Jira owned the project management market. Asana, Monday, Basecamp, Trello, ClickUp all competed on features. Linear's team walked in with fewer features than any of them and built a following among engineers. Linear is a worse product on paper. It does less. But the engineers who use it will fight you if you try to switch them back.

This pattern repeats across software. Products with fewer features take share in markets where the feature gap has collapsed to zero. The reason comes from game design.

The game is not the experience

Jesse Schell is a former Creative Director at Walt Disney Imagineering, Carnegie Mellon professor, and author of The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (now in its third edition, 113 lenses drawing from psychology, architecture, music, anthropology, and film).

Lens #2: The Lens of Essential Experience. The game is not the experience. The game enables the experience, but it is not the experience. A game designer's job is to identify the essential experience and design everything to support it. A feature list enables the product, but the user's experience of it determines whether they stay.

Schell adds the concept of resonance: game themes that touch players do so by fulfilling their fantasies or affirming an idea the player holds to be true. Skyrim's world is heavily scripted, but the fantasy of total freedom in a simpler world resonated enough that Bethesda sold 60 million copies on it. People buy Stardew Valley over games with 100x its budget because the pitch is the peace of farming minus the labor.

The Lens of Freedom: you don't need to give the player true freedom, only the feeling of freedom. Notion works even though users rarely touch half its features. The feeling of having a system you built yourself is what keeps them.

Fantasies that won

If the experience runs on fantasy fulfillment, then every product that won a crowded market should have a clear fantasy behind it.

The competence fantasy. Vim and Neovim hold a devoted audience alongside VS Code because the difficulty is the appeal. Mastering Vim feels like beating a boss. The learning curve filters for people who want the fantasy of being an elite engineer. Vim users have a moment where they realize they're editing text faster than anyone around them. Stack Overflow appeals to the same need: answer a question and the system tells you that you're an expert. People chose Stack Overflow because it let them prove competence to strangers.

The belonging fantasy. Discord won gaming communities by making "your server" feel like "your guild." Custom roles and custom emojis made each server feel owned. Slack won workplace communication by making "your workspace" feel like your team's living room. They serve different markets but both won on the same fantasy: you belong to a group that has its own space.

The control fantasy. Linear's team is taking Jira's market by offering the absence of chaos. Calm UI and fast keyboard shortcuts. Engineers pick Linear because it makes them feel like their work is under control, even when it isn't. Notion appeals to a related need: the workspace is the character sheet, the weekly planner is the quest log. Stripe's team targets developers with the control fantasy. The API docs and the platform architecture tell the developer that they're building real infrastructure.

The accumulation fantasy. VS Code's appeal is power accumulation. Each extension you install and each keybinding you learn makes your editor do more than it did yesterday. GitHub delivers accumulation, and the comparison with GitLab and Bitbucket makes it visible. All three host code. GitHub is the one that turned contribution history into a persistent asset: the green squares, the profile page. GitLab and Bitbucket store your code. GitHub made your contribution history feel like a track record.

The expression fantasy. Figma's appeal to designers is that the tool for designing things is itself a design game. Designers chose Figma because it let them express and iterate with other people watching. Excalidraw offers expression differently: the hand-drawn aesthetic says "this is a sketch, not a commitment."

The reward fantasy. Schell's Lens of Pleasure and Lens of Reward describe why certain game loops keep players coming back: the experience of earning something feels good independent of what you earned. Duolingo's team built a productivity app around this loop. The streak counter and the XP bar pull you back. The guilt trip from the owl when you miss a day makes sure you don't leave. Social media runs on the same loop (likes and notifications). Robinhood's team brought it to investing: confetti on your first trade.

Not every product maps to a clean fantasy (chaos and destruction drive entire game genres but have few product analogues), but the exercise forces you to ask Schell's question: what is the essential experience?

A lens from outside your discipline

None of the fantasies above came from the engineering discipline. They came from a game design textbook written by a former Disney Imagineer who also worked at IBM as a software engineer.

Grand strategy games train you to think about systems architecture. MMO guilds give you a framework for team dynamics and community products. A game design textbook reframes product-market fit in ways that product management books don't cover.

The advice to specialize is about depth, and depth matters. But specialization advice usually comes with an implicit "and ignore everything else." The engineer who reads game design or studies psychology has more mental models to pull from when the feature list runs out and the product needs a reason to exist.

Map your product to the fantasies above. If you can't articulate which fantasy you offer that your competitors don't, you're competing on features, and features will converge over time. Schell's Lens of Emotion asks: what emotions should the player feel, and are they feeling them? Next time you run a user test, ask what your users felt.