Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
A podcast from the Digital Futures Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University about play and pop culture. Professors Haeny Yoon and Nathan Holbert talk with educators, parents and kids about how they play in their work and their lives, and why play and pop culture matter.
The views expressed in this podcast are solely those of the speaker to whom they are attributed. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the faculty, administration, staff or Trustees either of Teachers College or of Columbia University.
Nathan Holbert:
Welcome to Pop and Play, the podcast all about play and pop culture and how it shapes our lives. I'm Nathan Holbert, and with me as always is Haeny, King of Kong, Yoon.
Haeny Yoon:
Okay. I was not expecting that at all. Okay. Anyway, I'm Haeny Yoon, and today we are very excited to welcome our guest, C. Thi Nguyen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. Go Utah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Hello, hello, hello.
Haeny Yoon:
Former food writer, current philosopher of games and technology. Thi has published two books, Games: Agency as Art, which is the first entry into our introduction of his work, and his newest book, The Score, which we're excited to talk with him about today. Welcome Thi.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Hello.
Nathan Holbert:
Thanks for joining us today. We're excited for you to be around, and for you to pop over here, and hang out with us on the podcast. Haeny and I, as Haeny mentioned, we came across your work with Games: Agency as Art, and I believe you sent me a text message about it, and just dropped it in my text message, and I read it. I was like, "Oh, my God, this is so great. This is what we've been talking about."
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. And we read the New Yorker article, which was great.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, yeah. We're really excited for you to be here to hang out with us today.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Excellent. I really need to know what people from the Teachers College, what was the passionate excitement point in the Games: Agency as Art stuff?
Haeny Yoon:
Do you want to go first, because you went down a rabbit hole over one weekend?
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, right. Well, this is a core punchline too of the score about why we play, and the ways in which our motivations, and our interests, and our values. There's places where they conflict, there's places where they're freely flowing, but that sense of games as a space for playing with agency, for exploring how we can act, and why we can act, and what it means to act, I think is really fun and exciting to us.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. I don't know. I feel like you're now hosting this podcast and asking us questions, but-
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, I love it. It's such a turn of the tables.
Haeny Yoon:
I think for me, okay, I read that New York article. I was in bed. Okay, so I'm scrolling, looking at the New York article. I think that was my first reading, and then I started the Games: Art and Agency. And I think it reminded me of this pivot that I had in my life. I had a philosophical moment where after COVID, which happened to coincide with when I got tenure, right?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yep, yep.
Haeny Yoon:
I was starting to think about why am I so guided and centralizing these metrics of my performance, and success, when I'm not thinking about play for play's sake, right-
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah.
Haeny Yoon:
... or thinking about like, yeah, maybe these metrics have gotten me to this point, but it's maybe gotten me to this point where I really need to pivot and think about a different way to measure myself.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah, there's like two levels of this question for me. The question of the book is like, why are scoring systems so fun in games and so awful in institutions-
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yes.
C. Thi Nguyen:
... and trying to explain that. But, I think there's another ... It's not quite the same section, but there's this thing underneath that I really care about, which is like, even though we're talking about games in the classroom, and games in education, like a thing I've been upset about is that so many people who talk about play in this kind of context try to instrumentalize it, and try to make it for something else. And I'm guilty of this too.
Haeny Yoon:
God, yes, you're speaking my language.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah, so I will ... During this book, the story is in the book, but like one of the weirder things to do is I learned to yo-yo. And the reason I learned to yo-yo, by the way, is I was going down a YouTube rabbit hole of looking for examples of cases where I thought a stylish, beautiful, expressive, aesthetic hobby got changed by a competition scene. Skateboarding-
Haeny Yoon:
Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, skateboarding was in there as well, yeah, yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
But, I was like, what about, and I was just trying stuff, and I found yo-yo. And again, it's this case where there's this like this beautiful flowing expressive style. I wouldn't say it gets corrupted, but it gets changed deeply into speed, and difficulty oriented competition scene. I get into it, and I started to yo-yo. And let me just say, this is, I'll talk about this at the top here, but in the book I say it at the end, because everyone gives me such weird looks, and it's this beautiful thing where you're yo-yoing and the yo-yo is like, they're very fluid.
