Gaming the system (or bending the rules, playing the system, abusing the system, milking the system or working the system) can be defined as "[using] the rules and procedures meant to protect a system in order, instead, to manipulate the system for [a] desired outcome".

According to James Rieley, structures in organizations (both explicit and implicit policies and procedures, stated goals, and mental models) drive behaviors that are detrimental to long-term organizational success. For some, 'error...is the essence of "gaming the system", in which a gap in protocol allows for errant practices that lead to unintended results'.

Hank Paulson, considering that 'the late crisis demonstrated that our financial markets had outgrown the ability of our current system to regulate them', saw as one necessity 'a better framework that featured less duplication and that restricted the ability of financial firms to pick and choose their own, generally less-strict regulators - a practice known as regulatory arbitrage' that enabled widespread gaming of the regulatory system.

The System can refer to:

Linus Benedict Torvalds (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈliːn.ɵs ˈtuːr.valds] ( listen); born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish Americansoftware engineer and hacker, best known for having initiated the development of the open source Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator. He also created the revision control system Git. He was honored (shared with Dr Shinya Yamanaka) with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel".

Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland. He is the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (5.5% of Finland's population). Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although in the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the Peanuts cartoon character", noting that this makes him half "Nobel-prize-winning chemist" and half "blanket-carrying cartoon character".