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Emile comments on Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Munchkinry is a terrible way to play a game because maximizing your character's victories and maximizing your and other players' enjoyment of the game are two very different things. (For one thing, rules-lawyering is a boring waste of time (unless you're into that, but then there are better rulesets, like the Talmud (Zing.)); for another, it's fun to let your character make stupid in-character mistakes.) It is a good way to live a life, and indeed recommended as such by writers of rationalist fiction.
There can be several ways to get enjoyement out of a roleplaying game:
The sheer intellectual challenge of the game (which you can also get from storyless boardgames)
Telling or enjoying an interesting story, with interesting situations
Escapism - living as someone else, in a different world
These are usually called Gamist, narrativist, Simulationist.
They are not mutually incompatible, and you can indeed have different people around the same table with different tastes / goals. There can be problem when one ruins the story or the believability in order to get a game advantage, and other players were caring about the story etc. - this is when people claim about munchkinry.
But you can still have good game sessions where everybody is a munchkin, or when the rules and DM are good enough so that the player's don't get to choose between a game advantage and an interesting story (for example, I think in most versions of D&D you basically have some points you can only spend on combat-useful stuff (opicking feats or powers), and some points you can only spend on combat-useless stuff (skill points)).
Anyone who thinks skill points (or any other character ability) is useless in combat gets an "F" in munchkinry. ;)