The modern ones will spin for two or three minutes. You create these really beautiful knot structures and it feels like very rhythmic, and very sensual, and very mobile, and freeing, and I love it. And when people ask me about it, I almost always say like, "Yeah, it's a really good work reset, and it like really clears my mind, and helps me solve problems, and it like gets me." And in some sense, like what I fall into, and I can feel it, is this like play is justified if it helps you work more. And what I actually want to say is like, no, right? The reason we work is to support a life full of play and get it so easy on the other side to push the play as good if it's developmental, or helps build grit, or if it resets you, or if it like helps you meditate in order to solve your work problems.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And I fall into that, and it's true it does all these things for me, but also I hate it.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
Well, the pressure to ... Part of it might be the pressure that you genuinely feel that way, but also part of it might be the pressure to feel like I need to explain why I'm yo-yoing to Haeny so she's not judging the time that I've spent on it, right?
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, I judge you constantly.
Nathan Holbert:
Always. Yeah. I never do the same to you by the way.
C. Thi Nguyen:
But, it is ... It is like, I guess like this is skipping to the end of the book, but like-
Nathan Holbert:
Perfect.
C. Thi Nguyen:
... I think the whole point is that the world of outcomes and metrics, the answer to that question, a center of that world is it's rigidified. It's rigidified because the demand is the values to be understandable to everyone instantly, that it's in some standard value currency, and play is the place where we're let loose to find things that like you don't need anybody but you or a friend, a couple of friends around your like role playing table to like the story you're telling, and by its nature, when you're freed up in that way, what you do will seem weird and stupid. I've almost started to think that like in some sense, if you're looking for pockets of genuine, authentic play and joy, really authentic, you should look for things that the world thinks are stupid, because stupidity is the Bible.
Nathan Holbert:
I'm crushing it, by the way. I am killing it in life.
Haeny Yoon:
Oh, my God.
Nathan Holbert:
Okay. Thi, I want to get into some questions for you about your book, and I want to start with, you already mentioned this, that a core topic of the book has to do with metrics, right? It's called the score. You get into the ways in which things designed in the world force us into certain patterns, but also the way in which metrics can be playful-
C. Thi Nguyen:
Right.
Nathan Holbert:
... and how like rules and structures of games can invite us to play in a way that we wouldn't normally do without them. I have a longstanding argument with a colleague, a frequent guest on the show, Letha Vasa Davin, about whether or not rules-
Haeny Yoon:
Oh, wow, I didn't know you were going to call her out.
Nathan Holbert:
I called her out. She's listening. Whether or not rules are necessary for games in play. Are they a necessary condition? Not necessarily rules that got started ahead of time, but rules are, maybe they're planned ahead, maybe they're emergent, but rules are necessary component of play. Can you answer for us finally as the expert on the topic, and I want to know why am I right-
Haeny Yoon:
Oh, my God. I'm about to fight you.
Nathan Holbert:
... that rules are necessary.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Okay. Okay. I have a bunch of answers.
Nathan Holbert:
Okay.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Some of it are boring and I think there's a real different question.
Nathan Holbert:
Okay, good.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Philosophers.
Haeny Yoon:
Philosophers.
C. Thi Nguyen:
I think games, first of all, games and play are different concepts, and I think that's important to keep separated. Bernard Suits, my favorite philosopher of games, he's this example where he's like, look, some games are play and some are not. He says a lot of gameplay, you're doing the thing, so let's back up. The way he defines a game is playing a game is voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the struggle to overcome them. It's obstacles for the sake of something valuable of the struggle.
Nathan Holbert:
Right, so Bernard Suits says, "I'm right."
C. Thi Nguyen:
Wait, hold on. And then, he says, "Play is redirecting normally instrumental resources for intrinsically valuable activity-
Nathan Holbert:
Right, right.
C. Thi Nguyen:
... or the short version of that is like wasting resources for fun."
Nathan Holbert:
Right, right.
C. Thi Nguyen:
He points out that they are separate, they overlap a lot, but, if we play a board game for fun, that's a game and a play. If you are a boxer, and you hate boxing, but it's the only source of income for you, that's a game, but it's work, not play. And if you're just screwing around with your friends, like kids rolling around in the dirt or people like suddenly spontaneously food fighting, that's play, but not a game.
Haeny Yoon:
Okay.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Games have rules, but that's just definitional. Like that's what a game is. A game is you take on constraints that shape an activity, and when you're doing the thing inside those constraints like that, that ... One way to put it is that what Suits is saying is games are things where you add rules, and you invent new kinds of activity-
Haeny Yoon:
Right.
C. Thi Nguyen:
... that never existed before, right? There's no such thing as dribbling or layup without the rules of basketball.
