David Runciman · Trivial Pursuits: Gamification
Trivial PursuitsDavid Runciman
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Vol. 48 No. 10 · 4 June 2026
Trivial Pursuits<br>David Runciman
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The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game<br>by C. Thi Nguyen.<br>Allen Lane, 353 pp., £25, January, 978 0 241 65397 5Show More
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Like many millions of people, I usually begin my morning doing a few gentle word puzzles on newspaper websites: Connections and Strands in the New York Times, Polygon and Codeword in the Times, plus a couple of others. I do it strictly by the clock so it doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes, and I don’t take it very seriously – I have till now resisted the endless offers to pay for a subscription that would allow me to track my scores, share my results and compare my performance with that of others. Nonetheless, and though I would swear I am not a superstitious person, I am conscious of a gut feeling when I do well (all the words, all the connections, no hints!) that the day is going to be a good one and an even stronger sense when I mess up that it’s a sign of more bad things to come. Do I believe this nonsense in order to motivate me to try harder or do I try harder because I believe this nonsense? I have no idea. But it works for me, especially since it makes me feel that by the time I get to the news in the newspapers the important stuff has already happened, which makes the news easier to digest.<br>The games I play each day are almost embarrassingly simple; there are far tougher ones that I avoid because they would take too long and would probably leave me with a sense of impending disaster. There is a world of game-playing out there that makes far greater demands of the players, from elegant cryptic crosswords through to complex strategy board games and on to multi-level role-playing computer games. Some of these games will take over your life if you let them. At the same time, prompts that come with even the simplest online games are designed to make you hand over more than just your passing attention. Why do newspapers take so much time and trouble to promote their games and puzzles sections to their readers? Because they know that it’s an excellent hook for keeping them on the website. That way, even if they don’t sign up for all the performance metrics on offer, they are still conforming to the various measures media outlets value – minutes, clicks, idents and the rest.<br>My modest game-playing habit falls somewhere between these two poles. On the one hand, there are better, smarter and more rewarding games that I could be playing. On the other, there are far more intrusive and extractive forms of gamification and data-harvesting that lie in wait for unwary participants in just about any online (and indeed offline) activity. C. Thi Nguyen wants us to recognise the enormous difference between these two ways of playing. One offers rich human experiences. The other threatens to turn all human experiences into a measurable and marketable product. The reason we might muddle them up is that they both rely on the same mechanism: scoring. All games need scoring systems – whether simple or complex – to make it possible to know who is winning, or if it is a collaborative game, what the shared goal is. Without a measure of progress, it is impossible to be sure whether any progress is being made. Money-sucking metrics are also a form of scoring – sometimes explicitly (‘Improve your credit score!’), but more often buried in the background. We don’t get to see the way the time we spend playing games improves the ability of online platforms to sell our data to their advertisers. But we can be sure all the same that we’ve become a number.<br>Nguyen, a keen game-player himself, suggests a series of useful tests for distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy scoring systems. Good games deploy essentially arbitrary means of keeping score. Their measures of achievement exist not as ends in themselves but simply as devices to allow creative/competitive/co-operative activity to take place under their auspices. The fact that in contract bridge spades and hearts score thirty points per trick and diamonds and clubs score...