Book reviews: ‘The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game’ and ‘The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World’

‘The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game’ by C. Thi Nguyen

C. Thi Nguyen loves games, said Dan Piepenbring in Harper’s. In his new book, the University of Utah philosophy professor puts himself out on “a long, creaking limb” by suggesting that much of human activity can be explained by two countervailing inclinations of the species: our tendency to gamify life’s purpose and our pursuit of freedom from that chase through, well, less consequential games. If you enjoy board games, fly fishing, or even recreational cooking, you probably appreciate the type of game that Nguyen endorses: an activity whose sometimes arbitrary rules enable us to play more freely and experience different aspects of ourselves. Nguyen worries, however, that our urge to quantify the value of our lives and achievements is soul-sucking, and his worries are less fun to read about than his paeans to play. He writes so beautifully about mastering the yo-yo, in fact, that I’d read a whole book on the subject and “would feel alive at the end.”