Gaming the System

The news out of the US Senate of late has been bugging me. The idea that when one group doesn't get what it wants they are compelled not to compromise but rather to change the rules is, well, irritating.

And yet, gaming the system is fundamentally American. Changing the game to your advantage, maximizing every little edge available, bending the rules until they break, and even breaking the rules until you get caught are really, although perhaps unfortunately, a fundamental building block of American life. In some ways it is one of the things that makes our country great.

There are examples of this all over the place. One need look no further than American sports to see this sort of thing played out in front of us. In football, the whole concept revolves around doing everything you can until you get caught. Its not against the rules to hold; its against the rules to get caught holding. Clearly the recent revelations about steroid use coming out of Baseball emphasize how players try to get every possible advantage. Nobody there seems to think they are doing anything wrong - and those are the players that actually do get caught.

I see it here at work in the shows I work on. Although things are structured collaboratively, there is at the beginning sometimes a little bit of competition between the creative team and the execution team with regard to what we can and cannot do within the resources. In times past not much evaluation was done and people simply burned out trying to realize their ideas. More recently we started to do a more realistic evaluation of budget in the scenery area. When that happened, the scope of the show didn't come down, but the weight of the work simply moved to paints. Suddenly everyone wanted to do huge paint shows because the sets area was being monitored more closely. Paints was where the advantage was. A little further down the road we started to look more carefully at paints and what happened? The weight of the design went to costumes, suddenly all the shows had puppets or exceptional creature costumes. In an effort to get everything they could, the creative team was running from the budget process - gaming the system to their advantage.

Politically one need only look to the efforts in the state of Texas, the gerrymandering of the legislative districts to change the federal representation. All gaming the political system to the Republican advantage.

Looking back to sports, the drive in the other direction has always been something I have liked about Ultimate. In Ultimate players call their own fouls and violations. You're much more accountable for fouling someone if the person you are fouling is going to be the one that calls the infraction. One would think that this would lead to a rash of called fouls when nothing had really happened, but Ultimate players are not Football players, and "the spirit of the game" outweighs our natural American tendencies. See in Ultimate it is a violation to break the rules - not to get caught breaking the rules. The whole culture is one that resists eeking an advantage. It is particularly refreshing. In all but the most competitive games players are normally able to behave in a civilized manner and call infractions when they happen and deal openly and honestly with their fellow competitors. Occasionally when the stakes are very high people's more American instincts take over. We have a name for that game too: "Uglimate." Players making calls to their advantage are universally ridiculed as failures to the spirit of the game.

Right now we are seeing this behavior demonstrated in a particularly high stakes arena. Uglimate has come to the US Senate. Faced with not being able to get absolutely 100% of their agenda through without a hitch, the Senate leadership has decided that they will change 200+ year old rules to accommodate themselves. Just like an Ultimate player in a championship game, it is absolutely within their rights to make this call, and just like that player who knows the disc hit the ground but calls it "up" anyway they are monumentally wrong.

The way forward in this situation is not to game the system to their advantage, but rather to work toward compromise and perhaps to realize that being the majority still does not bestow ultimate power.

Today I took a moment to tell both PA Senators that I would be very disappointed if they dumped the rules at this time. I think it would be cool if you did that too. You can access your Senator here: http://www.senate.gov/.