The Score summary

Value capture helps explain why games usually feel liberating – and while metrics so often feel oppressive. As we’ve seen so far, metrics can lead us to outsource our values. But what if the metrics dominating our institutions were never designed with meaningful lives in mind, but with administrative convenience?

And yet, scoring systems aren't inherently the problem. We encounter them in games all the time, and there they tend to feel liberating. The difference comes down to something Nguyen calls striving, which means choosing a goal not because the outcome matters, but because the process of pursuing it is worthwhile.

So, why can’t we gamify our universities, governments, and corporations? In short: because the nature of bureaucracies resists playful control. There are four components to this, which Nguyen calls the Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy. Each of these Horsemen brings a gift –⁠ and demands a sacrifice. 

Let’s start with the first Horseman: Scale. Scale brings a genuine gift –⁠ he makes it possible to coordinate action across vast populations and territories. Thanks to Scale, government bureaucracies can administer services to millions and scientists can collaborate globally.

In a bass fishing tournament, there’s an official rule for how to turn various measures into a single score –⁠ for example, the combined weight of your three heaviest fish. This convergence is necessary because tournaments must deliver a clear verdict about who won.

Here, we see the gift of the second Horseman, the Horseman of Rules. He enables convergence, helping people behave as a tightly coordinated unit by ensuring that everyone applies the same standards in the same way. Rules take a bunch of messy data and combine it into one clean metric.

Imagine for a moment you’re baking a batch of chocolate chip cookies when, suddenly, you realize you’re out of white sugar. No problem –⁠ you can just go next door and borrow a cup from your neighbor. Later, once you restock, you can return a cup. And it doesn’t have to be the same cup of sugar –⁠ because the value of a given cup of refined sugar is the same as any other.

The opposite is true for unrefined brown sugar. Unlike white sugar, brown sugar has an enormous variety of tastes and textures. Some brown sugars taste grassy and vegetal, while others are warm and rich. You can’t easily substitute one type or brand for another.

Cities used to be labyrinthine things, full of twisting alleys and winding roads. That environment favored locals, who knew all the shortcuts and hiding places. They could, using this specialized knowledge, slip away from a tax collector or policeman in pursuit.

Modern cities, however, tend to be organized in a regular grid –⁠ allowing police or the army to easily navigate without specialized, local knowledge. This is precisely why, after a massive citizen revolt, the French government rebuilt Paris into a hub-and-spoke pattern. The new layout was far more legible to the military, composed as it was of a patchwork of people from all over. Control shifted away from locals and toward centralized authority.

So: what do we conclude from all of this? Should we abandon metrics entirely? That would be very costly, since metrics are such powerful tools for coordinating collective action. Maybe we can build better metrics? That won’t work either. As we’ve seen, metrics must be simplified and decontextualized to operate at scale.

The real answer is more modest –⁠ and more difficult. We need to manage the trade-offs of metrics deliberately, accepting the Horsemen only when their gifts are really worthwhile.