In a zero-sum game, my gain is your loss. Resources, attention, status — all fixed. Every move is competitive, every alliance is temporary, every relationship is instrumental. The logic forces it.
In a positive-sum game, cooperation creates value that wouldn't otherwise exist. Both players can win. The moves available in a positive-sum game are qualitatively different — building, sharing, investing in shared infrastructure, being honest about weaknesses because fixing them helps everyone.
The useful thing about this distinction is that positive-sum games are recognizable before you fully understand the underlying structure.
People in genuine positive-sum games behave differently than people in zero-sum games, even when they don't explicitly know which game they're in.
Sharing information. In zero-sum games, information is hoarded — what you know is an edge. In positive-sum games, information sharing accelerates the joint outcome. Open source software, academic research, professional communities that publish their methods — these are positive-sum by nature. You can tell a community is genuinely positive-sum when sharing is the norm rather than the exception.
Long time horizons. Zero-sum games favor short-term extraction — take what you can before someone else does. Positive-sum games favor investment — spend resources now to create more later. Organizations with long time horizons are usually embedded in positive-sum dynamics. Organizations with short time horizons are usually in zero-sum ones.
Celebration of others' success. In zero-sum games, a competitor's success is bad news. In positive-sum games, a peer's success is often evidence that the opportunity is larger than you thought. The investor community's norm of celebrating portfolio company wins, even wins by direct competitors, is positive-sum behavior.
If you can identify whether a game is positive or zero-sum from the behavioral signals, you can make better decisions about how to play it. Applying zero-sum tactics in a positive-sum game is usually self-defeating — you extract short-term value while destroying the trust and cooperation that generates long-term value. Applying positive-sum tactics in a zero-sum game is naive.
The harder case: games that look positive-sum but are actually zero-sum, or vice versa. Due diligence on which game you're actually in is worth doing before choosing a strategy.