C. Thi Nguyen

Odyssey, and you want to speed run it, or you want to go on ultra easy mode, because that's the thing that suits you, you can do that.

And I think, I mean, do we talk about Hobbes so far today?

Okay.

This is the thing...

that truly blew my mind.

While I was researching the book, I was talking to some people and a political scientist casually mentioned to me that a lot of this was in Hobbes.

And I was like, what?

And what he taught me was that what a lot of people know about Hobbes is that Hobbes thought morality came from political power and the person that got to dictate morality was the tyrant who had the most political power.

But what most people don't know is that Hobbes goes on to say what political power is.

And he says, it's not military might, it's not strength of arms,

The ultimate power in the world is power over language.

Because if you can tell people what success and failure mean, then you can control their actions from the inside.

And this is what scoring systems are.

They are ways of telling people what success and failure mean.

And in games, in the natural ecosystem of games...

We have granular low-level control over those meanings.

Games are a system that let you play around with meaning, and that just means try on different games, try on different scoring systems, wander that world.

Metrics are a system that make authoritarianism and centralization of meaning determination

easy and possible so the answer is not like there's some games are good some games are bad it's that there's a natural flexibility to navigate the space of games to tailor something to suit your peculiarity in the game space um that is inimical to the kind of central rigid structure of large-scale institutional metrics

I mean, that's a pretty good takeaway.