The Myth of Fairness in The Sandbox

This story starts from a divot on a golf course, and ends in a sandbox built on a cloud.

Preamble for an unfair world

After a drive that missed the green and ended in a divot where he couldn’t see the hole, my friend’s younger golfing partner for the day, smacked his teeth and said, “it’s unfair.”

The game, as this guy (Sean, let’s say) saw it, was unfair. Not the way he played it, or his equipment, or anything specific, the whole of golf was unjust.

When Sean asked my friend why he played the game, the response was that golf was a great “problem engine.” The reason my friend liked golf was the very same reason Sean hated it; the game is a series of unplanned, in-and-out-bound problems that you willingly give yourself to solve.

This got me thinking about one of the places where we learn fairness in its earliest form - play.

And then I started to think about how games like Minecraft and other open-ended, world-building games have taken off in the last few decades, and what that may have done to the popular conception of “fairness.”

And then I pondered the vibe-coded, limitless-possibility renaissance that is taking place with AI as stated in this article I read from a VC, depicting a future of software as a service that is actually service as a software, turning reliable products into composable canvases, sandboxes; essentially, MineCraft for businesses.

Somewhere between hazards, playground rules, pixelated worlds, and vibe-coded sandboxes, our idea of fairness, and what success in business and life is supposed to be, and how it’s most likely attained, might be being overwritten.

On Play and Creative Resilience

For 13 years, I worked as an educator with kids in summer camps, schools, and science museums, and in that time I learned how to play from the masters of the art. Play is critically important to development and learning, and has a functional role in a fully flourishing, thriving life.

My children love to play and I’m often right in there with them, and the biggest issue I’m seeing lately is fairness, “that’s not fair they get this” or “that’s not fair I have ice powers, but not water powers” (a real concern).

What I noticed is that “fairness” is deeply considered and argued endlessly over, not while playing games (like our pal Sean on the links), but specifically while they are engaged in open-ended, imaginary play.

As a jazz musician, poet, artist, and confident improviser, I love to play, and there’s a time and place to get silly and pointless. But I also have learned creative, genius, out-of-the-box thinking in play, comes from well-defined boundaries.

Like I explain in this clip from “The Cheap Genius Theory,” creativity isn’t something you’ve never heard before, but something that mixes novelty and cliche. There’s a difference between free jazz and swing.

Open ended, imaginary, illogical - these are the traditional hallmarks of brilliance and creativity, something kids should be encouraged to explore - but as a creative artist, these terms make me scared.

If every idea is on the table, you’re not headed anywhere, you’re a hoarder. If there’s limitless possibilities, you don’t develop a knack for what plausible genius is.

If everything is out-of-the-box, there’s nothing inside to compare it to. The box is gone! So are you!

On Games

I took my kids to visit their grandmother recently, and she put out an old-school game for the kids, “Pick Up Sticks.” The game is simple; you take a handful of sticks, drop them in a pile, and use one stick to continuously reclaim others from the pile without disturbing the surrounding sticks, if you do, you lose a turn. It’s simple, but challenging.

Every time you play Pick Up Sticks, you are playing a new version of it. The sticks won’t always fall like they did the last time. No quantum computer could handle this game, because, what worked last time might help you, but not more than fully showing up to the current pile of sticks. The skill here comes from embodied experience and mindful, flexible presence within well-defined structures.

Games have definite rules and regulated ways of playing. 5-card draw doesn’t work with an infinite deck. Tetris isn’t open to switching the shapes, you fit what you’re given. Freeze tag is only freeze tag if you freeze when you’re tagged. Mario isn’t going to float in mid-air to the flag, you gotta hit your head on some bricks.

If you hit your golf ball into a divot, it’s not unfair - it’s called playing golf. Maybe the concept of unfairness comes from work ethic, or grit?

On Grit

In the last 20 years, there was a spate of grit-based philosophies that sprouted up in the educational circles I interact with, the narrative given to kids was that we use grit and really work problem solving into skills which turns into achievement. Just work really hard, grind it out, and skills show up later.

