The Victorians believed that games could teach lessons about fairness and honesty. Even Cold-War-era television game shows purported to show the value of knowledge as a metaphor of the ultimate contest between the U.S. and the USSR. Recent attitudes about games have altered traditional game concepts, focusing on winning and denigrating losing. Everything in real life – dating, finding a job, personal appearance, business, markets, customers – is a candidate to be “gamed.” Being gamed means, among other things, creating a situation in which normal relationships become a game and then focusing on winning at any cost.
The gaming of nearly everything started in the financial realm, moved into business and has now become a primary source of entertainment. This spreading appeal of gaming opponents to beat them and the system has several effects on society, which we have called: “Never give a sucker an even break” (with apologies to W. C. Fields); “It’s not how you played the game but whether you won outright”; “It’s the game, the whole game and nothing but the
game”; and “When all else fails, try sanity.”