Gameplay

Wardley Mapping gameplays are concrete, repeatable strategic actions you can deploy to influence your competitive environment. Unlike universal principles (doctrine), gameplays are context-dependent—specific to your users, landscape, climate, and organizational purpose.

Gameplays emerge directly from mapping insights. When you map your competitive landscape, you reveal patterns and opportunities that inform which strategic actions fit your situation. Use gameplays to reduce friction, evolve components, shape markets, and outmaneuver competitors.

How to use gameplays

1. Map the situation (users, needs, components, dependencies).
2. Analyze the landscape to identify constraints, inertia, duplication, and mismatches between methods and component characteristics.
3. Select gameplays that match your specific context (often combining multiple plays).
4. Execute iteratively; measure outcomes; adapt based on results.

Complete gameplay categories

Basic Operations

These fundamental plays focus on improving internal operations and alignment.

• Focus on user needs: Align the organization on user needs rather than internal needs. This process enables discovery of unmet needs (opportunities) and removes friction from customer interactions.

• Situational awareness: Remove alignment issues between business, IT and other groups by providing a common language. Enable development of common purpose and empower groups to take advantage of their part of the map while understanding the whole.

• Effective & efficient: Remove bias and duplication within an organization along with use of appropriate methods for management and purchasing. Cost reductions of 90-95% are not uncommon.

• Structure & culture: Implement cell-based & PST structures along with multiple cultures to deal with aptitude and attitude. Enable both autonomy and mastery while avoiding silos and inertia created by traditional structures.

• Optimising flow: Analyze and improve risk, performance, information and financial flow through mapping. This is necessary for increasing margin, removing friction and increasing speed.

• Channel conflict: Exploit new channels and conflict within existing channels to create favorable terms.

User Perception

These forms focus on influencing the end user view of the world.

• Education: Overcome user inertia to change through education. There are 16 different forms of inertia and many can be overcome directly with education.

• Bundling: Hide a disadvantageous change by bundling the change with other needs.

• Creating artificial needs: Create and elevate an artificial need through marketing and behavioral influence. Take a rock and make it a pet.

• Confusion of choice: Prevent users from making rational decisions by overwhelming them with choice.

• FUD: Create fear, uncertainty and doubt over a change in order to slow it down.

• Artificial competition: Create two competing bodies to become the focus of competition and drive oxygen out of a market.

• Lobbying: Persuade Government of a favorable position.

Accelerators

These enable you to accelerate the process of evolution.

• Market enablement: Encourage the development of competition in a market.

• Open approaches: Encourage competition through open source, open data, open APIs, open processes by removing barriers to adoption and encouraging a focus for competition.

• Exploiting network effects: Techniques which increase the marginal value of something with increased number of users.

• Co-operation: Working with others. Sounds easy, actually it's not.

• Industrial policy: Government investment in a field.

Deaccelerators

These enable you to slow down the process of evolution.

• Exploiting existing constraints: Find a constraint and reinforce it through supply or demand manipulation.

• Patents & IPR: Prevent competitors from developing a space including ring fencing a competitor.

• Creating constraints: Supply chain manipulation with a view of creating a new constraint where none existed.

• Limitation of competition: Through regulatory or other means including erecting barriers to prevent or limit competitors.

Dealing with toxicity

Elements of your value chain will be irrelevant with evolution over time. There are numerous ways of dealing with this especially as the inertia created can become toxic.

• Disposal of liability: Overcome the internal inertia to disposal. Your own organization is likely to fight you even when you're trying to get rid of the toxic.

• Sweat & dump: Exploit a 3rd party to take over operating the toxic asset while you prepare to remove yourself.

• Pig in a poke: Create a situation where others believe the toxic asset has long term value and dispose of it through sale before the toxicity reveals itself.

Market

Standard ways of playing in the market.

• Differentiation: Create a visible difference through user needs.

• Pricing policy: Exploit supply and demand effects including price elasticity, Jevons paradox and constraints including fragmentation plays.

