A while back I wrote a piece called Rules Rule, but Shouldn’t Rule Everything. The upshot of the article was that you have to have rules for things to work, but you also have to understand the rules to be able to bend and break them when needed.
Rules are really important in gamified systems, they collapse without them. Some rules are explicit and set by the system. These are the ones that you can’t break without hacking or breaking the system. Others are implicit or implied. These are the ones where trouble can sneak in.