3 in Three

Of all the classic games I’ve featured in this series, 3 in Three is the one that holds up the best. It is hard to imagine how modern technology could improve this delightful little puzzle game one iota. Each puzzle is clever and satisfying; each little cut scene is snappy and smart. Even the graphics are perfect: the game takes us inside a computer, and so it is right that the images be simple and symbolic, using the computer’s own signifiers as characters and scenery.

You play a sassy, smart-mouthed number 3 who, after a power surge, is ejected from her spreadsheet and becomes lost in the innards of the computer. The other characters are a motley crew of numbers, letters, punctuation and symbols (I was having a conversation with an @ symbol long before they got all popular and mainstream). The 3 is just trying to find her way back to her home spreadsheet, but along the way she has to repair the computer by solving various puzzles and problems. Most of the other symbols are too self-absorbed to help her, or misunderstand her based on cultural differences. Numbers and letters just don’t speak the same language sometimes.

In one gag the 3 is hanging out with an A, I, O, U and Y. “Who’s missing?” asks the A. “That’s easy,” replies the 3. Then E and z enter from stage left. This sort of pun also structures some of the puzzles. In one puzzle, sets of letters form homophones for the correct answer when read phonetically (e.g. IC is the clue for “icy”; XS becomes “excess”). It is a game of jumping the gap between pure symbols, with no semantic value, and meaningful words and ideas. Arguably, all culture derives from this sort of play: playing around with symbols and fitting them together in new ways until meanings pop out from the chaos of non-meaning.

Of course, A, E, I, O, U and Y form a members only club, and z has to leave. In another gag, the 3 meets a bunch of Roman numerals and calls the “old-timers”. Numbers and letters have cultures, have social groupings, have histories. It’s surprising how natural and appropriate the different personalities seem.

The implication of all this is that the smallest units of meaning, the building blocks from which we construct all the meanings of modern culture, themselves experience entire worlds of meaning. This is an awesome and dizzying concept (which raises the question of whether these symbols are using an even lower level set of symbols to express meaning, or are they using themselves, self-referentially?).

After playing 3 in Three you can never again use numbers and letters as pure, innocent symbols. They always have a back-story, a personality, opinions and preferences. What those symbols look like matter (font designers matter). 3 in Three becomes an intertext for the alphabet and the set of integers.