Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. to jeer, to mock, to delude.

1674		Jackson’s Recantation in C. Hindley Old Bk Collector’s Misc. 14: The next thing he taught me, was to game.
c.1698		B.E. Dict. Canting Crew n.p.: What you game me? c. do you jeer me, or pretend to expose me, to make a May-game of me.
1725		New Canting Dict. [as cit. c.1698].
1821		W.T. Moncrieff Tom and Jerry II i: To College I was sent: / Where I learn’d to game and swear, / On fun and frolic bent.
1952		B. MacMahon Children of the Rainbow 119: I was only gamin’ with ye, wren-boys.

2. (UK Und.) to encourage or turn a blind eye to theft.

1818

W. Perry London Guide.

3. (US black) to manipulate humanity for one’s own ends, usu. financial ones; to trick, to deceive; recent use has ext. to all forms of manipulation (see cite 2020).

a.1963		‘The Fall’ in D. Wepman et al. Life (1976) 80: SoI smiled with glee and said, ‘Golly gee, / It’s time for the kid to game.’.
1972		Milner & Milner Black Players 34: Sometimes game is used as a verb with a preposition: Thus, ‘he was gaming off the bitch’ [...]. Here the meaning is similar to that of ‘con game,’ but these usages also refer to the conception of life as a series of games, the most basic of which is the survival game.
1980		E. Folb Runnin’ Down Some Lines 88: To game someone [...] convey[s] the sense of context and jockeying for one-up power which is found in much teenage behavior. [Ibid.] 128: You constantly gamin’, tryin’ to get over with your conversation.
1992		T. Williams Crackhouse 37: A great variety of words refer to deceiving or stealing: there is much talk of ‘vic-ing’ (victimizing), ‘gaming’ (verbally conning), sancoching (stealing), and ‘taking off’ (robbing).
2001		J. Stahl Plainclothes Naked (2002) 273: You try to bail — huh-uh — a crackhead like Tony’s gonna get paranoid. Gonna think you’re gamin’ him, maybe cuttin’ a deal.
2015		T. Pluck ‘Mannish Water’ in Life During Wartime (2018) 137: ‘He thinks Katie is gaming me’.
2018		I. Welsh Dead Man’s Trousers 91: This [i.e. an art show] is the biggest pile of shite I’ve seen [...] He is totally gaming those thick, spoiled rich fuckers .
2020		D. Soh End of Gender 276: [T]hings have gotten so bad, scientific papers can’t be trusted. It speaks to how prominent the practice of gaming scientific publications has become.