C. Thi Nguyen

speaker

3,183 appearances 5 recordings 5 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 7 Jul

C. Thi Nguyen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Two Percent with Michael Easter · #25: Why Numbers, Scores, and Metrics Make Life Worse | Thi Nguyen · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

With games, I think an important thing to understand about games is that...

What we're doing is not what we're doing.

Or the point is not the point.

So one way to put it, I think, is that in games, the goal and the purpose come apart.

The goal is what you're trying to pursue in the game, and the purpose is the larger reason you're doing it.

So the goal of charades is to win by communicating.

The purpose is to have fun.

And you can tell that that's actually the purpose, because if you lose and had a great time,

You succeeded, right?

Similarly for me, rock climbing, the point of rock climbing is to relax myself and enter a meditative state and kind of clear my brain.

And what's important is to do that, I have to go to the climbing gym or go to the crag and try, just focus intensely on getting to the top.

But even if I completely fail at getting to the top, when I leave, my mind will be clear.

My body will feel good.

You're still good to go.

Right.

So I call this striving play.

So striving play is something where you're aiming at a goal, but your real point is something in the process.

Yeah.

And one of the things we can do in games is that we can detach... Because games are so detached from the rest of the world, we can keep pushing around what the rules are.

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