Recent research proves that grit has little to do with overcoming learning barriers and achieving outcomes.

I’m speculating, but perhaps our young Sean on the golf course may have been told about grit in school, and tried to apply it but found out it wasn’t quite the ticket. That is unfair.

But I think this Unfair World outlook might connect back to games, more specifically, open-ended games like Minecraft.

Fields of Dreams

Minecraft was a smash when it launched in 2009. No missions, no story - just build, explore, and mod. The community defined the rules and the value of the platform. It was a multiple of the Field of Dreams “if we build it, they will come”

And people showed up. Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time, and it really isn’t a game, but a sandbox. Players can play a story mode, but the popular traction seemingly comes from the “Creative” mode of play, where you can gather resources, craft, and engineer whatever your heart desires.

Whereas games in the past put you on a determined course with limited resource and you had to play and improvise within explicit confines, open-ended games empower players to make their own rules, adjust fairness to taste, and with barriers removed, they never have to feel the friction of their out-of-the-box ideas, because there is no box.

This is creativity incarnate. This is true freedom, ya?

Looking at this through the lens of “The Cheap Genius Theory” the popular assumption that Minecraft is an engine of creative thinking misses a few points;

• Players are most likely to copy what they see, not make what’s never been seen

• The game rewards finishing builds, not reflection

• Creativity gets flattened into speed-running recipes

• Trapped within physics and lore it’s hard to dialogue with disciplines beyond it

• It’s self-contained, so no interpretive layer can discern mimicry from mastery

It’s a great venue for practicing tinkering, but a poor place to train the connective tissue that turns tinkering into world-changing ideas.

Service As A Software

The main reason I’m bringing all this up is the “trillion dollar” shift in SaaS (software as a service), made possible with AI Agents, to SaaS (service as a software). Much better than “agents as a service,” which is AaaS.

The thought here is that rather than ship a final product, like software that works 100% of the time, the high-composability in AI technology and agentic coding applications, allows us to now continuously mod and build software that is always evolving.

“The traditional “deploy and maintain” model has become “deploy and continuously re-engineer,” says this article from Foundation Capital, an investment arm that has no reason to shake your hand funny when they deliver these words.

“In the new AI world, buyers don’t purchase software; they purchase the outcomes it delivers,” they tell you. And this sounds empowering, but it actually brings fairness into play.

Old software gave everyone the same finished product—shared wins, shared glitches.

Today we all get the same sandbox kit; fairness stops at equal parts.

Connecting this back to the theme at hand, the idea that enterprise software should mirror Minecraft, a sandbox where users invent value, is seductive but flawed.

Most people don't want open-ended freedom; they satisfice, picking the least-worst option, not the most creative one. The myth of “cheap genius” celebrates spontaneous invention, but real creativity depends on deep, often invisible knowledge and a cultural context that makes novelty legible and valuable.

When companies release tools expecting users to define their purpose, they attract mimics, not makers, and end up with templates instead of innovation.

Minecraft worked because it was a game that came with a culture, syntax, and feedback loops. If there is to be a future for service-as-software, it can’t just rely on blank canvases. Guided recombination, structures that nurture emergence, and scaffolding that turns chaos into meaning is the only way to bubble up real innovation.

Land the plane man…

So we return to that divot on the golf course, where Sean declared the game unfair. What he could’ve been saying, was that golf refused to be Minecraft. It wouldn't let him reshape the terrain, adjust the physics, or redefine success on his terms. The divot was just a divot, demanding he play from where his ball landed, not where he wished it had.

That's the paradox of the litterbox lottery moment: we've mistaken constraint for cruelty and structure for limitation, when in fact the opposite is true. Real creativity, the kind that builds bridges between disciplines, that turns tinkering into transformation, emerges not from limitless possibility but from the productive friction of well-defined boundaries.

The future belongs not to those who can dream up anything, but to those who can make something meaningful within the material, majestic, and maddening constraints of the world as it is.