in that 180 degrees, you're going to see like the sweet spot. You're trying to give a clue of a word or a phrase to your teammates who don't know where that is.

That's going to nail boring to stimulating, and if for some reason, let's just say it's like 5/8 of the way toward boring, then you're going to need to think of something not terribly boring, but something that's boring enough. You might say something like going for a random walk. Anyway, that is an example of a game like Codenames, like Dixit, like Spyfall, which is a little bit more hilarious of games that create a small miracle. They do indeed knit us together and provide us that moment, and I do find face-to-face that I prefer Codenames to the beautiful codenames.game website, which has some advantages to, we don't even need to go there, but there's the whole. Are we in person playing this with friends and family, or are we trying to win it all on the internet? Both are different experiences.

Thi Nguyen: First of all, I think people who look at games often overemphasize the incredibly arcane complex games, which I also love. But if you look at game designer diaries, these elegant little party games are actually the hardest to design because you have so few rules to play with. Sometimes I think of them as like high cool or sushi or something we're like the amazingness as you can get so much out of this little minimal rule set. I have my students play The Mind, which is really interesting game. Do you know the Mind?

David Gardner: I do.

Thi Nguyen: The Mind is a game where a group of people are given a randomly distributed set of numbered cards from, 1-100. They've to cooperate to play them in order, but they cannot talk or signal in any way. It's about developing this intimate sense of timing. A lot of these games, the Codenames and Spyfall and the Mind are all interestingly games that constrain communication in particular way. They try to get you to create some empathy or neurotelepathy or you package too much information into this little thin package. To do that you have to get inside someone's mind. This is one of the things I found really interesting.

There's both a set of co-operative game, there's set of competitive games. What you get out of it is like you get so close to somebody else's mind. I think in some ways, weirdly, the most mental intimacy you might have is playing chess against someone. Because if you make a move, because you see they have 10 moves sequence and you block it, both of you are in the same 10 moves sequence. Also there's going to be turned out to be worrisome later. One of the incredible things about games is the art of the environment or so artificially simplified. There's so few moves possible and the goals are so clear. That's what enables this neurotelepathy that you're operating in such a clean, minimal environment together.

David Gardner: Let's talk a little bit about abstraction because that's happening with games. After all, a game designer decides to create along a theme, some rule set, which if you and I read the rules and I'm always the one that Mike Gaming Group who does. I buy games sometimes just to read the 32-page rulebook and it doesn't even make sense because these days are all in PDF, but I still buy the game. Still in shrink wrap in many cases, but I'm going to open it. I at least want to read the rule books. You have somebody who's thought through a system and if it's published, if it's a good game, it's not a breakable system. If you don't obviously always choose for or always pick wheat, you're actually going to think through each time you play the game, how you're going to maybe play the game differently, maybe based on the conditions.

But anyway, what's being done is we're abstracting reality, we're simplifying in the same way that comics in a lot of ways abstract the visual world around us. That's what game designers are doing. Then they say along with Knizia, here's our scoring, here's the goal, here are the points for this particular game. That's why in some ways we're given agency within a simplified abstracted world. As I know, you're somebody who loves hundreds of different games and I am also that geeky and most people listening to us are not anywhere near that geeky. Let's not geek out too much. But I think part of what I love about games so much is that there's so many different ones. In my mind, there was like monopoly.

I'm making up 1933, Charles Dara. I'm even making up that name. I don't think I have that right. But then, five-years later I'm making this up again. Part cheesy shows up, but there were no games in-between 1933 and 1938. Then all of a sudden we reach the 1980s and '90s. This is post Avalon Hill war games, which was an efflorescence. But in the last 20 years, it has absolutely exploded the choices that we have, the abstractions we can seek and Thi, this is where we're headed now. I know you want to say something to that and you can, but I'm even going to push us forward to social media platforms which are also abstracted forms of experience that a lot of people far more than play Catan are opting into and those have their own rules as well. When you start to really think about it like you have.

Thi Nguyen: Thank you for giving me the lead. He knows that I've written a paper called how Twitter gamifies communication and that he can just prod me and I'll rent.

David Gardner: A lot of people listening use Twitter. A lot of people on this podcasts used Twitter actively. This is very relevant to us.

