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.

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!