Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
CT Wen is a philosopher of games.
Chapter 2: What is the main question about the games we play in life?
He is the author of a new book called The Score, How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game. T, welcome to Bankless.
Hello. I have no idea what I'm doing here.
Chapter 3: How does Bernard Suits define what counts as a game?
I was going to ask you this in the pre-show, but, you know, I'm... Maybe we should ask it here.
Do you know what's amazing? I enjoyed your book so much and I've enjoyed some of your previous writings because so much of what you talk about on Bankless, which people think of Bankless as a crypto podcast, but what is crypto? It is finance. It is money. What is money? What is finance? It is a game.
So much of crypto takes place on another game engine that we call social media, Twitter, X. It's all games all the way down. Got it.
Chapter 4: What makes social media game-like but not a true game?
This is why I feel like there's so much to learn from you, Ashley T. Excellent.
You do not have the wrong person. I'm not walking into the wrong room.
No, this will be a lot of fun. I want to talk to you about games and social scalability and all of the interrelated things.
Chapter 5: Why can points and rankings become dangerous in our lives?
But actually, maybe the place to start, give this some salience for bankless listeners, is the way you start your book. There's a story in the first chapter of your book about someone that I personally identified with and maybe some bankless listeners might identify with as well. This is a student. She's an overachiever. She's obsessed with her body mass index or GPA.
She's the child of immigrants. Her parents pushed her to get 4.0s through school. She's a competitive golfer trying to get in the most highly ranked prestigious university. Basically, life gave her a set of these scoring systems. And she was trying to optimize for a high score throughout all of the systems that she was engaged in. And what snapped her out of it?
The idea that you promote that these things are games. Many of these systems... that she's engaged in, the rankings, the metrics, if she could step back and get some distance from them, if she could start asking questions about these systems rather than just accepting them. She changed her phone background to this constant reminder, is this the game you really want to be playing?
I really enjoyed that because it's a question I think that has some salience for everyone listening. Is this the game you really want to be playing?
Chapter 6: How does value capture affect our personal values and decisions?
Why is that an important question to you, T?
So, God, there's so many ways to talk about this. Maybe the most important thing for me, and this applies both to games, to real games and to games, game-like systems outside, is the idea that we have a significant choice in the games we play. We can pick the games we play. We can pick which scoring systems we engage in and we can pick and fine tune and tailor them.
We can shift and move them around. And I think like I've been trying to figure out for a while.
Chapter 7: What is the significance of Plato's cave in relation to metrics?
I wrote this book in part because the student wrote me that email after I gave an early talk version of a lot of this material. And I was trying to figure out what is it about the framing of how I was talking about things that was really impactful. And I think it's that we know in our hearts that we play games for fun, for enjoyment, for richness, for satisfaction.
And then if a game, if a game like pulls us in and then we, and if we fight all our might to like max out that score and then, and then we end up with like misery and sorrow, I think it's really intuitive to think to yourself like, no, you screwed up, right? Like I, I've had this experience a lot. Fly fishing. This is,
There's one mode of fly fishing I engage in, which is dry fly fishing, which is like very, very difficult, very weird. The point is to get a trout to eat your fly off the surface of the water. It's incredibly beautiful to me. It's incredibly satisfying. It's hard as hell.
You actually have to stalk and sneak and like move through the undergrowth and you like see a trout and then you like sneak up on the bank and you cast this delicate little cast like to the trout that you see. There's another mode of fishing that I don't enjoy. Enjoy.
Chapter 8: How can playfulness help us resist metric hypnosis?
Some people really enjoy. It's called euro nymphing. You're basically like bouncing this heavily weighted fly along the bottom. You can't see it. It's kind of exhausting. I find it miserable. Some people love it, but you catch a lot more fish. And one of the things I've been running into a lot of the times is a certain kind of person.
I was about to say dude, and I stopped myself, but I should just say like everybody I met like this is in fact a dude. A certain kind of dude who's like, you got a EuroNIF. It's such a better way to catch fish. And then they're like, I hate it. It's like, it's miserable. I just don't. Dry fly fishing is so much more fun, but you got to do it because you catch more fish.
It's so much more efficient. And I'm kind of like, we're letting the fish go, man. Like this is a game. This is a catch and release game. Like you go out, you catch some number of fish and then you let them go and you go home. And what is the goddamn point? Right. And I think like this is there are times when you're forced to do something because you need to survive.
But there are other times where we make these choices. And I think like this is like I think a lot of the times we don't even realize we're making a choice. We think it's forced on us. I think the dude that I'm thinking there's a specific guy ran into just miserable on the side of the river, just like hating his fishing and thinking he had to do this. They thought it wasn't a choice.
He thought he had to optimize for this particular score. And I don't know, that seems to. missed the point of the whole thing. So yeah, that's why it's important to me.
I think when we invoke the word game, when somebody invokes the word game in a conversation, people's brains probably go straight to something like chess or video games. We are obviously talking about games in a more expansive fashion than that, like using games as a lens to view a lot of our behavior that we engage in. How expansive can we really get here? Like how far does this really go?
Is everything a game? No matter what environment that we're in, is it always a game? Or is it possible to escape games? How expansive can we really get here?
Right. So I think this is really important because... I don't think everything is a game. When I started thinking about this stuff, I was kind of lost about what a game really was. It seemed like really an important concept, but I couldn't get my hands around it until I found this incredible book by Bernard Suits called The Grasshopper. He's a philosopher. He wrote in the 70s.
This book is kind of a cult classic. And in it, he gives a definition of games that I think is incredibly useful because it like points to one specific point of life, but not everything. So there's a short version and a long version. I'll give you the short version first, but I suspect you're going to want the details of the long version.
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