Thi Nguyen: This is I think a really good place to see the difference between games and game-like systems in the world. Games I think give you one of the crucial abstractions is the value system. Games give you abstracted simplified value systems. In ordinary life, your values are super complicated. They are super-rich, like it's Heartland. I care about research, I care about my family, I care about health, I care about fun. It's hard to quantify them and measure them off against each other.

David Gardner: What's your score a dad? What did you score last month.

Thi Nguyen: It's not just the hard to compare against each other, even a single one. If you're being careful and thoughtful about it, it's actually really hard to tell. I think about this parenting, you let your kid off the hook some night. They're screaming, they are telling stories and it's too late and they should have gone to bed, but they're having a great time and you're like, am I succeeding or failing?

David Gardner: Was that good?

Thi Nguyen: What's going on? In games you get something very different. In scored games, you get a clear mechanistic decision procedure that tells you exactly how to apply the value system to know exactly how well you've done and everyone's on the same one. What you get is value clarity. One of the things that I think happened in games or one of the things that makes them so appealing is that in life, we have these rich in Kuwait nausea, eating complex value decisions, and then we get a break from them. Games are dislike existential desert. Where you get to like be soothed by the experience of knowing for wants in your life exactly where you're going. This is part of why I'm really worried about gamification.

There are a lot of people who are very pro, let's make life like a game. Games are awesome, so let's make life more awesome. But to do that, you have to offer a simplified, mechanically, applicable scoring system. In real life values are much more complicated. Twitter for me is this remarkable example where they're all these possible values for communication, empathy, connection, information. Then Twitter gives you the scoring system that measures one thing which is popularity. If you let it in and if you get thrilled by it, then what's going to happen is that you will have gotten game-like pleasures in exchange for simplifying your communicative value system to get into line with something that can be measured by simple mechanism at mass-scale.

The next book I'm writing right now is about this. I'm worried about this thing, but I'm calling value capture about when your values get captured by clear institutional metrics. The best way of putting the worry for me is that your outsourcing your values. Instead of being engaged in something and figuring out whether it's worthwhile for you, whether it matches with your value, with your place here, with your personality, you're just like OK. You're literally buying your values off the rack. Here's what I'm going to do with Twitter. I'm going to aim at what it measures. Here's what I'm going to do with fitness.

I don't think you have to be like this. You're not instantly captured the moment you put on a Fitbit or start using Twitter. But I think it just beckoned and I experience this all the time. I'm very vulnerable to this and I constantly have to fight. A few times I've gotten viral on Twitter and each time I've had to delete Twitter from my phone because my brain gets so infected with the desire to score more points. That I just start trying to reaim my thoughts for the things that will score well. I think when you're oriented that way toward Twitter, you have been captured by the simplified value system.

David Gardner: It's really so compelling and I think so important for our self awareness. One of the things I appreciate about your work, other than your often talking about games and game designers I know or games that I love is that you're helping us get above the game. I lead off this week by talking about that in metagame level, are we in some games that we don't even realize we're playing as individuals and also as a society. Do you have other examples in mind to scare us with or provoke us with?

Thi Nguyen: Oh, yeah. 

David Gardner: Let's do it.

Thi Nguyen: Let me take a step back. There's a crucial bit from my book that I need to talk about and that is going to be important for going on. In a game, the goal is something that constituted by the constraints where you get the struggle. Why are you doing it? One of the things that I think Bernard Suits make clear, is there at least two different motivations for playing a game. He didn't spell this out. For me, I feel like the most important thing I figured out thinking about suits. The two motivations I call achievement play and striving play. Achievement play is playing a game because winning is valuable to you. Striving play is temporarily taking on an interest in winning because the struggle is valuable to you. Does it make sense?

David Gardner: It does.

Thi Nguyen: Striving play in particular, you might think of this in normal life, we're engaging instrumentally. We're taking the means for the sake of the ends. In striving play, our motivations are inverted. We're taking the ends for the sake of the means. We're taking on a goal because the activity of pursuing that goal is valuable. One of the things I think that happens with games, by the way I should give the argument. Some people have doubted that striving play is real. Here's my argument. Consider the category of stupid games. A stupid game is a game where the fun part is failing, but it's only fun if you are trying to win, like twister, or telephone, or a lot of drinking games. There's a case, where actually what you want is to fail. That's the fun part. But in order to get it, you actually have to try. If you fall over on purpose, it's not funny, because what's funny is failure.

David Gardner: You just give an example of very accessible games. I was just thinking about Galaxy Trucker. Have you played Galaxy Trucker?