• Exploiting buyer/supplier power: Create a position of strength for yourself.

• Harvesting: Allow others to develop upon your offerings and harvest those that are successful. Techniques for ensuring harvesting creates positive signals rather than creating an environment others avoid.

• Standards game: Drive a market to a standard to create a cost of transition for others or remove the ability of others to differentiate.

• Signal distortion: Exploit commonly used signals in the market by manipulation of analysts to create a perception of change.

Defensive

Standard ways of protecting your market position.

• Threat acquisition: Buy up those companies that may threaten your market.

• Raising barriers to entry: Increase expectations within a market for a range of user needs to be met in order to prevent others entering the market.

• Procrastination: Do nothing and allow competition to drive a system to a more evolved form.

• Defensive regulation: Use Government to create protection for your market and slow down competitors.

Attacking

Standard ways of attacking a market change.

• Directed investment: VC approach to a specific or identified future change.

• Experimentation: Use of specialist groups, hackdays and other mechanisms of experimentation.

• Creating centres of gravity: Create a focus of talent to encourage a market focus on your organization.

• Undermining barriers to entry: Identify a barrier to entry into a market and reduce it to encourage competition.

• Fool's mate: Use a constraint to force industrialization of a higher order system.

Ecosystem

Using others to help achieve your goals.

• Alliances: Work with other companies to drive evolution of a specific activity, practice or data set.

• Co-creation: Work with end users to drive evolution of a specific activity, practice or data set.

• Sensing engines (ILC): Use consumption data to detect future success.

• Tower and moat: Dominate a future position and prevent future competitors from creating any differential.

• Two factor: Bring together consumers and producers and exploit the relationship between them.

• Co-opting: Copy competitors move and undermine any ecosystem advantage by interrupting data flows.

• Embrace & extend: Capture an existing ecosystem.

Competitor

Dealing with the opposition if you can't work with them.

• Tech drops: Create a 'follow me' situation and drop large technology changes onto the market.

• Fragmentation: Exploit pricing effects, constraints and co-opting to fragment a competitor's market.

• Reinforcing inertia: Identify inertia within a competitor and force market changes that reinforce this.

• Sapping: Open up multiple fronts on a competitor to weaken their ability to react.

• Misdirection: Send false signals to competitors or future competitors including investment focused on the wrong direction.

• Restriction: Limit a competitors ability to adapt.

• Talent raid: Remove core talent from a competitor either directly or indirectly.

Positional

General forms of playing with the future market.

• Land grab: Identify and position a company to capture a future market space.

• First mover: Exploit first mover advantage especially with industrialization to component services.

• Fast follower: Exploit fast follower advantage into uncharted spaces.

• Weak signal: Use of common economic patterns to identify where and when to attack.

Poison

General forms of preventing others playing with the future market. If you can't capture then poison it.

• Licensing: Use of licensing to prevent future competitor moves.

• Insertion: Either through talent or misdirection, encourage false moves in a competitor.

• Design to fail: Remove potential future threats by poisoning a market space before anyone attempts to establish it.

How to implement gameplays effectively

Start with mapping: Every gameplay must be grounded in a current map of your competitive landscape. Without situational awareness, gameplays become generic tactics rather than strategic moves.

Combine: Individual gameplays rarely work in isolation. Successful strategies combine multiple plays in sequences that build momentum and create compound effects.

Reinforce with doctrine: Gameplays work best when supported by Wardley Mapping doctrine—common language, bias removal, duplication elimination, and assumption challenging.

Related concepts

Understanding gameplays requires familiarity with several interconnected Wardley Mapping concepts:

• Doctrine: The universal principles that guide all strategic decisions
• Coevolution of Practice: How practices must evolve as components mature
• Value Chain: The sequence of activities that deliver value to users
• ILC: Information, Learning, and Communication systems for sensing market changes
• Strategy Loop: The continuous cycle of mapping, learning, and adapting
• Inertia: The resistance to change that gameplays must overcome