Haeny Yoon:
You actually answered a really important question for me, because I feel like a couple of weeks ago you heard me say this. I was like, I'm really invested in the idea of play, and I really ... It's part of my research, it's part of how I think about my life, it's part of how I've tried to shift my priorities and things like that. But, I don't like games. I wouldn't say my favorite thing to do is to play games. Playing games feels like work for me, because I don't see games and play as synonyms. I don't see them as necessarily the same things, right? And I feel like you answered a really important key there, which is that Nathan isn't always right.
C. Thi Nguyen:
I'm excited, because I think if I put it right, my answer will piss you both off.
Haeny Yoon:
Okay. Oh, good.
Nathan Holbert:
This is perfect.
C. Thi Nguyen:
There is deeply a kind of play that is completely accessible without rules. Another, Maria Laguna is my other favorite philosopher play says that play is lightly shifting between worlds. Again, if you're just changing perspectives lightly and easily, you can be playful without playing games. And she agrees with you that the height of play is ruleless play where you're just moving of your own accord. I don't think so. I think there are two very different forms of play, and that the playing we do with games has a distinctive magic that's completely different from ruleless play. Here's one way to put it. I have a friend, some of this stuff is just addressed in my head to a friend of mine who had the same view as you that was like, her way of putting it would be like, "Play is free, play is creative. I can be myself like, why would I ever follow the rules?" And we'd go to the climbing gym and she'd be like, "Why would I ever follow the rules of like this particular route or that one? I'm just going to play."
Haeny Yoon:
And then she falls.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Well, no, actually it's the opposite. It's easier. Yeah. If you don't ... The rules and the rock climbing gym are, here are these specific routes that are set on this color hold and you have to stay to those. If you don't follow those rules and use everything, you're never going to get past a particular difficulty level, and you're never going to experience ... I think one of the interesting things is that a set rock climb, a specific set of holds because of the particular difficulty involved, can teach you a way of moving. You never had to control your hips that much before.
You never had to slide so precisely before, but this particular challenge shapes that. I think something similar happens with a lot of games because games are such tight structures, because they specify goals so carefully and they specify constraints so carefully, they are little sculptures of action, and they can plunge you into kinds of action that you never had before. I think my favorite board game, which is completely evil, is the game Imperial. Imperial is a board game where it's World War I, and all the countries are fighting, but you don't play the countries. You play shadowy investors changing investments in the countries to control the war for profit.
Haeny Yoon:
Oh, my God.
C. Thi Nguyen:
But, it teaches you things. The way the game is played is like ... I think one of the first times ... I didn't get it. And in the middle of the first game, I controlled England, and my friend Sarah controlled Germany, and Germany was about to attack England, and I thought war was inevitable, and I was like, oh no, I just need to sell her some cheap stock in England, and now she's co-invested. And so, I did not have access to this kind of coincentive thinking.
But, the specific structure of the game pushed me there. One way to think about it is like, games are a way of communicating play because there are different forms of play, and games stabilize a specific kind, and there is a fantasy in which you didn't need games. And that is the fantasy in which without structure, we would be perfectly creative, but what the world actually teaches us is without structure, we often just follow particular habits and we don't expand. For me, it's in the book, but I think for me, it's kind of like the idea of like recipes, like recipes might be too constraining, but if you never follow, but they're also how you learn a new cuisine that's different.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, okay, yep.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And so, the rigidity, all communication requires some rigidity. Imagine if you're like, why do I need to follow the rules of language? I'll just interpret any words I want and the answer is nice freedom, you'll never learn anything-
Nathan Holbert:
Or communicate.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Or communicate, yeah, right? And I think games are a way of communicating. Play can be deeply freeing. And I think if you are stuck on one game, and you can never depart from those rules, it'll trash your freedom. But, if you use games to like traipse across the landscape of different actions, and explore different ways of being that you might not have had until they're fixed in a game, then this is increasing your vocabulary. This is like creating new possibilities for you.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. What I'm hearing is that I do ... I feel like games or things related to that like recipe following or set of rules, I feel like it gives you a structure to enter into something. And I think like you said, it gives you a structure into something that maybe you haven't experienced before, because I think about the recent role playing game experience that we had.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Haeny Yoon:
And I feel like if I was never forced into that situation, I would never have thought about how interesting and delightful it is to create a narrative, and a story together, and to actually engage in something that wasn't comfortable for me, and it was in a safe confine of these structures, right-
Nathan Holbert:
Yep, yep.