Thi Nguyen: I love Galaxy Trucker. That is a stupid game.

David Gardner: That is one of the few games that actually takes about 30 minutes to teach and is a deeper strategy game where you act. It is actually more fun in a lot of ways to watch your ship that you've carefully built on a timer get blown apart by unforeseen events and circumstances and laugh as everybody else's does, and winning doesn't seem to matter as much, even though it's still count anyway, keep going.

Thi Nguyen: Here's our second connection. Galaxy Trucker was one of my natural examples that one of the ones that I got to thinking of, I didn't use it in the book because only weirdo geeks like us know Galaxy Trucker. It's so good.

David Gardner: It is.

Thi Nguyen: But I also think this is also true of some more complicated games. It's fun to see the wheels come off. Here's a way that you can get engaged in games well. You play a game and then if you're striving player, you step back and you ask, was the activity worth it? Was the struggle fun, was the struggle interesting? The bad way to play games is to play a game and just get sucked into the win even if the struggles sucks. This is actually my worry about a lot of real-world systems. Because with games at least there's a natural built-in moment where you step away from the game and you decide whether you're going to play it again. I think with a lot of real-world systems and ones I'm worried about things are like GPA, the ranking of what college you got into, your Twitter likes.

David Gardner: We're not just talking about kids mobile games, make you wait 15 minutes to take your next shot or you can pay a buck now, you're talking about real-world systems that have been around for a long time, GPA.

Thi Nguyen: I think one of the worries is that you can get sucked into a game like that as a game that is just pursuing those points and not realize that the actual process sucks. That it's empty of life, that is boring or awful. Part of it is because my suspicion is that a lot of the times we don't have the opportunity to step back and ask the question that I think games make prominent, which is, was the pursuit of these points actually a worthwhile way of living. Should we play something else? But one of the things that makes it easier in games is, as you said, there's massive choice. You get to engage in a rich aesthetic personal decision. Did I play that game? Do I take it on? I think it's really boring compared to other games of that stripe from that world like all of Knizia games, Wolfgang Kramer's El Grande which is one of the most interesting board game to play.

David Gardner: Fantastic game.

Thi Nguyen: Right. Rich juicy thick decisions all the time. But then I think when large-scale systems in the world become games like GPA, there aren't alternatives or ways to step back. You can just get sucked into this game.

David Gardner: You can't stop playing that game. It's systemic.

Thi Nguyen: There are two problems. One is that there's this pervasive instrumentality. Sorry, I sound like such a philosopher.

David Gardner: Be among friends.

Thi Nguyen: Every student is stuck with GPA is something that employers will look at. That's pervasive, but I think there's something even worse you can do, that the pervasive is encourages, which is to take GPA as the only purpose of your education. One of the things that games encourage, I wish I had a better term for this in the book, I call it all out instrumentality. You look at a goal, and that's all that matters, and you just throw yourself with that goal. In a game that's OK because games are thinned artificial temporary environments. But if you approach your entire educational life, where the only goal is GPA and you don't think about anything else then you're thinning out a much richer activity. PS I've the same worry about money.

David Gardner: We're real near getting there. I want to talk some about investing in business. This is going to be a podcast that runs longer than my normal podcast and yet we're not even get to have the stuff I'd like to. That's a sign that I need to have you back, which I certainly will, this has been so much fun. Let me just talk some about like new games that we're playing. It's because of the world of big data. I know that you've written a recent paper entitled, I believe Transparency is Surveillance. If you'd like to speak about that, some, please do. But for me anyway, I am actively opting into all scoring systems that I really do love.

I think they make me a better me. I'll give two quick examples that come to mind. One is my HidrateSpark PRO smart water bottle. Every time I take a sip from it, it lets me know, that's 1.2 ounces. Good job. You're on your way to 71.2 ounces, your daily goal away. It's actually now 73.2 today because you just took a short walk, which means you need to hydrate a little bit more and the humidity is lower than usual. We're going to need you to have a little bit more water than that. From one day to the next, I am hydrating. I'm not just doing that, Thi, I don't know if you have one of these, but I've invited my friends and family, we have a water league. We all see how we're doing toward our goal.

