The Gray Area with Sean Illing
Games are fun. Aren’t they?
When we play games — board games, video games, any kind of game — something magical happens. Games allow us to explore, to create little worlds where we can be different versions of ourselves. But when we turn life into a game — where we have to get the best grade, or the most money, or the most “likes” — then games stop being fun. Why is that?
This week Sean speaks with philosopher C. Thi Nguyen about what a game really is, the difference between playing for enjoyment and playing to win, and why games lose their magic when the stakes become real.
Thi argues that the things we value in life are increasingly captured by grades and likes and downloads and step counts and a thousand other metrics that quietly rewrite what we want and what we think makes us happy.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: C. Thi Nguyen, author of The Score
We would love to hear from you. To tell us what you thought of this episode, email us at thegrayarea@vox.com or leave us a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your comments and questions help us make a better show.
And you can watch new episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What the climate story gets wrong
The story we tell about climate change is mostly a story about loss. But look to the data, and that story starts to fall apart. Emissions are peaking in key sectors. Clean energy is scaling…
The Great Enshittening
Open a browser and you can feel it instantly: everything online just feels… worse. Search results that look like ads. Social feeds that you don’t control. Streaming platforms that are packed with ads. Services that…
America chose violence. Now what?
Is America at a tipping point? Sean Illing talks with Barbara Walter, one of the world’s leading experts on violent extremism and domestic terror. She’s the author of How Civil Wars Start, about how democracies…
What’s worth remembering?
We like to think of memory as a record of the past. But that’s not really what it is. Memory doesn’t keep the past — it can also remake it. It stitches fragments into stories,…
Why TikTok matters
This week, Sean talks with Emily Baker-White, author of Every Screen on the Planet, about why TikTok feels uniquely addictive, how it turned social media into a push-not-pull entertainment feed, and what happens when human…
The sun will save us
Bill McKibben has spent four decades warning us about climate change. Much of what he predicted has come true. And yet, his new book Here Comes the Sun is more hopeful than you might expect.…
How much free speech is too much?
Free speech is often treated as a timeless and sacred right. But what if it’s more myth than reality? This week, Sean is joined by historian Fara Dabhoiwala, author of What Is Free Speech? They…
Imagine there’s no billionaires
How much money is too much? In today’s episode, political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns tells Sean that we need to cap the amount of wealth a person can accumulate. They talk about how extreme inequality affects…
America’s lawyers vs. China’s engineers
America has a hard time building stuff. Roads. Trains. Bridges. Housing. Everything takes seemingly forever. Meanwhile, China seems to have no trouble at all: high-speed rails, solar panels, electric cars, bridges, ports, all churned out…
So, what exactly is the “New Right?”
A loose movement of radical intellectuals is driving American politics. They’re called the “New Right,” and they share a basic hostility to American liberal democracy, a real desire to fundamentally overhaul it, and real influence…