The rules to a finite game are almost always clearly established. If a person doesn’t follow the rules, the mechanism for the players is usually pretty obvious. In a board game, there is a rules sheet. In baseball, there is a book.

Outside of competitive sports, however, rules are almost always dealt with by the people involved in the game. If you’re at a table playing cribbage, there are no referees. It’s just the people playing.

So what do you do when someone isn’t following the rules?

You might confront them. Then it is up to them to “shape up” or not.

But what happens if that doesn’t work?

Now you get to choose whether you keep playing or not.

Anyone used to playing games with cheaters knows that it gets tiresome. You confront, they deny, you let it go for a minute, they win (unsurprisingly) and then gloat.

Or…

You confront, they deny, you let it go for a minute, they start to lose, cheat some more and then…

Or…

You confront, they deny, you refuse to keep playing, and they storm off.

The most important thing to remember, though, is this:

Cheating changes the rules.

Whether we like to admit it or not.

When someone cheats and we let them, then their cheating becomes part of the game.

We can tell ourselves all the stories we want about how we are taking the high road and “not stooping to their level”. Or we can think of ourselves as “the bigger person” or merely trying to avoid conflict. But we are now playing a game in which one side is functionally allowed to cheat.

Of course, we can engage in cheating too, which reestablishes a competitive balance, more or less. But that isn’t the game we all have agreed to play. And there is no guarantee they won’t seek a new competitive advantage.

Or we could choose to stop playing the second cheating happens. Because cheating changes the rules, and none of us agreed to these new rules.

If we care about playing games the right way, the one thing we ought not do is pretend the cheating never happened.