[Note that the following in no way represents my own personal approach to life!]

There will come a time in everybody's life where the "rules" we all play by don't seem fair. You feel like the system just in general works against you, rather than for you, and it's an uphill battle just to break even. If you're particularly steadfast in this mindset, you may likely even come to new environments - like Mahalo - with that same "even if there's no evidence that it's broken, it's only a matter of time before I get screwed" mentality.

So once you've got it into your head that the system will ultimately screw you, you feel substantially less guilt about screwing the system. After all, they're the ones that made up the rules, right? "Gaming the system" typically means finding a loophole in the rules of the game that allows you to profit in unexpected ways. It's like if you failed to qualify for that $50 rebate on your HD tv at Best Buy because you didn't send in the rebate form quick enough, well hey, if the programmers left open a way to infinitely ask yourself direct questions and get a buck each time you do it, oh well, too bad for them just like it was too bad for me. Rules is rules.

I remember a great story from days gone by, during the first sorts of "online multiplayer games" when everything was text. There was a bug in this one game where you could buy equipment out of a machine for a certain price, but there was another machine somewhere in the game where you could sell it back for like 1 gold piece more. The people running the game went to bed, came back the next morning to find people with hundreds of gold pieces in their accounts because once the bug was spotted they just spent all night walking back and forth between the two machines.

There are ALWAYS people who will spot the loopholes, and exploit them. Sometimes people will just trip over them, sometimes they won't even realize it's a loophole. Sometimes it's malicious, and people know it and say "Tough" (because deep down they're expecting a fight, and having their ill-gotten gains taken away). Others don't see it as gaming the system at all, but rather just working the system optimally.

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