I’m not going to pontificate here on whether gaming systems is morally suspect, yada yada. Doing them is totally up to you. Whatever game you’re playing to gain some advantage over the way a system is built, designed and is actually supposed to be used, screwing around with that is most certainly “within the rules.” Technically. For now, anyway.

These are system holes, ladies and gents, and sooner or later, these holes will more than likely be plugged up. Which means if your business model banks heavily on being able to work and take advantage of these holes, well — surprise! — someday, that’ll just likely come to a screeching halt. And seemingly overnight, with no warning. One day click, it’ll all just go dark.

Google’s search results algorithm is a perfect example of this. Trying to take advantage of how it works is a never-ending source of system gaming examples. In the early days, for instance, keyword stuffing reaped huge benefits, moving practitioners’ sites way up in the search results, much to Google’s users’ dismay. Huge business operations were actually built around sites taking advantage of this technical hole.

Then one day — click! — no more. The faucet with the flood of inbound traffic was shut off. All those advertising $$$ from that traffic (AdSense, affiliate marketing, etc.)? Gone too.

That’s not the end of it, though. As far as I know, these keyword stuffing sites started getting penalized in the algorithm’s search results. These sites were now worse off than the clean folks. All that system-gaming content? Useless. Heck, worse than useless: damaging. They either had to invest huge sums to redo all their content, or die. Many died.

That’s the thing, folks: System owners hate the people who game their systems. Passionately. And for obvious reasons. Here’s a simple one: It screws up their business operations and income. Duh.

LOTS of examples of this kind of thing going on through the years, and not just with the search engines. Social media sites battling follower farming is something you’re likely aware of, for instance.

Indie publishing itself isn’t immune from system gaming, which is the whole point of this post. Amazon sure has problems with them. And a lot of the games aren’t based on some technical or logistical hole in an automated system that can be easily plugged up. Ergo, they’re a bit more difficult for Amazon to “clean up” and start preventing. I would imagine that doesn’t make Amazon very happy.

The latest clean up mess I’m aware of, picking up from forum whining, is Amazon cracking down on ARCs. That stands for “advanced review copies.” Amazon’s not against them in general, obviously, just the practice a lot of indie authors have been employing of assembling and using “ARC teams” — people with Amazon accounts whose whole raison d’être is to post those star-rated Amazon customer reviews. Besides just padding the review counts, timed well around book launch, those usually glowing reviews paint a rosy picture and prime the pump, so to speak. These “reviewers” get ARCs not to review and write about in regular media or even their own blogs to share with their readers — you know, old school legit ARC activity — but mainly for futzing with those Amazon customer reviews. It doesn’t really take a genius to figure that out, so save it.

Yeah, Amazon could of course turn a blind eye to the whole thing, but apparently it’s chosen to do a solid for its customers instead. Why that would be a surprise to anyone, I have no idea.

Just as unsurprisingly, Amazon’s none too happy with the game players. I don’t know the exact technical details, but it seems they’re all now on some internal watchlists (those can be automated too… surprise!). The ARC reviewers are seeing many of their reviews zapped, and they are now being prevented from posting reviews pretty much everywhere; authors are seeing their books’ existing reviews purged, yada yada.

As you may have guessed, however, this kind of manual/automated-hybrid cleanup effort is causing some real problems: There’s the inevitable collateral damage. Many of these books are seeing a significant number of legit reviews getting nuked as well. Interesting, huh? If you think about it, much like the Google keyword stuffing thing, the game players seem to be losing way more than whatever gains they may have enjoyed screwing with the system.

Funny how that works. If you’re caught up in this kerfuffle, good luck getting it all sorted out.

But hey, I’m not stopping you from trying to game the system if you’re so inclined — large scale, small scale, it’s all the same (yeah, killing just one person instead of 10 makes a difference, hmm?). But please, spare us the whining, and even the outrage, if it catches up to you.

This all just reminds me of this very common saying I keep stumbling across online. Amazing how well it fits:

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

Now on to the Reader’s featured selections! What say we keep it simple today and stick with an all-Writing issue? OK, let’s do that. Enjoy!

— EES