There are a number of serious and playful domains where individuals repeatedly engage with others for mutually-exclusive outcomes: there will be only one Prime Minister, only one sports team atop of their respective league, only one victor following war. Games represent microcosms of these larger environments by highlighting the tension between evolutionary impulses such as win-stay and lose-shift, and the need to avoid exploitation. I will discuss one particular game space (Rock, Paper, Scissors) that has provided a number of insights into how individuals might make themselves competitively vulnerable as a result of experiencing sequential events, how positive and negative outcomes lead to the self-allocation of decision-making time, and, how certain heuristics appear both behaviourally and neutrally inflexible. I will present some new work from the Re:Cognition Lab that looks at performance variation against a variety of differently designed computer opponents (unexploitable, exploiting, exploitable) within the context of a ‘credit’ system where participants must occasionally interrupt their own processing. To end, I will discuss some problems in the media portrayal of such work, and future work that will attempt a ‘controlled demolition’ of previous findings.