Current mood:	too much work
Current music:	radiohead-there there

when is breaking the rules justified?
first of all, it must be said that you have to look at things from a perpective that favors or opposest social darwinism (forgive me for sounding trite... i know i do). When people join and create rules or laws, society leaves a state of nature.

Social darwinism can only really be applied to its maximum extent when people are in a state of nature. When in this state, individuals adhere to laws dictated by nature. However, nobody really knows what these laws pertain to because they are unwritten. I guess the guidelines should come out of one's own conscience but that would be the same as having no rules at all. If the rules were completely subjective and applied differently to each individal this would break the implication that a law or rule sets a parameter for doing something. thus, in a state of nature (which, it could be argued, holds no rules)social darwinism would kick in immediately. stronger people would do whatever is in their best interest. Alliances, if there were any in existence, would be broken as soon the opportunity cost of keeping them were surpassed by something else. one could argue that people would not break trust (which is kind of an implied rule) because in the long run it be beneficial for them to behave nicely. anyways i lost track of what i was trying to say. ohh ok... if we look at it from a social darwinisim perspective, if breaking the rules gets you ahead, then go ahead and break them...

The problem is that we do not live in a state of nature so breaking the rules is seldom justified...the rules are there to protect those people with less ability from those with more ability... since there are always people with more ability than us (at least at doing different things) the rules are there to protect us. we prob shouldnt break them then. sometimes breaking the rules brings about a change that is good, but this is not very common... rules should be broken when the breaking of the rules will bring benefits to a group of people larger than the group it will affect... this is not ussually the case in video games... in this case, idiotic players try to alter the rules of gameplay in order to achieve things that ussually benefit them and nobody else. For example, what good does no-clipping cheat that a player uses do to the gaming community? none. all it does is give that player an advantage over other players in tha game and make their honest efforts to succeed become futile... im sorry but i hate people that cheat in games... the great thing about games is that they have they ussually put everybody in an equal playing field. this allows players to actually measure their strengths and weaknesses against each other and determine who is better at what... games provide pure competition becuase few things outside of the game influence each player's performance and this reduces everything to adaptability to rules and pure skills. Then an idiot comes along and decides he will break the rules. this immediately destroys the nature of the game because it adds in other factors. competition is no longer pure... other players will never be able to know if the cheater is really better than them or if they are in fact better than the cheater...
i remember i used to love age of empires and i thought i was pretty good at it... then one day i saw my ranking had dropped incredibibly because i was getting beat by people that sucked in the ranking, but were somehow defeating me... i found out they were cheating and after that it was completely pointless for me to play... i was never gonna be able to know if i was in fact better than them...

so dont be stupid and ruin the game for everyone by "exploring" what you can do by "expanding" your options... unless what you do will benefit more people than just you and your buddies.