Spoilsports and Cheaters - Not playing along vs. not playing fair

It's not difficult to find a game that you can cheat on or be a spoilsport. You can cheat on any game that has rules to be broken, spoken or unspoken. If the rules are programmed into the interface it might be more difficult. People can cheat in single-player games, but the act is more subversive if cheating against fellow players. I think that being a spoilsport requires that a game involves more than one person, so any multi-player game can be susceptible to spoilsports.

I'm ashamed to admit it but the last time I myself was a spoilsport was only a few months ago. My friend Marcus wanted to play Monopoly, and even though I have never enjoyed that game I went along with it. Marcus is a good friend. After about half-an-hour of gameplay I was already really hard on Monopoly cash and was having pretty bad luck (plus I am most definitely an awful Monopoly player). Then something in my brain switched and I simply gave up on the game. I kept playing but not with any effort to win. I just went through the motions of rolling the dice and moving my piece. Marcus noticed almost at once. The game was no longer fun for either of us. The magic circle was broken. I wish I would have tried a little harder to take the game more seriously so at least one of us could have enjoyed the game.

Here being a spoilsport was as simple as not playing to win. It seems that most if not all games are basically pointless if the players are not in agreement about the goal of the game. The goal doesn't necessarily have to be to win. When I was a kid I would play a lot of Super Smash Bros with my sisters, but sometimes we would just mess around and make up or own games within games that didn't have to do with blasting each other off the level. But it was not spoilsporting, as we were in agreement about ignoring the explicit goal of the game. The game was not what it was supposed to be, but there was still an illusion of gameplay that made it enjoyable for us.