Is Life a Game?

"Every summer for the past few years, I've taught a multiday seminar for philosophy professors who want to write for magazines. The seminars involve a fair amount of after-dinner chitchat under the stars, during which talk often winds its way to the weirdness of being a professional philosopher. It turns out, for instance, that philosophy departments are ruled by rankings. A single website, the Philosophical Gourmet, ranks graduate programs in philosophy, sorting them not just in general terms (N.Y.U., Rutgers, and Princeton are currently the top three) but by specialization (Oxford wins for normative ethics, the University of Toronto for American pragmatism). The rankings are based on a survey which asks philosophy professors to rate one another, and its effects, people say, are widespread. One professor told me that it's not unusual for hiring decisions to take the rankings into account. In theory, no one cares about them. But any given department knows that, if it brings on the right philosopher, it could dominate Chinese philosophy, or own the Nietzsche space."

"Philosophers are supposed to be clear thinkers; shouldn't they see through thought traps like this? The problem is that metrics are seductive. Once something is being ranked, it becomes almost impossible to get that ranking out of your head. Over time, this can lead to what C. Thi Nguyen calls "value capture." In " The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game," Nguyen writes that "value capture occurs when you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them." Because we live in a world in which nearly everything is quantified and ranked, value capture is everywhere."

"In "The Score," the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues that play is the meaning of life."

Value capture occurs when individuals adopt values from external sources and allow those values to govern behavior without modification. Quantification and ranking systems create pervasive incentives that distort priorities and decision-making. Rankings of academic departments influence hiring, specialization, and institutional status, producing strategic behavior aimed at improving scores. Play functions as a contrasting mode of meaningful activity: it is self-directed, governed by internal goals and scoring systems, and pursued for its own sake. Emphasizing play helps resist external metrics, restore autonomous valuation, and recover activities motivated by intrinsic engagement rather than instrumental reward.

Read at The New Yorker