Haeny Yoon:
... that helped me enter.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. Yeah. The rules create that kind of invitation, right? And they also nudge you and poke you in ways that, like you said, you may not have tried, or they help you figure out how to move your hips in a way that you wouldn't normally try to kind of explore and control. I think that's where, for me, the argument around my stance about the importance of rules is not ... Rules as a word ... I often am telling my design students that this word constraints feels negative, but constraints are incredibly empowering, and inventive. And rules, I feel like are the same way. The word has this connotation which sounds negative, and it sounds sort top down, but oftentimes, if you have a kid who's like hopping on just the white lines as they cross the street, that's obviously play. I think we would all agree with that, but that's also a rule that they gave themselves just spontaneously when they were crossing the street. And so, I don't know, I think of rules as actually being these fun little ways of tinkering and exploring the world.
C. Thi Nguyen:
I have terrible news for you, but this thought is also in Rousseau. No, really? No. Part of the core idea of Rousseau is that rules and governance adopted freely actually increase our freedom and rights. The entire idea of Rousseau is that if you thought that no rules meant more freedom, then think about the state of nature where everyone can kill each other, that what we construct, we construct larger freedoms, positive freedoms ... I'm really dragging down the tone here ... By creating structures that create newer, richer freedoms, the freedom to walk around without being killed and like ... And I think there's something really interesting. I have this really simple example sometimes. Imagine an empty field, you can move in any direction, you're free. Imagine we add a room with doors that lock and windows. In a sense, you're constrained because you can't move in every direction, but in a sense, what you have is a richer option set, right? You can be inside or outside.
And I think that's an interesting thing that games do is they create their creative structure ... Okay, this is going to sound weird, but there's a way in which building walls is both an act of constraint and it's architecture. It's creating new spaces for us to inhabit. And I think that's what games are simultaneously, but unlike a lot of other things, games, at least of their best, should be voluntary. And so, you can enter the structure and then you can take it down. Kick it down. And so, it seems like a deeper meta freedom.
Nathan Holbert:
We solved it.
Haeny Yoon:
It's basically what you're saying in your book. It's the idea that these rules, we engage in them, because it's the process rather than focusing on the outcome of it, right? Like what do you gain by the process of going through these obstacles, and challenges, and rules, and what is the functional feeling of that, but then what is also the affective feeling of engaging in that way?
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, yeah. That seems to me to be one of the most exciting parts of what you talk about here is you really do focus on process, and the like messiness and beauty, and the ways in which things like games or various kinds of play can not force us, but really prime us to live in the process, live in those experiences in those moments. And that's something we certainly talk a lot about in education too, right?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah. I think one of the interesting things about this Bernard Suits book, The Grasshopper that I'm obsessed with is that ... He's an Aristotle scholar, and he's, I think, just vibing with the original Aristotle idea that the meaning of life comes from rich activity, not from outcomes. But, I think what Suits thinks is that game ... It's a truth you don't need games to acknowledge, but games force you to acknowledge, like they rub your face in it, right? Why would you put on unnecessary constraints if you actually just wanted the outcome? The only explanation is that you value something about the process. And I think for me, what games force us to think of, not all games. I think like ... The important distinction for me here is between achievement play and striving play.
Nathan Holbert:
Right.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Achievement play is playing because you value winning, and striving play is temporarily taking on an interest in winning so you can have the process. And I think with striving play, the best way to put it is in ordinary life, you take the means for the sake of the ends, but in game life, you take the ends for the sake of the means, and it's so ... I'm a rock climber, and it's so clear to me that I need to invest myself in the intense desire to get to the top, or it won't be like thrilling and intense. But, the moment I get to the top, I immediately lower off, right? Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
Let's do it again.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah. And I think games ... And this is, I think, why games and play are often so underrated because I think the world we're living in has been perverted, and the correct view is that the point of making stuff is either that the stuff is interesting, that it's a good process, or it like supports us in further interesting activities or process, and instead, the world ... Oh, I just thought of the worst thing to say. The world we're in is one where we value the outcome so much that we push ourselves into grinding miserable processes, and we keep piling up more outcomes, and making the processes worse and worse until like ... And then you're like, where's the value? Where do the importance go? Okay, here's the incredibly terrible thing that I just thought of. I love this moment in Tim Rogers, he's a really good game critic, and his old website, Action Button, he has this review of the Sims Social-
Nathan Holbert:
Okay.
Haeny Yoon:
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
C. Thi Nguyen:
... which is one of the early free to play games that engineered the free to play structure. And he says, "Free to play games like this are essentially evil, because in order to get money from you, they need to first addict you to winning, and then make the process of play so miserable that you're willing to pay to skip the process of play."