There's not really a race. You can get, I think it's called something like hyponatremia where you can over-water yourself and create dangerous conditions. They're not trying to do that, but I have actively opted in and I am driven by a gamification tool that I know you know well and that is Streaks. I have a long streak where I've nailed my water goal from one day to the next. That example took a little while to explain. There's more to that we can unpack that or skip it. But I also have my sleep. I actively measure my sleep. I wake up each morning. I'm like, I was in 801 last night out of 1,000. That means basically I was 80th percentile, gentlemen around my age and weight and how we slept last night. I really enjoy these things. I'm inviting them. I feel as if gamification is obviously like any powerful tool can be used for good or for evil.

Thi Nguyen: I'm certainly not going to block the good of a fully controlled gamification. My worry is about normally imposed systems, but systems that sneak up on you without you realizing it. The discourage reflectiveness. In some sense, when you decide because it makes your life better, that this gamification is good for you. That's in some sense very similar to playing any other game. You made a decision about an experience you find worthwhile. I still have a worry though, in the worries about what activities in the current environment are easily gamifiable and which ones are not. My worry is something like look, water intake, and sleep is easier to measure. Enjoying poetry is nonetheless easier to measure.

Having an interesting conversation with your family is less easy to measure. My worry is that if you're the person that reacts to gamifications, then you're choosing them. But you're also choosing from a limited supply of possible gamifications, there are things that gamify more easily. Well, let me try this. One of the worries I have in this transparency paper you're talking about is that there's a drift between what we actually care about and what's easy to measure its scale in an institution. Part of that drift is particularly because in transparency cases, the metrics you use are further constrained by the need to be legible to the public.

In our O'Neill who got a philosopher, a bio ethicist, and candy ethicist has got me really interested in this. She has this moment that inspired this whole paper where she says, people think trust and transparency go together, but they're actually intention because transparency as experts to explain themselves to non-experts. But there are real reasons aren't explicable to non-experts, so they have to lie. My worry is even worse that experts might only start doing the things that they can explain to non-experts, which actually constrains the reasons they can use and minimizes their expertise.

There are a lot of cases where I think the actual expert, like the art expert or the educational expert, has a sensitivity to an area that won't survive the demand for metrification. One of the other worries I have about the gamification cases is that even if it's under your choice, given the fact that the gamification is available range over activities that are easier to quickly metrify. Then your attention is going to go to things like sleep and hydration and not to things like poetry and conversation. This is measurability constraint, but I think it's really important.

David Gardner: I'm reminded briefly of one of my probably 20 favorite movies, The Truman Show, because no spoilers, but we all should have watched The Truman Show at this point. I think it's fair to spoil this movie. But there's Truman Burbank, the protagonist played by Jim Carrey. He's living his life, not realizing that he's actually a reality TV show for the rest of the world. The hilarity of and also the troubling nature of the discovery that is actually the case is in large part that movie, The Truman Show. But I'm thinking about it because in a way he's a microcosm of what we're talking about. Are we living a life not conscious of well-being watched in the case of The Truman Show and maybe a big data today. But more importantly, we'll actually Thi have you seen this movie?

Thi Nguyen: Yeah, of course.

David Gardner: Are we in The Truman Show today? 

Thi Nguyen: There are two worries I have about runaway gamification. One of them, the answer something like you're in The Truman Show and you don't know it. The other, it's something like, it's actually worse if you know that you are in a game. Let me try this. I think there are lots of these targets that we have out there. It might be Twitter likes, it might be money and investing in your investment. How much you made. It might be in my world and academics, it's funny because academics will often be like, I'm above money. But then they're targeting things like citation rates and impact factors for their publications are like page views for journalists. One worry, I just thought about this morning. Let me try this distinction between bad games and evil games.

David Gardner: Let's do it.

Thi Nguyen: See if this makes sense. I think a bad game is the thing we were talking about before, where the game sucks for you if you play it. It's boring. It's annoying. It makes your life worse. It makes you unhappy, but you're stuck in it. Because you don't realize it's a game. You don't realize that you have choice about what you're pursuing. If you think I have to be pursuing this. I have to be getting GB. I have to be getting more money. I have to be getting into the good college even though it's making my life miserable. That I think that's the problem with being stuck in a bad game. That I think realizing that you're in a game where that means you have choice. That's really powerful. You can be like, look, I've been pursuing this metric for a really long time and my life socks, and what that looks like is I know people who got really excited about having a lot of Instagram followers. At some point, they realize their lives have gotten hollowed out and they tried to get out of that game. That's one word.

