[the_af]

Your reply reminded me of the free game Oiligarchy by Molleindustria (which made quite a few indie hits in my opinion).

In that game, if you played "well" you ended up destroying the world. The only winning move was, indeed, not to play.

[shaftway]

I think OP is referring to the 80's movie WarGames - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames

At the end a strategic defense computer is asked to play Tic Tac Toe against itself and suddenly "learns" about no-win scenarios. Then it does the same with nuclear launch scenarios, and finds that they're all no-win. It decides that nuclear war "is a strange game", and "the only winning move is not to play".

[the_af]

Thanks, I caught the WarGames reference. Is there anyone not familiar with it? It's one of those pieces of widespread internet lore (though, of course, I actually watched the movie too, back in my youth).

I very intentionally meant that it also applies to Oiligarchy [1], an actual game (not a movie) where the winning move was not to play :)

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[1] https://www.molleindustria.org/en/oiligarchy/