Only One Company Makes the Game Monopoly

This article explores C. Thi Nguyen's book 'The Score' and its question about why numerical scores are fun in games but oppressive in social metrics. It revisits David Graeber's work, particularly 'The Utopia of Rules', to argue that games and bureaucracy both offer utopian fantasies of fairness and equality through written rules. The piece discusses how score-based games reinforce a reality defined by accounting procedures, contrasting the enjoyment of games with the dread of bureaucratic institutions like the DMV or IRS. It engages with ethnographic and philosophical perspectives on technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy.