I built an app for car dealerships. Wrote code for three months before going to work each day. Pitched three. None bought.
I was playing a flat game inside a live one. The code worked. The market didn’t care.
That’s the trap for developers. We spend all day in flat games. Code compiles or it doesn’t. Tests pass or they fail. Then we try sales, cold email, marketing and the outcomes aren’t deterministic anymore.
There are four types of games in life.
Some games are flat. The rules are fixed, the outcome is known and the result depends entirely on execution. Writing code. Shipping a feature. Hitting a daily habit. There’s no randomness. You either did it or you didn’t.
Some games are random. The outcomes vary, but the rules are stable. A coin flip. A dice roll. Run enough trials and you start to see the distribution. You figure out what works 30% of the time and you plan around that.
Some games are live. The people in the game learn. A cold email. A product launch. Sales. Poker. What worked last quarter stops working because the other side adapted. There’s no fixed playbook. You adapt or you fall behind.
Some games are dark. Crises show up and you don’t control when. A market crash. A pandemic. A platform disappearing overnight. Platform risk. You can’t predict the frequency. The best you can do is buffer. But dark games have an upside too. Viral moments. Breakthroughs. The partnership that changes your trajectory. The downside finds you whether you’re playing or not. The upside requires you to show up.
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What type of game are you best at?
