Utah professor looks to his personal passions — from video games to yo-yoing — to illuminate the downside of an increasingly gamified world

Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen remembers when misery turned out to be his salvation. He had just graduated from college and was living in a Boston suburb, working as a tech writer. “I made a lot of money,” he recalled on a recent afternoon in his Salt Lake City home. But the cash came at the cost of spending too much time doing something he hated. “That was the death of the soul.”