Gaming the system (also rigging, abusing, cheating, milking, playing, working, or breaking the system, or gaming or bending the rules) can be defined as using the rules and procedures meant to protect a system to, instead,

manipulate Manipulation may refer to: * Manipulation (psychology) - the action of manipulating someone in a clever or unscrupulous way *Crowd manipulation - use of crowd psychology to direct the behavior of a crowd toward a specific action ::* Internet mani ...

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.

History

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

Examples

Finance

Henry Paulson Henry Merritt Paulson Jr. (born March 28, 1946) is an American banker and financier who served as the 74th United States Secretary of the Treasury from 2006 to 2009. Prior to his role in the Department of the Treasury, Paulson was the Chairman a ...

, considering that the

financial crisis of 2007–08 Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of fina ...

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 In economics and finance, arbitrage (, ) is the practice of taking advantage of a difference in prices in two or more markets; striking a combination of matching deals to capitalise on the difference, the profit being the difference between th ...

, 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.

Internet

Designers of

online communities An online community, also called an internet community or web community, is a community whose members interact with each other primarily via the Internet. Members of the community usually share common interests. For many, online communities may fe ...

are explicitly warned that whenever one creates a system for managing a community, someone will try to work it to their advantage.Gavin Bell, ''Building Social Web Applications'' (2009) p. 274 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.

Child-rearing

Parental divisions on

child-rearing Parenting or child rearing promotes and supports the physical fitness, physical, emotional, Social change, social, spiritual and intellectual development of a child from infant, infancy to adulthood. Parenting refers to the intricacies of raisi ...

will always give the child plenty of opportunity to play one parent off against the other.

Object relations theory Object relations theory is a school of thought in psychoanalytic theory centered around theories of stages of ego development. Its concerns include the relation of the psyche to others in childhood and the exploration of relationships between ...

states that if one parent is easy-going and the other stricter, a child is likely to take advantage of that split. According to this theory, this is always a hollow triumph; the child is really hoping that the parents will begin to work together to set limits. It has been noted that contingent feeding — offering treats if an unpopular food is eaten — encourages children to argue and practice gaming the system by fighting over the fine print.

NHS dentistry

NHS dentistry Dentistry provided by the National Health Service in the United Kingdom is supposed to ensure that dental treatment is available to the whole population. Most dentistry is provided by private practitioners, most of whom also provide, on a commerci ...

in the UK sees the frequent use of gaming the system in the form of adapting treatment to the payment system, which is frequently referred to as simply "gaming". The practice of adapting treatment to payment systems, rather than clinical need, is thought to be widespread in NHS dentistry and is considered by some to be a result of a poorly planned target based system. The term is also used to describe obfuscation of the scope of NHS dentistry in order to "upsell" items of treatment that should be available.

Performance management

performance management Performance management (PM) is the process of ensuring that a set of activities and outputs meets an organization's goals in an effective and efficient manner. Performance management can focus on the performance of a whole organization, a d ...

, gaming the system is finding ways to achieve good scores on

performance metric A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it en ...

s (for employees or departments) without achieving the aims of the corporation which the metrics were instigated to promote. This is related to the well-known problem inherent in

incentive system The term incentive system refers to a variety of fields, including biology, education, and philosophy. Organizational Psychology, Economics, and Business In organizational psychology, economics and business an incentive system denotes a struc ...

design, sometimes known as

perverse incentive A perverse incentive is an incentive that has an unintended and undesirable result that is contrary to the intentions of its designers. The cobra effect is the most direct kind of perverse incentive, typically because the incentive unintentionall ...

, in that people will tend to pursue incentives, even by means that make no common sense, should the incentive be naively constructed. For instance, criticism of author-level metrics in science often described the vulnerabilities to gaming strategies of such metrics.

Algorithmic governance

Whenever greater transparency is brought by the government to previously secret decisions, those decision processes become more gameable. Parties adjust their behavior to maximize their outcomes. The case of

algorithmic governance Government by algorithm (also known as algorithmic regulation, regulation by algorithms, algorithmic governance, algocratic governance, algorithmic legal order or algocracy) is an alternative form of government or social ordering, where the usa ...

is not exceptional. Regulated parties might even employ

adversarial machine learning Adversarial machine learning is the study of the attacks on machine learning algorithms, and of the defenses against such attacks. A recent survey exposes the fact that practitioners report a dire need for better protecting machine learning syste ...

in order to fool algorithmic models.

Other

Eric Berne Eric Berne (May 10, 1910 – July 15, 1970) was a Canadian-born psychiatrist who created the theory of transactional analysis as a way of explaining human behavior. Berne's theory of transactional analysis was based on the ideas of Freud but ...

identified a kind of gaming the system in a clinical context through what he called the

game A game is a structured form of play (activity), play, usually undertaken for enjoyment, entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an educational tool. Many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator s ...

of "Psychiatry", with its motto "You will never cure me, but you will teach me to be a better neurotic (play a better game of 'Psychiatry')."Eric Berne, ''Games People Play'' (Penguin) p. 136 A few patients, he noted, carefully pick weak

psychoanalysts PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might be ...

, moving from one to another, demonstrating that they can't be cured and meanwhile learning to play a sharper and sharper game of 'Psychiatry;' eventually it becomes difficult for even a first-rate clinician to separate the wheat from the chaff. Some people confuse "gaming the system" with "working the system". Gaming the system has a negative connotation, while working the system has a positive meaning. Working the system implies that one is using an understanding to work within the system to attain sets of goals that align, whereas gaming the system implies using this understanding to attain specific goals that don't align with the rest of a set of goals. Depending on the observers' interest or preferred goals, this may be perceived as unfair or as an outcome for which the system was never intended. The cause of the difference between gaming the system and working the system lies in the existence of a (perceived) conflict between goals.