Deception - Conundrums for Youth

What  do you say to the young about deception?

Of course we start with the premise that our kids should be honest and tell the truth and not lie or cheat.
This goes triple in our view of the kids relations with us.
Never lie to your parents.
To lie to parents will trigger profound and unhappy consequences.
We tell kids that trustworthiness is a most valuable trait, and that it can be lost so easily with a seemingly simple act of deception. We tell kids that their reputation for trustworthiness has to be earned, and that without it they will have an unhappy life.
Parents tend to speak in absolute terms about truth telling.
There is no middle ground; things are black or white.
And that message is repeated endlessly, with the hopes it will sink in, be internalized by youth.

Now let us consider youth sports.
I'm thinking typically of team sports and games.
Hide and seek for openers.
This is a pasttime that is founded on deception.
If one is not deceptive, one can not do well at the game.
To do well yields all sorts of benefits to the child, and they are encouraged to be deceptive.

Think of hockey, soccer, volleyball and other goal/point scoring games.
Again, success in these sports is often dependent upon deception - either at a team level or an individual level.

So can you now see the dissonance or disconnect between the message to youth as a general rule from elders, and in a specific application like games and sports.

And my question - is how to resolve this apparent conflict in what we say to youth?

I turn to game theory ( and what very little I know about it) for a framework of analysis.
In zero sum games it is permssible to deceive.
In non zero sum games it is not permissible.
That is my tentative conclusion.

I am of the view that is best to see human lives and conduct on this planet these days as being a non zero sum situation.
To paraphrase Buckminister Fuller - we ought to think that
"this is not a you OR me world, but rather a you AND me world."

We ought to arrange our affairs that our gains are not at the expense of others.
Rather our gains should benefit not only ourselves but others as well.

Still, we will often find ourselves in zero sum game situations.
The most dramatic of these situations is War.
In the Art of War - an enduring classic from Sun Tzu written 2500 years ago - it is said
"That all war is based on deception".
While we may try to justify any participation in a war as not only for our own benefit, but the benefit of humankind (say to stop an evil ruler from pursuing an evil path), in the limited context of the fight between two factions - it is a zero sum game. One wins at the expense of the other side's loss.

Of course most team sport and recreational games will be most often seen in a zero sum perspective.
One team wins, the other team loses. The fruits go to the winners.

But what about other contests that are commonplace in our experience.
Consider election campaigns - political or otherwise.
Or how about the competitive world of business - where only one individual or company will get the 'sale' and the other will be shut out.
Surely these are in some respects anyway, zero sum games.

So the next question becomes, in these situations, - political contests, or business contests, is deception permissible, or not.

I am leaning to the response that deception is indeed permitted in these situations.
And if that is an acceptable response, then how should that inform what we say to youth?

More on this later.
For now, I close content to have introduced the topic, and in a crude way set out my own preliminary views.