David Gardner: That's such a good example. Just to throw out one other older movie that I'm thinking of that you just made me think Logan's Run. I'm sure you've seen Logan's, Run Thi?

Thi Nguyen: Yes.

David Gardner: That's like you're living in a world that's a dystopia and all of a sudden you realize you can break out of it, no spoilers.

Thi Nguyen: The flip worry, and I think this is a very different worry, is, what makes real games morally OK. Is that they're separated from ordinary life. Because the points in a game are artificial and not directly connected to real life in most circumstances, then there's a safety mechanism. One of the first things I wrote about games as this account that looks like, look if you're engaged in striving play and both of you are only trying to win for the pleasure of a struggle. Then, in some sense, blocking somebody else's attempt to score.

That's not evil, that's good because you're helping them get what they want, which is the struggle, and part of what makes that OK, is the points aren't valuable of themselves. They're just these temporary construct that you get into to have this interesting struggle. They're detached from the rest of material reality. But investing isn't like that. One of the things that I worry about people that do anything for more Twitter likes or anything for more money. Is that if you treat it like a game, the game-like attitude, is it OK to pay attention to and nothing else and just max out my points? That's OK in the secluded environment of real games.

But in so far as the point at you're pursuing have real-world effects. Like on Twitter. Like with money and investing. Then you don't have the same ethical free get out of being evil card that you have with settlers of baton or monopoly. My worry is actually in the investment space and in the Twitter space, the people that I find most worrying are those who self-consciously think of it as a game like I'm just trying to win. These are my points. I'm just playing the game and not thinking about the fact that the things that they're calling points are attached to incredibly consequential material reality.

David Gardner: Well, I hear you and at least listeners of this podcast and anybody who's followed my work with rule Breaker Investing for 30 years know that my guiding watchwords are make your portfolio reflect your best vision for our future. I certainly, and I'm on the board of conscious capitalism. I think that it's integral, everything is connected. What you invest in says so much, not just about who you are though it does, but it also says so much about our future because we're shaping the future every day with our dollars.

By the way, that's true of investing. It's also true, of course, of our spending choosing to buy from this vendor, not that one to pay this price, not that to have this different experience. All of these are all about agency in many cases. There are places in the world where you only have one choice or you have no choices, which is really sad. But at least in America were blessed with so many choices, maybe too many choices sometimes it can be overwhelming. But everything is connected. To the extent that I think of investing is a game which by the way I do. Businesses is a game, it's partly, what rules have I designed into the game that I'm playing as an entrepreneur at The Motley Fool, or as somebody who's making his own portfolio.

I self-regulate against things that I think are evil or bad, or at least I'm doing my best, not just at my own level, but to anybody who listens to me, to counsel us to realize that buying fair trade coffee, where you pay up a little bit more beyond what you could have had that cup of coffee for, actually gives a developing world farmer direct foreign aid, which is much more efficient than the US trying to give the dictator of his or her country that aid, or even in many cases, the NGOs on the ground in that country, not all of which are particularly effective or always well motivated. As an example, fair-trade coffee that is playing the game as a consumer differently than how other consumers do it. A lot of my optimism and you're joined today by an optimist is rooted in the belief that along with Jeffersons great line, I can light your taper, you can light mine and neither one of us loses anything as we let the light shine and we hit higher levels of consciousness and conscious doing.

Thi Nguyen: I want to probe what you mean by game when you say that investing is a game. Let me say why I'm worried about treating investment like a game. Maybe we're picking up on different parts of the phenomenon because the phenomenon is really mission complicated. The part of the pleasure of a game for me is because it's detached from ordinary life and because we're in this consensual space, you can just go all in on the point system. Games are situation where you can be a pure min-maxing monster. You don't have to worry about anything else.

You don't have to get involved with the complicated thing of, what are the later downstream effects on other people? You can just be this pure instrumentalizing, optimizing, simple beast. I think that's the attitude that I would be worried about in investing. The thing that you're talking about doesn't seem game-like to me in that respect. I can see what you mean in the sense that there are aspects that you've put on to increase the striving pleasure. But you're also the thing you're describing to me involves not just settling on money as pure points and pure victory and nothing else matters, but opening yourself to the consequential downstream consequences. That seems crazy to me, but that attitude is the thing that makes me think. You should be like that, and not as a pure game in the sense that I was talking about.

