InThe Player of Games, the inciting incident for the main plot is that the titular character cheats, accepting help from an AI to maintain his reputation of ludic brilliance against an emerging rival who exhibits greater natural talent.

Subsequently, he is gently blackmailed into participating in a game on a distant planet where life is nasty, brutish, and short to an extreme degree, but where he is accepted as a guest because of his great reputation. The Minds have chosen this method to destabilize the current balance of power and bring the planet in question out of a particularly repugnant developmental minimum. It's ultimately revealed that even the initial moral misstep was not exploited but rather engineered by the Minds from the outset, and that the great player was never more than a pawn in their own games.