Playing the Right Games: Why Scores Quietly Replace Meaning | C. Thi Nguyen
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CT Wen is a philosopher of games. He is the author of a new book called the score, how to stop playing someone else's game. Tee, welcome to bankless.
Hello. I have no idea what I'm doing here. I was gonna ask you this in the preshow, but, you know, I'm I maybe we shouldn't ask it here. Like
Do do you know what's I'm excited. Do you know what's amazing? I I enjoyed your book so much, and I've enjoyed some of your previous writings because so much of what you talk about on bankless, which people think of bankless as a crypto podcast. But what is crypto? It is finance. It is money. What is money? What is finance? It is a game. Mhmm. So much of crypto takes place on another game engine that we call social media, Twitter, x. It's all games all the way down.
Got it.
And so this is why I feel like there's so much to learn from you, actually, Tee.
Excellent. I then you do not have the wrong person. I'm not walking into the wrong room.
Now this will be a lot of fun. I wanna talk to you about games and and social scalability and all of the interrelated things. But, actually, may maybe the place to start, give this some salience for bankless listeners, is the way you start your book. There's a story in the first chapter of your book about someone that I personally identified with and maybe some bankless listeners might identify with as well. This is a student. She's an overachiever. She's obsessed with her body mass index, her GPA. She's the child of immigrants. She her parents pushed her to get four point o's through school.
god, there's so many there's so many ways to talk about this. Maybe the most important thing for me, and this applies both to games, to real games, and to games game like systems outside is the idea that we have a significant choice in the games we play. We can pick the games we play. We can pick which scoring systems we engage in, and we can pick and fine tune and tailor them. We can shift and move them around. And I think like I've been trying to figure out for a while. I I wrote this book in part because the student wrote that me that email after I gave an early talk version of this a lot o
I think when we invoke the word game, when somebody invokes the word game in a conversation, people's brains probably go straight to something like, you know, chess or or video games. We are obviously talking about games in a more expansive fashion than that, like using games as a lens to view a lot of our behavior that we engage in. How expansive can we really get here? Like, how far does this really go? Is, like, everything a game no matter no matter what environment that we're in? Is it always a game? Or, like or is there is it possible to escape games? Like, how expensive can we really get
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