David Gardner: I really appreciate that and I almost feel like we're going into another podcasts, like the one you should be hosting, having me on at some point because I'd love to talk about that at a deeper level than we probably have time to. But I do want to say a few things back. First of all, for me anyway, when I think about games, I almost start inside out with business first and then investing is one concentric circle outside of it. As an entrepreneur, I think of businesses a tremendous game. It has Knizia like beauty in terms of some of the scoring mechanisms. Balance sheets, income statements, statements have cash-flow accounting, accountants who actually force you to publish your numbers on a regular transparent basis.

Now outside of the accounting and the numbers of racking up, not just profit, but a lot of other measures you can be playing toward. But what are we doing the real-world? What are the effects of teaching more people about the stock market? For good and for bad, because it's not just all good or all bad. I guess there's such richness in my own experience. Helping to create and helping to run an organization. I feel like I see so much of the game. I have almost a 360-degree view, whereas one concentric circle away, I start having a narrower view. I can't see as much of the elephant now, and so the game there for me doesn't as clearly connect with real-world effects.

Hiring and firing, making your numbers or not, going public and having an incredible IPO or not, all of those things are much clearer and much more grounded in the world when you're running an organization or a university than if you're just their mom and pop armchair investor, which is also part of how I roll in there. I would just say that I have formed up the game in this way. I am trying to beat the index funds. We live in a world where so much of academia, even still today thinks it's a random walk down Wall Street and monkey throwing darts. The game of it for me, the game is on, games of foot. When I know that there is an average and the vast majority of the world, even at the highest academic levels, think it is not possible sustainably to beat that. That is incredibly motivating for me, and that's why I encourage everybody listening to always score how you're doing, etc.

What are the ways to play to win in that? But it's not necessary. I don't know if this is helpful or not or if I'm speaking to you or away from you. But for me, I guess a lot of it are the constraints that you set. It's the game that you put in place. As an entrepreneur, you could be a jerk or not. You could think about all your stakeholders. You could just think about yourself. Same thing with your portfolio, what it does in the world, and even more than your portfolio, perhaps passing the ball back to you. How each of us is spending our money every day. Those things have real-world effects and they're intimate and they're all about agency to me. The transcript will read long pause. 

Thi Nguyen: There is a problematic way to think about investing as a game when you get this all instrumental altitude. I think you're pushing on another side of this. What you're pushing on look something like this. You can keep reflectively redesigning a game to get the effects out of it you want. I think a lot of us engage in movement between fitness games. There real-world consequences for that. There are some things I find incredibly fun that actually trash my body. I have to think at some point I'm like, I can't. I have to think about other effects. There's some things that are very rich and there are some things that are really healthy and are going to help me, but they suck so much that I'm never going to try to do them.

What I'm trying to do is find and then push around the design for me for something that is both rigid engaging and then has the right downstream effects. I can just throw myself into it. I think what you're saying, which is the hopeful side of this, is that you are imagining that it's possible to create an investment game and keep pushing it around. It's both fun and interesting for you, and also are the downstream consequences are better for the world. I would like to be optimistic enough to think that that's possible. I am worried given the history I know about whether that's possible or not. But maybe you're the economic moral saint we need to make things less horrific. 

David Gardner: Well, it would be fun to keep going along that track, but I think we need to start bringing things to close. I thought, let's close with a game. Will you play a game with me?

Thi Nguyen: Absolutely.

David Gardner: Let's play our long-standing Motley Fool game of buy, sell, or hold. I'll be asking you about things that are not stocks. But if they were stocks t, would you be buying right now, selling, or holding? You ready.

Thi Nguyen: Am I looking for financial value or cultural value or goodness, if I thought something wouldn't make any money?

David Gardner: That is the right question, and we're going to leave that rhetorical. That is up to you. I love the question. Here we go. Specifically, ChatGPT, buy, sell, or hold right now.

Thi Nguyen: I'll hold because I'm torn between various things. You're talking to a teacher who thinks that getting students to write things for themselves is a deeply valuable procedure and it also has to write tons and tons of bureaucratic crap. Every single one of us is like, oh my God, every single stupid year-end report after I can use this for, and then at the same time we all have to think like the most valuable part of our intro class is to get students to write and think and put down their thought, and if they have a way to get around that, they might produce good writing, but they won't go through the process of struggling with their own words. If you think that's valuable for critical thinking, then whoa.

David Gardner: Well said. Next one up. Buy, sell, or hold. If it were a stock these days, academic tenure. 