Nathan Holbert:
To skip.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And he says, right? That's an essentially evil structure-
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
... because they're addicting you to something that is meaningless where the only meaning it could have been, the points could have had, was to have an interesting process-
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
... and then they are janking the process.
Haeny Yoon:
Right.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And I think the world will win has applied that logic to everything.
Nathan Holbert:
It's all Farmville. I'm going to need you to have a little more evidence that the world is a mess though, please, that you can just say that without any sort of evidence.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. I wonder though, can you ... I want to ... We've been dancing around a question that certainly I know is in my mind a lot. And Haeny mentioned something similar earlier about the ways in which some people, some of us find ourselves in places where metrics are driving everything. Many of our students are having to really focus on metrics. Certainly, whenever we were working on tenure, or other like levels of promotion, we're thinking about metrics, and how people are going to evaluate us. In your book, you talk about the sort of philosophy rankings and things. What do we do with that? Sometimes we are stuck in these systems, whether or not ... And stuck in a way that, I mean ... Let me maybe add a little layer to this. I find great pleasure and joy in my work, and to continue to do this work in which I find the process meaningful and beautiful, I also have to play this other game, right? How do we think about that? How do we push back on those competing pressures?
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, can I add? And I think we were talking about how for some people, those pressures are very high stakes, right? And so, I think we were discussing how it's so easy for us on this side of tenure to be like, let's not worry about metrics. Let's try to make things creative, and fun, and less serious, right, and less high stakes. But then, I think we forgot that on the other side of tenure, we were not having that same kind of mentality, right?
Nathan Holbert:
Yep.
Haeny Yoon:
And then, at the same time, we're trying to really work with and collaborate with our grad students around trying to think of a different kind of academia and a different kind of metric to think to evaluate success or achievement or whatever that might mean to them, but it's really hard to convince people to sit outside of that.
C. Thi Nguyen:
There's two answers to the question. One of them is addressed to the individual who has no power over the institution, and has to survive-
Nathan Holbert:
Mm-hmm, yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
... and the other is addressed to the kinds of people that have some degree of institutional power, especially because I know this is an education podcast. It's funny because, a lot of educators mostly think of themselves as under the gun of metrics, and scoring system design, because they have to report outcomes and all this stuff. But, they are also creators of scoring for their students.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And one of the ironies, a lot of this behind a lot of this book was rage at some of my colleagues who would complain about the authoritarian metric structures they were given, and then turn around and apply aggressively authoritarian grading systems in their class. This is deeply related to my experience during COVID, by the way, of professors who talked about the horrors of authoritarian surveillance, and then forced their students to take tests with eye tracking software [inaudible 00:26:00]. And literally, I know someone who taught and made their students take a class on the Foucault's analysis of the horrors of surveillance via highly surveillance. You have to have the camera on for the entire process of writing.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah, right.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And I think with education it's super interesting, because we do have so much control. Maybe we'll have control at our administrative level, but at least have our classrooms, we have a fair degree of control.
Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Let me talk about the individual level first when you're under the gun, and then I'll flip. But, I think an important thing with metrics, actually, if you hate them, is to realize what's good about them, because I think there's a false negativity that's actually deeply optimistic that's like, metrics are terrible. And it imagines there's some perfect world without them-
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, right.
C. Thi Nguyen:
... and I don't think that's there. I think even if you hate them, you have to acknowledge what they're for. The best analysis of this came from Theodore Porter for me, the historian of quantification, who I found so clarifying about this. In his claim, and he was trying to understand why administrators and politicians love metrics too much, his thought was that qualitative and quantitative information was good for different things, and you had to understand what they were good and bad for, and then balance them and the worry was overreaching. He says that qualitative information is nuanced, open-ended, dynamic, context-sensitive, but it travels badly between context because you need a lot of shared background information. Think like qualitative writing on student essays.
Nathan Holbert:
Students, I hope you're listening.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
Method students.
C. Thi Nguyen:
The grades, quantitative information travels well between context because it's been designed to be. His claim is that what data is, is a structure of information that's been designed to be portable, and it's designed to be portable by stripping out high context, high nuance, high background information. If you move to letter grades, right, since everyone understands them approximately the same way, then they can be comprehended at different levels of institution, and then they can aggregate instantly. And the insight that I find so terrifying and so interesting is that the social power and usefulness of metrics is inextricably bound up with their thinness and their information lossiness, right?
Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm.
Nathan Holbert:
Right.
C. Thi Nguyen:
It's the context stripping that makes them do that job. I think to understand how to live with metrics, you have to understand that they are useful, and that they allow large scale data aggregation, and a certain kind of objectivity, and they're a quick reference for large scale collective communication precisely because they're so lossy and insensitive, so that you can see what they're good for, right?
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm.
C. Thi Nguyen:
If you need to track something quickly at scale, you can also see exactly what they're bad for, which is highly nuanced, highly context-sensitive information. And so, I think there's an idea, which is hard, which is to treat them as very rough approximate proxies that are useful for fast communication, but are going to lose most of any particular nuance. And so, you have to treat them at very rough arms' length.
Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
C. Thi Nguyen:
I think one of my favorite examples here is like ... BMI, like I think a lot of people know that BMI is a terrible health measure, but it originally started as a public health metric where if a huge population suddenly jumped up or down BMI massively, you knew something was up-
Nathan Holbert:
Right.
C. Thi Nguyen:
... and so you had ... That, for that purpose-
Nathan Holbert:
It's an aggregate measure.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
For that purpose, it's fine, but that's a very minimal purpose. It's when you start letting it intrude into setting a personal notion of ... If you understand that, you should understand that it's ridiculous that you would ever use that to set a personal notion of health. The problem is that it's hard to keep at arm's length for two reasons. One is because it's so catchy, and because it's so clearly communicable, it becomes easier to communicate yourself.
This is what we're talking about at the beginning. It's hard to communicate the joy of yo-yo because there's a joy of yo-yo metric. It's easy to communicate, if I yo-yo more, I write more pages per day, because that's a communicable standard. It's also hard, because I think insofar as large scale institutions can't exchange subtle reasons, then they're just going to attach ... All they're going to see, their operating logic is going to be by the clear metrics, and their incentives to be attached to them. We have this weird space where we're going to be incentivized by these simple metrics, and yet no, they can't capture the value of what we're doing. And so, if we want to live under them without having our souls destroyed, we have to have some, cultivate some distance from the thing that gives us incentives where it'd be so much easier, and so much more clear if you could just be like, "All I care about is what makes good outcomes."
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Or ways to put context back in. I feel like that's often what we're thinking about when we're thinking about tenure packets, right? It's like how do you put all the context back into that so it's not just a number of publications, a number of citations, right?
Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah. I think as you were talking, it was making me think about these incentives and measures for the greater good, let's say. And it's made me think about even the striving that we did to get tenure, that some of it is if we can distance our own value from it, like our own self-worth, but then also think about how that maybe can lead to things like institutional power, or decision making, or choices, or make things, I don't know, make things more bearable, or humane, right, for whatever the next generation of people is going to be, or for the greater good, right, or the wellbeing of other people. I think that actually is a helpful, I don't know, helpful way to think about it. Because I was thinking back personally about how I arrived at this, and I realized the reason why I don't like games is the idea that you have to win, or that you have to achieve something, right.
Nathan Holbert:
Oh, yeah.
Haeny Yoon:
And like you talked about that, like the achievement versus the striving. And I think all my life, like my parents are Korean immigrants, and they have a very distinct way of measuring success, right, and achievement. And not because they're like horrible people, but because that's the situation or the context that they were living in, and that's the aspirations that they have for me. I think about all of these like outputs and these measures as related to achievement, and that you can not fail in those achievements, right? And so, the idea of games, like winning a game does not actually satisfy me at all. Losing a game is also horrible, so therefore, I don't really like games. I only like Candy Crush because I just play against myself, right?
And so, I think it took me a while to shift how I think about games, how I think about play, to understand that, oh, it's the, I can still struggle and strive for something, and get pleasure out of it, but could also just do something like the equivalent of a silly party game, right? Because that also brings me joy, and this idea that I can actually work for end product of joy, or the process of joy, versus I have to work to achieve something that if I fail at, I'm going to feel really bad. And I think it took me a while to realize like if I fail, I'm not going to feel really bad. It's actually fine.
C. Thi Nguyen:
I think to crystallize something, I think that is underneath what you were saying, I think there's one way of thinking about the awfulness of the achievement childhood that I also have that combines it with games like, "Oh, you're trying to win." But, I think another way to think about it is that the big difference between work and play is in work, the goals are set by some external force, and you can't screw around with them. What gets you money or what gets you status is set by the world, and you're trapped by that. And the forces that made that did not make them for your joy. And with games, you can fight to win, but you've chosen which wins you want, and you've chosen them if they give you joy. And if they do not, you can-
Haeny Yoon:
Leave.
