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

So games have this isolation which lets them be radically different.

Like if I want to change my game or play a different game, if we want to play...

I think sometimes my kids and I, we play Super Mario Smash, and sometimes we play in a normal way, and sometimes we play for the most spectacular death possible.

Who cares about who wins, right?

And you can just do that.

Metrics are not like that because metrics are attached to real-world resources and attached to each other.

The whole point of metrics is that they're interconnected, right?

The whole point is that everyone counts on them in the same way, so you cannot alter them

in a way that makes it better for you.

I mean, the dumbest way to put it is that you can house rule poker, but you can't house rule GPA.

You can't house rule like Twitter likes, because the thing that gave them the value in the first place was that we were all counting in the same way.

Achievement play is when you play because you value winning, and striving play is when you play because you value the struggle.

And what's interesting is to get that struggle, you actually have to try to win, but winning doesn't actually matter, right?

And so one of the... I think one of the interesting things is that we can slide the reasons we play all around because the point isn't the point, because the goal isn't the point, right?

So, I mean...

I can shift my reasons for playing fluidly during the game, right?

Like, sometimes...

Sometimes I can be playing to win and then realize that this is not enjoyable and then I can start goofing off.

Sometimes I can be, I mean, one thing I'll often do is I'll be goofing off with my kid on a video game and then suddenly realize that my kids are not getting old enough that they can beat me.

I'm like, oh, wait, this is an interesting challenge.

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