I'm imagining this variant of chess that goes like this: there are literally NO rules. Literally *no* rules. You could just declare yourself the winner if you want, and the other player could declare themselves the winner too. You could retcon the rules so that only you can win. Etc

Why? Because that would be no fun. But, specifically, if you actually want to have fun playing it, then you can't just blindly optimize for your own success while playing it. It forces you to not goodhart winning the game. Or, rather, its extremely easy to see that you're goodharting winning and so if you end up playing a good game of this variant of chess you must not have goodharted it

I actually hate chess, but I thought of this while playing a different (video-) game. I was cheating. As is so often the case with blindly cheating: its not really that fun. But I was cheating in such a way to simulate the actual rules of the game being different. Sort of like the same kind of thing when you do a self-imposed challenge. I was very careful to notice what my impulse was, and what I thought fit the spirit of what I was doing, rather than what I wanted superficially

This is related to the following anti-bad-actor tactic: you simply give everyone every opportunity to be bad, and when the bad ones are bad you ban em, (virtually) arrest em, etc

Its also related to playing make believe. You could theoretically give yourself an arbitrarily advantageous position in make-believe space and win out over the people you're playing make-believe with, but the point of playing make-believe isn't to win like that

Its probably also related to life in general. You have a lot of freedom to do whatever you want. But when you reduce everything in your life to X thing, and lay into that one thing really hard, then in the end you find you never won, and wiser people might even say that you lost