Tic-Tac-Toe in Pop Culture: Movies, Shows, and Surprising Cameos

From WarGames to chicken-vs-human carnival booths · 8 min read

In 1983, a tic-tac-toe game saved the world.

Or, at least, in the climax of the film WarGames, the young protagonist gets a sentient military supercomputer to grasp the futility of nuclear war by making it play itself at tic-tac-toe. After running through thousands of self-play games and reaching only draws, the computer extends the lesson to its nuclear-strike simulations and concludes, in one of the most quoted lines in 1980s cinema: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

That moment captures something true about tic-tac-toe's place in culture. The game keeps showing up — in movies, TV, video games, even literal chicken carnivals — because it's a kind of cultural shorthand. Everyone recognizes it. Nobody needs the rules explained. And in its solvedness, it carries a built-in metaphor about futility, perfect play, and the limits of strategy.

Here are some of the places tic-tac-toe has surfaced over the years, and a guess at why.

WarGames (1983): the most famous tic-tac-toe moment in cinema

Matthew Broderick plays a teenage hacker who accidentally dials into a U.S. military computer called WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) and inadvertently starts a simulated countdown to global thermonuclear war. The computer, having been designed to "learn" through play, can't tell the difference between a game and reality. It's about to launch real missiles.

The solution Broderick's character lands on is brilliantly simple. He tells WOPR to play tic-tac-toe against itself. Game after game flashes across the screen, all ending in draws. Eventually WOPR generalizes the lesson — runs through every nuclear war simulation, finds no winners — and stops the launch.

What makes the scene work is the choice of tic-tac-toe specifically. Any solved game could have done the job, conceptually. But tic-tac-toe is the only one a 1983 movie audience would all instantly recognize and understand. The film's writers, Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes, picked the game with the most cultural saturation precisely so they wouldn't have to explain anything. Tic-tac-toe didn't need a Wikipedia link. It just was the game everybody had played.

The line "the only winning move is not to play" has had a strange afterlife — appearing in everything from political commentary to memes to security research papers about Cold War deterrence theory. It's one of the rare movie quotes that's also genuinely useful as a piece of game-theoretic insight.

Beetlejuice (1988)

In a much smaller moment, the bored ghosts of the Maitlands play tic-tac-toe in their attic in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice. The scene isn't about strategy — it's about expressing how mundane the afterlife is. Even ghosts, with all of eternity and the ability to fly, end up drawing tic-tac-toe with each other. It's a sight gag, but it works because the audience instantly understands: tic-tac-toe is what you play when there's literally nothing else to do.

That association — tic-tac-toe as the universal "I'm bored" activity — runs through a lot of pop culture. Characters play it in waiting rooms, in detention, on long car trips, during interminable meetings. The game's portability (anywhere there's paper) and brevity (under a minute) make it the visual symbol of killed time.

"Cat's game": the slang that won't die

In American English, a draw at tic-tac-toe is called a "cat's game" or just "cat." Where this phrase came from is genuinely murky — there are competing theories. One holds that "cat" is short for "catscratch," because the X-shaped marks looked like the scratches a cat would leave. Another suggests it came from the (now archaic) sense of "cat" meaning something easily caught or trivially achieved. A third points to the older game name "tit-tat-toe" or "tip-cat" (an unrelated stick game), with the "cat" surviving into the tic-tac-toe vocabulary as a fossil.

What's clear is that the phrase has been in use since at least the late 19th century. It appears in The Simpsons, Family Guy, and countless other animated and live-action shows whenever a tic-tac-toe game ends in a draw. The fact that the slang has its own name says something about how universal the game's experience is — including the experience of finishing a game with no winner.

Tic-Tac-Dough: the game show

From 1956 to 1986 (with a few revivals in the years since), American TV ran a quiz show called Tic-Tac-Dough. Contestants answered trivia questions to claim squares on a giant tic-tac-toe board — get three in a row, win a bunch of money. The format is essentially tic-tac-toe with knowledge gates between the squares.

What's interesting is that Tic-Tac-Dough, like its host game, is mostly a contest of decisions about which squares to attempt rather than whether you know the trivia. Strong players quickly realized that the center square — being part of four winning lines — was disproportionately valuable. Just like the original game. Even on a game show with category questions and prize money, the same geometric truths held.

Tic-tac-toe-playing chickens (yes, really)

This deserves its own section because it's so improbable. From at least the 1980s through the early 2000s, traveling carnival booths in the United States featured a "challenge a chicken at tic-tac-toe" attraction. Pay a dollar, sit at a table opposite a chicken in a glass case, and play a game. If the chicken won, the carnival kept your dollar. If you won, you got a small prize.

The chickens always won, or at minimum drew. They weren't strategists — they were trained, using the same kind of operant conditioning Skinner used in his pigeon research. Hidden mechanisms behind the booth showed the chicken a light next to the cell it should peck, and pecking earned a small food reward. The "AI" was a simple lookup table; the chicken was just the actuator.

The most famous of these chickens was at the Tropicana casino in Atlantic City, where a chicken named "Ginger" (and her successors) became a tourist attraction in the 1990s and 2000s. The booth closed eventually for, of all reasons, animal welfare concerns about the chicken's quality of life — not concerns about the game.

The whole thing is delightful and absurd, but it also illustrates something about tic-tac-toe's depth: even the simplest possible game-playing setup (a chicken pecking colored buttons) can play unbeatably, because the optimal strategy is small enough to encode in a lookup table. Try that with chess.

Tic-tac-toe in video games and computing

It would be hard to overstate how often tic-tac-toe appears in early computing. The first video game ever created with a visual display — A. S. Douglas's OXO program of 1952 — was tic-tac-toe. Before Pong, before Spacewar!, before any of the things we usually credit as "the first," there was a Cambridge graduate student programming tic-tac-toe on a vacuum-tube computer.

From there, the game became the standard "first project" in computer science education. Almost every introduction to AI uses tic-tac-toe as the running example. Tutorial websites use it. Coding bootcamps use it. Our own Python tutorial and JavaScript tutorial are part of a tradition stretching back seven decades. Generations of programmers have learned by building tic-tac-toe.

And the game keeps showing up as a metaphor inside other video games — usually as a mini-game, a puzzle, or a clue. The Witness, Inscryption, countless escape-room games include tic-tac-toe variations as puzzles. It's the universal language of "this is a small strategic challenge."

Why tic-tac-toe keeps showing up

Step back from the specific examples and you see a pattern. Filmmakers, TV writers, game designers, and even carnival operators keep reaching for tic-tac-toe because it does three things that no other game does as well.

First, universal recognition. Every audience on Earth understands tic-tac-toe instantly. You can show it without explanation. There's almost no other game with that property.

Second, maximum simplicity. It fits in a single shot. The board is a 3×3 grid; the moves are a handful of marks. A director can show a full game in 10 seconds of screen time. Try doing that with chess.

Third, layered meaning. Tic-tac-toe carries a lot of cultural baggage with it. It can signal childhood, boredom, futility, intelligence (when used to teach AI), or strategic depth (when used in pop-math contexts). Filmmakers can lean on any of these meanings without spelling them out.

That's a lot of work being done by nine squares and two symbols. Most cultural objects don't punch above their weight like that. But tic-tac-toe does, which is probably why it's been doing it for four thousand years and shows no sign of stopping.

Want to test the WarGames lesson for yourself? Set our Classic AI to "Impossible" and play it. You'll discover, like WOPR in the film, that with perfect play, the only outcome is a draw.

Play Classic Tic-Tac-Toe →