An Unlikely Conversation
Ryan McGranaghan paired me with philosopher C. Thi Nguyen for a podcast conversation. At first glance, it was an unlikely pairing. Nguyen studies how games shape agency. I study complexity and work across art, technology, and science. But within minutes, we found ourselves asking the same question: How do the systems we inhabit shape the people we become?
Nguyen’s work shows how games, and their scoring systems, reshape our values. But it made me realize something broader: Every system is an evolutionary system. Every system selects. This essay explores what that means.
Nguyen’s Insight
Nguyen’s insight is that scoring systems – whether in games, social media, or institutions – can capture our values. Initially, a score is just a proxy for what matters. Over time, it can become the thing that matters. Nguyen calls this “value capture.” We stop seeing the metric as a tool and start seeing it as the goal.
Every System Selects
But every system does more than shape individuals. It shapes populations. Evolutionary biology teaches us that every environment creates selection pressures. Universities select for certain kinds of scholars. Markets select for certain kinds of firms. Social media platforms select for certain kinds of communicators. The most important question is not who succeeds; it is what kind of person the system gradually produces.
This is true even, and especially, for systems we deliberately design. We tend to assume that intention is a kind of immunity: if humans built the system on purpose, surely humans remain in control of what it does. But a designed system, once released into the world, behaves exactly like an undesigned one. It becomes an environment. People adapt to it, not to the intentions behind it. Every system, designed or not, is an evolutionary system: an arena of variation and selection that, over enough time, produces a population shaped in its image.
Gamers and Game Designers
In this context, I distinguish between gamers and game designers. Gamers adapt within a system. They learn the rules and optimize for them. Game designers adapt the system itself. They see the rules and ask whether they should be changed. The question is: Which does the environment select for?
Evolution Explains More Than Philosophy Alone
Nguyen’s philosophy explains how individuals become captured. Evolution explains why entire populations become dominated by gamers. A system does not need malicious intent to produce this outcome; it only needs to reward, generation after generation, those who optimize for its metrics more than those who question them.
The Bad Designer
There is a more troubling category: the bad designer. Some see the architecture clearly but design systems that serve narrow interests at the expense of the whole. They have the intelligence of a game designer but the ethics of a predator. They design systems that capture others.
What Today’s Fitness Landscapes Reward
Today’s fitness landscapes often reward gamers. Universities select for citation counts. Social media platforms select for engagement. AI systems select for optimization. In each case, the system selects for those who play the game well rather than those who might change the game.
The Deeper Problem: Selecting Against the Re-Designer
There is a sharper way to state what is happening, and it is the part that should worry us most. These systems do not merely fail to reward the people who could fix them. They actively select against them.
Seeing a system’s architecture clearly – noticing what it rewards, what it quietly punishes, what it is becoming – takes time, distance, and a willingness to step outside the game while everyone else is still playing it. Those are precisely the resources that a competitive fitness landscape strips away from its participants. The scholar who pauses to question whether citation counts measure anything real publishes less than the one who does not pause. The communicator who refuses to optimize for engagement is outcompeted by the one who optimizes ruthlessly. The re-designer is, by construction, slower than the gamer, because seeing the whole board takes longer than making the next move on it.
So the system does not just fill up with gamers by accident. It promotes them by design – not the system’s explicit design, but the design that emerges from what the selection pressure rewards. The very people with the standing, attention, and resources to redesign the system are, generation after generation, the ones least likely to survive it long enough to try. This is the quiet tragedy underneath value capture: the game does not just capture our values. It can also eliminate, before they ever gain influence, the people who might have seen past it.
Complexity Changes the Story
Complexity science adds one more layer. Complex systems evolve recursively. They are environments that evolve. Their rules shape the behavior of individuals, and the accumulated behavior of individuals reshapes the system itself. Selection and emergence become inseparable. The challenge, then, is not simply to understand complex systems but to design them so that what emerges is worthy of the society we hope to build – and so that the people capable of redesigning them are not the first ones the system eliminates.
Listen to the full episode on The Great Askers podcast.