Thi Nguyen: I want to buy and I want to buy for forward-looking reasons.

David Gardner: Share.

Thi Nguyen: I'm going to buy the support. I think one of the values of tenure is that it gives people the freedom to explore outside of narrow constraints. I actually worry right now. One of the things that's going on across the board in research is that in the increasingly monitored and metrified view of the research world, people are being encouraged to take more and more safe bets. Things that will definitely pay off. There's a really interesting piece of philosophy of science from a guy named Philip Kitcher about how healthy science incentivizes people both to some people to take short high likelihood bets and some people to take weird wild long shots. My worry right now is that the world is moving away from incentivizing academic research on long shots in 10 years of thing that protects long shots.

David Gardner: Well said. Changing gears here. Thi, buy, sell, or hold the game Candy Land.

Thi Nguyen: I will sell that.

David Gardner: Thank you.

Thi Nguyen: It's a long list. 

David Gardner: That is actually the most well-known game that provides zero agency, literally no agency. You are picking up a car and it tells you to go ahead two blue spaces. You hope you're going forward, not backwards. That's, we have fixed Candy Land previously on this podcast, thanks to one of my listeners, right again saying, "Hey, draw two cards and have your kid pick which one." That actually adds, all of a sudden the art, the agency tea. But anyway, thank you for your Candy Land competition. We did not talk about that ahead of time, but you are more than welcome to return anytime to this podcast. Thank you. Next one, buy, sell, or hold rock climbing. If it were a stock.

Thi Nguyen: Buy. I think it's an amazing thing. I'm excited. More people who've discovered rock climbing because I think the world is moving away from thinking that what fitness is, is you have to pound out some miles on a treadmill and hit your numbers and be miserable and toward thinking like you can do this thing. It'll help you mean healthy, but it's also interesting and rich. I think like more export, more people are moving to some of these more. I think there are more autotelic forms of fitness too like surfing, climbing, things that are just delightful. I think that's good.

David Gardner: I now know exactly what you're saying. I wouldn't have known an hour-and-a-half ago what you were talking about when you said autotelic. Thank you. Two more for you T. penultimate one. If it were a stock buy, seller, or hold blogging. Now you seem to have done it a while, but the last one I see in your sights dated like January 2021.

Thi Nguyen: Sell. It's dead. I'm sad about it, but I'm really worried that there's a lot of good qualities in blogging that are being lost right now. I'm watching it as a former food writer. Food blogs in some sense are getting replaced by Instagram. One of my worries is that Instagram actually accentuates the visual aspect and not the food aspects. But my worry is that I'm sad because I think social media is giving us a more organized version of this and a lot of that organization is tuning us to problems, blogs were the wild side. I know it's dead.

David Gardner: Well, and when you say dead, I didn't know if you were referring specifically to you're not planning on continuing blogging or do you think capital B globally blogging is dying or dead.

Thi Nguyen: I think blogging has become a minor thing in the face of the more controlled environment of Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram and I'm sad about it.

David Gardner: Would you say that, and certainly Neil Postman and some other cultural critics at least one generation ago? We're talking so much about the power of visuals and television taking away from print media and the enjoyment of novels and things. Is this the power of the image just starving out the power of the word?

Thi Nguyen: I made an off-the-cuff remark about Instagram, but I also think that Twitter is taking energy away from blogging in a lot of worrisome ways. My worry here is less about the visual than about the success of finally controlled platforms that have tuned their algorithm for quick engagement and that's more of the world than the visual.

David Gardner: Last one for you, Thi. buy, sell, hold, geeking out with me for a special short weekend extra, just focused on tabletop games.

Thi Nguyen: Buy.

David Gardner: Let's do it. This has been a delightful 90 minutes or so with a new friend of mine, Thi Nguyen thank you so much for generously sharing your insights and for taking the time to help us question more and ask, why are we doing what we're doing? Is it out of the best reasons will it lead to the best ends? While it's hard to ever give emphatic yeses to that, just asking the questions so much of the time leads to better things and you are an incredible asker of questions. You're also a wonderful answer. I said to you before we started the podcast, you're one of those people. I can just wind up with a simple question, let you go. You're so much fun to listen to and learn from. Thi, thank you so much and I look forward to doing this Weekend Extra on tabletop games. Fool on my friend.

Thi Nguyen: Thank you. It's been a good time.