C. Thi Nguyen

It's that you can house rule poker, but you can't house rule GPA, right?

Yeah, it doesn't matter which game you're talking about.

What I mean is you have an enormous degree of freedom over games.

So if I tried running, I hate running.

It turns out it's super boring for me.

And so I started rock climbing.

Other people I know can't stand rock climbing and they love the zen out of running.

and that's fine.

And I, at some point, stopped chasing difficulty in rock climbing and started chasing elegance, and that's fine.

And some people might play poker and like the kind of classic, no-limit, incredibly intense style, and other people might want something goofier, and they can introduce house rules, and that's fine.

And the reason it's fine is not accidental.

It's because games...

are essentially a space that do not require cross-contextual compatibility.

That's the crucial difference in games and metrics.

GPA is powerful.

Page views are powerful precisely because they're held stable at scale.

If you screw with them, they lose their communicative power.

But scoring, unless, I mean, again, this isn't true of all games.

If you're in a large-scale professional organization or you're trying to climb the leaderboard of the world chess rankings, this doesn't apply.

But if you are casually playing Mario...