Games work because they have scores, which tell us what to aim for and which player won. Yet the very sorts of scoring systems that enable riffing and invention on a board tend to stifle us when they are applied in institutional contexts. Consider another kind of score, a grade. In an effort to make students’ work easy to compare — to determine who “wins” a class or a quiz — we establish a universal metric, a one-size-fits-all approach that flattens academic achievement. Instead of seeing a paper or an exam as imaginative or stale, meticulous or careless, we start to see it as an A or a B.

“The Score” has an ambitious mission. It seeks to explain why the constraints imposed by scoring systems in games are so liberating, while the constraints imposed by institutional metrics are so deadening. In doing so, it aspires to explain a quintessential contemporary tragedy: the extent to which optimization has gutted our lives.

Even without this larger argument, “The Score” would brim with local insights. Nguyen is a connoisseur of games, and his musings about them are ingenious and entertaining. “Often in games,” he observes, “the goal isn’t what really matters. We adopt the goal in order to experience the process.” No one except the most brittlely competitive partygoer cares who wins a game of charades at a birthday celebration; the point of the undertaking is to allow us to make fools of ourselves in the company of our friends.

Sometimes, however, the state we hope to achieve is one of elegance, as in chess, or of bodily awareness, as in rock climbing. Many well-designed games, Nguyen argues, “make beautiful action.” They “call it forth” by directing our movements and placing odd obstacles in our way. Would anyone think to become skilled at maneuvering a ball with her feet if not for soccer’s prohibition on the use of hands? “This is what makes games unique as an art,” Nguyen writes. “In traditional art, the beauty is outside the viewer, in the art object itself. It is external beauty. But with games, much of the beauty shows up in the players’ own actions — in the feeling of their own bodies and minds.”

Games also teach us to experiment with identities, trying them on for size. “This is the peculiarity at the heart of games,” Nguyen argues. “They tell you what to desire. And we players are fluid enough that we can let those scoring systems shape our desires. We can slip into alternate motivational states like a new set of clothes. We have the ability to start a game, find out what will get us points, and then — for a period of time — care intensely, exactly as we’re told to.”

Perhaps because gaming has helped Nguyen embrace many values, he is bursting with interests and affections. He is a former food critic, an excellent cook, an enthusiastic fly-fisher, an avid rock climber (scaling cliffs affords him a “loving involvement with the difficulty of the physical world”) and a lover of yo-yo tricks, which he describes in almost beatific terms as “the sheer joy of physics made tangible.” Quite anomalously for a work of philosophy, “The Score” is socially attentive, historically literate and imbued with sensual glee. It is exuberantly eclectic, full of passionate digressions into the history of algorithms or the nature of classification systems or the workings of skateboarding competitions.

All this would make the book well worth reading even without its argumentative pièce de résistance, its inspired comparison of games and institutional metrics — those pesky grades that teachers append to homework, the rankings we attach to colleges, the often simplistic measures we use to assess health. There are reasons for turning to these scores, of course. Standardized systems tend to allow for “frictionless coordination” across disparate fields, and they afford us an otherwise elusive “experience of clarity.” When we rely on a metric, “we know exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, and afterward, we know exactly how well we’ve done.”

But we lose so much when we demand measurability of things that are difficult, if not impossible, to measure — education, taste, health, beauty. Indeed, metrics can be so distortive that they tempt us to care about “what’s easy to measure,” rather than what is truly important. When law schools introduced a formal ranking system, for instance, they started trying to move up the ladder, often at the cost of their educational mission; because higher rejection rates gave them higher scores, Nguyen writes, they “started spending a lot of resources on encouraging unlikely applicants to apply, simply so they’ll have more people to reject.”

In the context of games, “scoring systems have been tuned to produce interesting, satisfying, delightful action,” to force us to move gracefully during an ice skating routine or invoke the strange geometries of chess. But institutional scoring systems are designed to transfer seamlessly across contexts, and they therefore serve to homogenize. Nguyen contrasts the improvisational verve of cooking a beloved dish with the instructions handed out to employees in the fast-food industry. These formulas eliminate spontaneity so as to yield a uniform product that is the same at each franchise; they also render the workforce fungible, ensuring that no special skill is required to execute the relevant procedures.

The virtues and pitfalls of scores, it emerges, are one and the same: “Scoring systems offer us relief from the painful complexity of life,” Nguyen writes. But sometimes, the complexity of life is just what the doctor ordered. Games function as a refuge because they allow us to “outsource our values” within the limited confines of a particular activity. But institutional metrics constitute “an unbounded scoring system.” They devour ever larger swaths of the world, aiming to “coordinate more and more of it, to put it under a single standard of value.”

And they present themselves as the cold hard truth, not one approach of many. Games encourage us to try on different values in a playful spirit so that we can cultivate new capacities; metrics, in contrast, foist values upon us and insist that they are the right ones. “Metrics are designed from the top down and enforce a centralized view of the world,” Nguyen writes. “They presume a kind of sameness to life.” Games, in contrast, “offer the possibility of a splintered, de-centralized, hyper-tailored form of life.” Hence games — and the provisional embrace of values that they promote — are one rejoinder to the hegemony of metrics.

The urgent question posed by “The Score” is one a student started asking herself after she attended one of Nguyen’s lectures. She looked around at all the metrics that reduced her to a daily step count, a number on a scale, a score on a test, and she wondered: Is this the game you want to be playing? Her answer was no. I think readers of Nguyen’s forceful book will agree.