C. Thi Nguyen:
You can leave. And I think that's the crucial ... It's so dumb, but what is the mysterious difference between games and institutions? Games you can leave, or you can change, and that ... It is such an idiotically dumb insight to try to push as a philosopher, but yeah, it's different when something is self-chosen, and self-tailorable as opposed to distant, harsh and unmodifiable to your needs. They're different.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. It's like what you were saying at the beginning about games, that they're not always about fun, right? It could be dangerous, it could be violent, it could be hard, it could be difficult, right, so we don't have this singular version of what that is. I do want to end with a very, very serious question, okay?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Okay.
Haeny Yoon:
Your book also got me hungry, because we talk about food a lot-
C. Thi Nguyen:
A lot, yeah.
Haeny Yoon:
We talk about different recipes, you talk about ratatouille, and chili verde, and there's a part where you talk about how you're obsessed with getting the best chili verde recipe, and getting it right.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah.
Haeny Yoon:
Did you perfect it?
C. Thi Nguyen:
I did, but I hate to tell you that I did it by moving away from the recipe, which is part of the point.
Haeny Yoon:
Nice.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah. I can not describe how I do it anymore.
Haeny Yoon:
Oh, nice. My God. Like Asian grandma recipes.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah, no, that's the point. I started with recipes, and I made a bunch, and then somehow they melded in my brain, and now I look at the meat, and the peppers, and they're different each time.
Haeny Yoon:
Nice.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And then, I do some ... It's like if I described it to you, there would be no ... It was like, I saute some onions, and garlic, and put some chilies in, and put some meat in, and I cook it.
Nathan Holbert:
Oh, it sounds easy.
C. Thi Nguyen:
But then, it's like, it's everything, everything else.
Haeny Yoon:
I'm so glad you succeeded.
C. Thi Nguyen:
That's great, yeah. There was another recipe that involved, I think, jelly beans or something. Maybe it wasn't as good.
Nathan Holbert:
We do have one final question. It's a less serious question that we like to always part with, our guests with, and that's what's popping. What are you into right now? Maybe it's another book, maybe it's some games you're playing, maybe it's music, maybe it's a new yo-yo trick.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Right.
Nathan Holbert:
What's popping for you right now?
C. Thi Nguyen:
Wait. Okay. Can I be not fun for a second?
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, for sure.
Nathan Holbert:
Sure.
C. Thi Nguyen:
The thing that I'm actually obsessed with is figuring out ... This is actually something I really wanted to talk to you all about, because this is an education podcast.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
But, I've been obsessed with a new thing I did in my classroom, and I've been trying to figure out how to do it again, and I don't know how to do it again, but I'll ... This was a response I had to ChatGPT.
Nathan Holbert:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, uh-huh.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And I didn't know what to do, and-
Nathan Holbert:
With ChatGPT being available to students and possibly using it for-
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
Okay, yeah, yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And so, I was teaching this, it was a tech and design ethics political philosophy class, like politics of technology basically.
Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Nathan Holbert:
Yep, yep.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And I didn't know what to do. And so, I tried an experiment, and I walked into the classroom, and I said, "Hey, everyone, I don't know what to do about ChatGPT, and this is a tech ethics and political philosophy class, so you're going to figure it out for me." What I had them do was I had them read a bunch of stuff about automation, and the change to the human soul, and meaningfulness, and what automation did to upskilling, and deskilling, and what the purpose of education was. And we read Iris Marion Young and Democrat Inclusiveness. And then, for the middle third of the class, they had one project, which is to break into policy groups, and propose ChatGPT policies, and assignment structures, and then they argued it out, and then they voted, and I told them, and I just did what they said. And it worked great.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And it's really jarred how I think about teaching, because it's related to what I was thinking about in the ... We were talking in the beginning, like I teach a lot of stuff about anti-authoritarianism, and democratic reasoning-
Nathan Holbert:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Haeny Yoon:
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
C. Thi Nguyen:
... and the wisdom of generating everyone's views. And then, until now, whenever I've done grading the class, I've done it in a, I will tell you exactly what to do, because I think I know what's better for you. And I also ... I think I can't leave it up entirely to my students, because there are ... As we were saying about scoring systems before, like a lot of the way I build my grading involves things that I think that they don't quite have access to about the kinds of practice that will lead them to skills that they don't even know that they have. But also, they have a much better sense of their interests about say what kind of relationship they want to have to chat. And so, it worked incredibly, and it's making me ... Sorry, I should have a fun answer to this, but this is-
Nathan Holbert:
Question everything.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah. No, this is the thing I've been-
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
The degree to which it worked well, and not ... They designed a really good system, but they also ... The process of figuring out their system was the best classroom experience I've had.
Nathan Holbert:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And I think in the background, part of it was because I staked it with a certain degree of like control, like I gave it something, but also because, I don't know, it's like ... I feel like we say a lot of things about treating our students with respect and I believe in it, but also, like I realized, I had never really treated my students with full respect until I let them actually control the grading system, and like I don't have time to do that in every class. It's like very specific to tech, and design, and political philosophy. But also, it was such a deep experience that I like, it screwed with my sense of how the rest of my classes should be, and I don't know how to recover, and be okay with teaching anymore. That's what I've been thinking about. I could come up with a fun answer too.
Nathan Holbert:
Whoa, huge.
Haeny Yoon:
I think what's popping is democratic practice in classrooms.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yes, yes, yes.
Haeny Yoon:
Right, yeah. And that, as you said, is very difficult to do, and takes a lot of-
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yeah, right.
Haeny Yoon:
... unbounding of your own control.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And also, there are many ways to do it that sound good in theory, but just result in an empty, listless, undesigned ... If you were just like, okay students, whatever, tell me whatever you want to do.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah, tell me what you want to do, yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen:
That won't go anywhere good.
Haeny Yoon:
Right.
C. Thi Nguyen:
But, the walking, the balance between being a knowledgeable teacher and like, it's so hard.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
And this is like my whole thing. We could talk for another four hours on this, but absolutely. The thing I write a lot about and I talk a lot about is the ways in which we can create spaces that are absolutely genuinely student centered, that, that requires, as I've already said today, some thoughtful constraints, some very thoughtful, well planned constraints. It also requires a massive amount of support and resources that provide meaningful nudges, right? Like you were giving them some things to read, you were giving them some prompts, you were ... And then, it also, you hit another key point here is that like the stakes matter, the thing that they're doing actually has meaning beyond just because there's a stupid ass grade at the end of it.
C. Thi Nguyen:
And this is like ... And I see it like, this is one of the reasons I think in the background, I've been so obsessed with certain kinds of game design, because some game design at its best, is the thing that walks this line between structure and freedom so deeply. One way that tabletop role playing experience can suck is no structure. You're sitting there like, "Make something up." "Okay." And another way you can suck is that you're railroaded into a story, and the true design is such a careful balance of constraint and incentive that actually encourages people to be more free in ways they didn't know they had. And that's what I want for the classroom, and it's so God damn hard. It's so hard.
Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm, the thing I want to add to that too though, is that a truly democratic classroom is also co-constructed, right-
C. Thi Nguyen:
Mm-hmm, yes.
Nathan Holbert:
Mm-hmm.
Haeny Yoon:
... and that everybody participates, right-
C. Thi Nguyen:
Yep.
Haeny Yoon:
... and I think sometimes, especially in early childhood, I will say, it is so student-centric that the only people that are participating are the kids, right? Like you're making all the structure so that children are the ones who enter into it where the teacher is sitting on the side, right, facilitating and managing those things. But, I think a really, truly democratic practice is one where everybody really feels like they're co-constructors and contributors of that space. And I think that's what you did.
Nathan Holbert:
And not to bring it ... Well, to bring it back to the book, because that's also why I find the arguments you make here so beautiful that those rules, those constraints, those structures, the invitation to come into that space, but also the willingness to modify them, the willingness to shift them, the willingness in a classroom to-
Haeny Yoon:
Make meaning together.
Nathan Holbert:
Though that co-construction, the students say, actually I want to go a different way and to open that up. I agree with you. I find this notion of game design, this way of pedagogy and play, I think it all is such a beautiful soup.
Haeny Yoon:
Well, thank you so much for this delightful conversation.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, this is great.
Haeny Yoon:
It was very thought-provoking, and made me have lots of questions, and things to think about after.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. Yeah, thanks for joining us, Thi. Thanks for being here. Thank you to our listeners. I hope you all enjoyed this conversation and please share it with others. I think this is a really rich space for thinking and discussion. And so, yeah, appreciate you coming here.
C. Thi Nguyen:
Thanks y'all.
Nathan Holbert:
All right. Thanks. Bye.
Haeny Yoon:
Bye.