I visited the Museo del Prado in Madrid some years ago. It was memorable mainly because I spent the whole trip trying to find all the paintings on a “top 20 must-see” list of museum artworks.

What was meant to be an opportunity to marvel at the works of El Greco, Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya became a box-ticking exercise. I had gamified the cultural experience and made it less meaningful in the process. I realised this on a return visit to the Prado recently when I made a point of neither counting masterpieces nor watching the clock – and left the building with a feeling of appreciation and awe at what I’d just seen.

The use of a “top 20” to guide your behaviour is an example of what philosopher C Thi Nguyen might call “value capture”. I had come to believe that following a measurement, purporting to represent a successful visit to the museum, was more important than being led by the artwork itself.

“Value capture occurs when you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them,” he writes in a new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.

How you decide to spend your time in a museum is relatively trivial and a “top 20” list recognisably open to debate. Far more troubling is value capture through metrics, backed up by big........

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