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.

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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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 :) --- [1] https://www.molleindustria.org/en/oiligarchy/