What Game Are You Playing?

I’ve spent the last few years reading people like Ted Gioia, Zena Hitz, Ray Dalio, Ryan Holiday, and Scott Galloway.
For a long time, I thought I was collecting knowledge.
Recently, I’ve started to think I’m collecting something else.

I’m collecting theories of the game.

That realization came into focus when I read Reid Hoffman’s June 2026 foreword to Mark Pincus’s new book, Life at the Speed of Play.

In it, Hoffman says he often asks founders two questions:

What game are you playing?

And:

What’s your theory of the game?

At first glance, these sound like startup questions.
The more I thought about them, the more they felt like life questions.

Two Questions

Hoffman and Pincus have been discussing the future of the internet since the aftermath of the dot-com crash.
At a time when many believed the internet had failed, they shared a different view.
The future would not be built around information alone.
It would be built around human connection.
History largely proved them right.
But what interested me was not their prediction.
It was the framework behind it.

The first question is straightforward.

What game are you playing?

Most people never stop to ask. They focus on tactics. They optimize individual moves. They work harder.
But they rarely examine the game itself.

The second question goes deeper.

What’s your theory of the game?

Hoffman defines it this way:

“Your theory of the game is your mental model of how success happens in a given domain.”

In other words:

How does the world actually work?
What forces matter most?
What dynamics sit beneath the surface?
What does everyone else believe that might be wrong?

Google had a theory.
Facebook had a theory.
Amazon had a theory.

None of them knew they were right at the beginning.
They acted, tested, learned, and adjusted.
What distinguished them was not certainty.
It was having a model worth testing.

Seeing Theories Everywhere

Once I started thinking this way, I began to see theories of the game everywhere.
Ted Gioia has one. Zena Hitz has one. Ray Dalio has one. Ryan Holiday has one.

What makes them interesting is not the information they provide.

It is the lens through which they interpret reality.
Ted Gioia is not simply writing about culture. He has a theory of culture.
Zena Hitz is not simply writing about education. She has a theory of learning.
Dalio is not simply writing about geopolitics. He has a theory of how empires rise and fall.
The more I read, the more I realized that I was not collecting facts.

I was collecting ways of seeing.

The Great Books as Competing Theories

This realization changed the way I think about the Great Books as well.
The Great Books are not merely a collection of classics.
In some sense, they are a conversation between competing theories of the game.

Homer offers one answer.
Marcus Aurelius offers another.
Montaigne another.
Tocqueville another.

Each is wrestling with the same questions:
What matters? What lasts? How should one live?

Perhaps that is why these books remain alive centuries later.
Not because they provide information.
But because they offer frameworks.
They help us see the game differently.

Living Between Games

Perhaps this idea resonates with me because I have spent much of my life moving between worlds.

Brazil. Japan. France. Southeast Asia.
Business. Education. Writing.

Each world seemed to be playing a different game.
What counted as success in one often mattered very little in another.
Over time, I became less interested in mastering a particular game and more interested in understanding the assumptions behind it.

What are people optimizing for?
What do they believe leads to success?
What theory are they acting on?

AI Changes the Moves

One of Hoffman’s most interesting observations concerns AI.
For decades, competitive advantage often came from being able to build.

To code. To design. To write. To create.
Now AI dramatically lowers those barriers.

Anyone can prototype.
Anyone can generate content.
Anyone can build something.

The question is shifting from:

Can you build it?

to:

Do you know what to build?

AI accelerates execution.
It does not provide direction.
It speeds up moves.
It does not choose the game.

Building an Intellectual Factory

Lately I’ve been thinking about what I call building an intellectual factory.

Writing essays. Reading books. Watching films. Teaching leadership. Studying philosophy.

Individually, these are just moves.
A blog post is a move. A book review is a move. A lecture is a move.

But the real project is larger.
The goal is to build a system that compounds ideas over time.
A place where history, philosophy, literature, film, and leadership can interact with one another. The individual outputs matter.
But they are not the game.
They are pieces of a larger one.

For much of my career, I played games defined by institutions.

Companies. Industries. Job titles.

Increasingly, I find myself drawn to a different game:
Building something under my own name. And behind that game sits a theory.

A belief that people do not change because they receive more information.

They change because they acquire a new way of seeing.

Choosing the Game

When I was younger, I spent most of my energy thinking about how to win.
Now I spend more time thinking about what game is worth playing.
And whether I have a coherent theory for how that game works.
AI will make us faster.
It will make us more productive.
It will make many things easier.
But it will not answer the most important question.

What game are you playing?

And what is your theory of the game? ◾️

Reference:

Idea Generators

When I meet founders and product managers, I typically ask them two questions: What game are you playing? What’s your theory of the game?

Reid Hoffman Jun 23, 2026

https://reidhoffman.substack.com/p/idea-generators

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First published on Substack on Jul 1, 2026 (JST). Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive (published on this site: Oct 15, 2026). Images from the original are omitted here pending rights clearance. Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/what-game-are-you-playing

Cover image: A game of Go in progress on a wooden board (CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons — source)