"For Nguyen, the point — and pleasure — of games is play, not efficiency; a person who simply wants to catch more fish would trade Nguyen’s feathery hand-tied flies..."

"... for a big net or a blast of dynamite.... Nguyen, whose day job is as a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, contrasts the delightful thrill of playing games like basketball, The Legend of Zelda and Dungeons & Dragons with the demoralizing pursuit of university rankings, page views and social media likes: 'Why is it that mechanical scoring systems are, in games, the site of so much joy and fluidity and play? And why, in the realm of public measures and institutional metrics, do they drain the life out of everything?'... Nguyen, 48... brought out various toys...yo-yos, spin tops, a Japanese ball-and-cup thingumajig known as a kendama.... 'All of my hobbies involve basically micro-dosing epiphanies,' Nguyen said at one point. 'Every time you’re yo-yoing, you’re like, If I change my angle this much, or if I pull a little bit here, or if I drop it, oh, then it works!' The fact that the stakes are so low is not a deficit of the yo-yo (or the kendama, or D&D, or fly-fishing); low stakes are part of the point, allowing us to move from one game to another. Nguyen argues that problems emerge when the stakes become all-consuming, taking over our sense of self and dictating what we should value...."

I'm reading "Why Keeping Score Isn’t Fun Anymore/In a new book, C. Thi Nguyen looks to his personal passions — from video games to yo-yoing — to illuminate the downside of our increasingly gamified world" by Jennifer Szalai (NYT)(gift link).

I see the connection to blogging. I'm going to read Nguyen's book, "The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game" (commission earned).

I thought the article was going to have something in it about how sports betting ruins the fun of spectator sports, but no. Is that in the book? I can tell you that the word "football" does not appear in the book and "baseball" only appears in the context of a baseball cap worn by Tsukasa Takatsu, "a minor saint, beloved of a very tiny sect of passionate yo-yo players."

ADDED: Nguyen sees low stakes as a positive force, but the most famous thing anyone ever said about low stakes is Sayre's law: Responding to "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake," Sayre quipped: "That is why academic politics are so bitter." Usually restated as: "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."