Playing the system

Gaming the system (also gaming the rules, bending the rules, abusing the system, cheating the system, milking the system, playing the system, or working the system) can be defined as using the rules and procedures meant to protect a system in order, instead, to manipulate the system for a desired outcome.

According to James Rieley, a British advisor to CEOs and an author, structures in companies and organizations (both explicit and implicit policies and procedures, stated goals, and mental models) drive behaviors that are detrimental to long-term organizational success and stifle competition. For some, error is the essence of gaming the system, in which a gap in protocol allows for errant practices that lead to unintended results. Although the term generally carries negative connotations, gaming the system can be used for benign purposes in the undermining and dismantling of corrupt or oppressive organisations.

The first known documented use of the term "gaming the system" is in 1975.

Henry Paulson, considering that the financial crisis of 2007–08 demonstrated that US financial markets had outgrown the ability of the system that had been used to regulate them, saw as a necessity a better framework than US financial markets had used before. This framework would be one that featured less duplication and that restricted the ability of financial firms to pick and choose their own, generally less strict regulators—a practice known as regulatory arbitrage, which enabled widespread gaming of the regulatory system.

A similar, contributing effect has been identified within corporate rating systems, where gaming the system becomes virulent when formalization is combined with transparency.

Designers of online communities are explicitly warned that whenever one creates a system for managing a community, someone will try to work it to their advantage. Accordingly, they are advised from the start to think like a bad guy and to consider what behaviors they are unintentionally encouraging by creating some new social rules for the community.

Parental divisions on child-rearing will always give the child plenty of opportunity to play one parent off against the other.Object relations theory stresses, however, that while, if a child finds one parent easy to get round, compared with the other who is trying to set limits, it is likely to take advantage of that split. According to this theory, this is always a hollow triumph; what the child is really hoping is that such parents will eventually begin to see a need to get together on the issue of limit-setting.

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