> There's definitely an argument for just exploiting edge cases in the rules as hard as you can, seeing how the game evolves from there, and relying on the governing body to fix it if needed.

Sadly, a lot of people live their entire lives this way. Ignoring courtesy, norms, ethics, grace, walking right up to the very edge of the law and then smugly declaring “ha ha there is no rule saying I can’t do this!!” Like the annoying little brother who waves his hand a millimeter from your face saying “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!”

The fact that everything has to be written down or some people will exploit and take advantage is a human failing, not a feature.

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retsibsi 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm reading a book at the moment (https://academic.oup.com/book/32137) in which the author makes a point of the distinction between "the goals of a game and our purpose in playing a game". My purpose in playing games is never winning for winning's sake, let alone winning at the cost of violating basic decency. But sometimes the purpose is best served by pursuing the goals quite single-mindedly. Competition can be fun, and some games become much more interesting when both players are really trying to win, even when this means using 'cheap' moves, learning to counter the cheap moves, etc. There's no reason this approach has to carry over into the rest of our lives; we can 'play to win' in the appropriate arenas while caring deeply about courtesy and ethics.

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scott_w an hour ago | parent [-]

There’s definitely a time and place for both. Even in sport, “playing to win” can defeat the point when you’re doing it for fun. During swim training, if our coach wants to setup a relay race, he’ll deliberately mix swim ability (even changing teams between rounds) so that there’s a competitive element. Not much of a race if lane 1 is in the same team and beats everyone by 30 seconds!

	▲	retsibsi an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I totally agree. Perhaps pedantically, though, I'd say this isn't a counterexample to 'playing to win': > During swim training, if our coach wants to setup a relay race, he’ll deliberately mix swim ability (even changing teams between rounds) so that there’s a competitive element. Not much of a race if lane 1 is in the same team and beats everyone by 30 seconds! I think this is actually a good example of setting up the game appropriately (in this case the teams as well as the rules) and then playing to win within those constraints. The end result is more fun and better training than you would get by departing from the 'playing to win' philosophy by, for example, having a tacit agreement that the faster swimmers will take it easy so as not to embarrass the others.