> No one wants the rules to change in a game that they perceive that they are winning (or have won). Moreso if they worked hard to win.

I'm one of those people who wants the rules to change in a game that I'm already winning. I worked hard to win; I fully engaged in the gamifiction, spending days at a time making sure I hit the max daily rep level, optimizing how I answered questions to get the highest score.

Even then, I tried to focus my optimization on ways that would help people more. For instance, one way to optimize is to post a very short quick answer, so you are able to get early upvotes before there's been a flood of answers for a question; but I would then edit and flesh out my answer. This has both advantages for reputation, since I could get early upvotes, and then later provide a more detailed comprehensive answer that would be likely to get further upvotes. It's also helpful for the person asking; it's possible that the very quick reply will be helpful, so they get an answer soon, but it's also possible that the more detailed reply with references to docs is what they need, so it's a way of making the gamification actually work to help people out more.

I think one of the big problems is when they added gamification of moderation. They added the review queues, which prompt you to review questions and answers that had been downvoted, voted to close, edited by other people, etc, and gave out badges based on numbers of reviews done. This means you'd go through a queue of questions and answers on topics you might know nothing about, and be prompted as for whether or not you agree with someone else's close vote or edit or the like.

When a question is not great, you could just vote to close it, or you could try to engage with the person asking the question and help edit it into a better form. I generally try to talk to the person asking and edit the question to be better; but getting internet points for getting through a lot of reviews quickly incentivizes people to make quick judgements, sometimes on topic they don't know much about. After they added the review queues, I found a lot more questions were being closed before you had a chance to answer or to engage with the person in comments to get them to clarify their question.

And while lots of people these days argue that closing a question is just a way to indicate that it's not up to standards but it can be fixed and re-opened, for people new to SO who aren't familiar with the culture it feels like a slap in the face and a rejection of their question. After a question is closed, it's a lot more likely that they'll just delete it, delete their account, or just stop participating.

Anyhow, yeah, there is an aspect of people not wanting to change the rules of a game that they are playing and winning; I just wish either the incentives were changed, or more people would take the view that the point of the scoring is as a rough measure of how much they are helping people out, and helping people out is the ultimate goal, rather than being an end in itself.

And I should also say that I'm not against closing truly bad or unsalvageable questions; I've had cases where I've tried to engage with someone to make their question better, and they just haven't made any effort, or cases in which people are obviously asking homework questions. But I really think that there should be some effort to help people out with asking their questions before just blindly deciding to close them out.