Sustainability, Climate Change, Renewable Energy, Politics, Activism, Biodiversity, Carbon Footprint, Wildlife, Regenerative Agriculture, Circular Economy, Extinction, Net-Zero · One Planet Podcast · Mia Funk

Games that Help Us Reconnect with Nature, Our Sense of Wonder & Play with C. THI NGUYEN

·1 hr 12 min·4 clips

“Value capture” happens when simplified institutional metrics take over your real values.

The conversation starts with process. Nguyen says the part of life that matters most is making things and talking to people about what they mean, even though that kind of value does not fit neatly into measurement or optimization. Play comes next. He separates achievement play, where winning is the point, from striving play, where the pleasure lies in taking on the problem of winning for the sake of the struggle itself. The distinction matters. Much of play scholarship, he argues, makes the same mistake as modern institutions by defending play in productivity language, as if games only matter when they make people smarter, stronger, or grittier. Suits gives the argument a bridge. Nguyen returns to Bernard Suits' utopian claim that if all practical problems were solved, people would still play games rather than drift into boredom, which suggests that play is not a decorative extra but part of what life is for. Aristotle is close by. The interview ties Suits back to Aristotle's view that human flourishing comes from exercising our capacities and acting in the world, not from treating life like a finished object to judge from a distance. Animals enter the frame too. Nguyen is careful here, acknowledging the struggle of animal life while using creatures in the wild to test what play might mean outside human institutions. The critique sharpens as the episode goes on. Again and again he returns to the pressure people feel to prove the usefulness of play, when the deeper answer may be simpler: play matters because it lets us live inside process instead of obsessing over results. The book stays central throughout. The Score, How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game, becomes a way to ask how agency survives in a culture of hidden scoreboards, outside expectations, and borrowed goals. The ending opens outward. The episode settles on a gentler claim: a life can be written as story rather than score, and meaning may come from staying with the making instead of chasing the tally.

As heard by us

A patient case for play, process, and meaning over the metrics that flatten them.

C. Thi Nguyen argues that games and play matter because they shape how people live and how they value process. The conversation moves through creative work, achievement play, and striving play, and it keeps coming back to the habit of explaining play in the language of work and…

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Why you'd press play

If you're ready to stop living by someone else's scoreboard.

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