C. Thi Nguyen

And it might not be a game.

A lot of these systems, a lot of people respond to ranking systems just because they are incentives that are connected to money.

They'll do anything they can to make them go up.

That's an important phenomenon that's right next to games.

But if we can find something that intuitively feels to you like cheating, like not the way you wanted to do it, like if there's anything I could say where you would be like, I wanted that, but not that way.

Like what's in some sense what's crucial to suits is that what a game is, is something where we care about the method that we did it.

We care that we did it out of this particular talent or using this particular ability, right?

You probably care that you get podcast count by people listening to you talk and you doing the interviews live instead of having an optimized bot create a similar acronym of you.

What really matters for thinking about social media, I think at some point the question of is this a game by that definition I gave is a boring question.

That's not what I actually care about here.

What matters is the fact that certain game-like things are happening.

And I actually think what's really crucial to understand the damage of the gamification of social media is to understand that it's not a game in a really profound way, but it's superficially game-like and it motivates us in a game-like way.

Yeah, I think the crucial thing that when I'm thinking about social media as a gamified platform, I'm thinking that's because it renders a clear singular pronouncement of how well you did.

So the crucial thing it has is a scoring system.

I...

Scoring systems are really interesting to me.

So when I wrote my first book about games, my academic book about games as an art form, I didn't realize something really crucial, which is that you can have a game without having a scoring system.

So I think one way to think about it is that what a scoring system is, is it something that yields an instant clear verdict that everyone agrees to, right?

Like, so if we play a game, we all agree to a particular scoring system and then the scoring system looks at our activities and it spits out a bunch of points and we know exactly how we did and there's no way to argue it, right?

So if you're playing like one of the classic German games,