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Games

Why I’ll Never Delete ‘Threes!’, AKA the Best Mobile Game Ever

It began as a crutch, but now it’s something else—the app I’ll never get rid of.

Above: Threes! app icon courtesy of Sirvo.

I first met Threes! on the bus. I had an hour-long journey each morning, from the south of London to the north of London. It was tedious, and I wasn't earning enough to buy myself a Kindle or a 3DS. All I had was my then-boyfriend's second-hand iPhone and a tiny sliver of memory and time to spend on games.

Threes! came out during my first month in my first real job, and so I played it on the bus. It's a game in which you combine big, chunky numbers to make bigger numbers, but it's more than that. Each number is voiced, and they yawn and giggle and flirt with you and each other. It's a puzzle-ish game with a personality. It was Apple's game of the year in 2014, and topped the App Store's paid app chart. It was so popular that there's a good chance that, even if you haven't played it, you've seen someone else doing so.

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Threes! soon became my life. I knew nobody in London, except my boss and co-workers, who lived nowhere near me. Threes! was a reason to look at my phone when nobody was messaging me.

There's no penalty, but there's no reward. It just… is.

It started as a crutch, and became a dependency, a nervous tic, perhaps. I had a lot of travel anxiety. I had a lot of work anxiety. I would spend slightly too long in the bathrooms there, nervously swiping numbers up and down and across in a near-mindless pattern. I knew how to play, and it's simple enough that you can do it without really thinking. Swipe. Swipe. Reacting to colors and glyphs with unfocused eyes. Lose. Start again. There's no penalty, but there's no reward. It just… is, and it asks no more from you than your own sense of personal satisfaction.

Eventually life settled down. I made friends, moved to somewhere better, got my own phone. But Threes! still stayed nestled in a folder next to my photos and music. I'd keep getting that warning, the bane of anyone with a love of games and a hatred of spending lots of money on fancy phones: Storage Almost Full.

I have deleted many things: Podcasts, YouTube, Maps. But never Threes!. I genuinely think it's a little bit perfect. It's got the kind of small-but-satisfying feedback loop that never gets tiring for me. It's endless, in an almost Sisyphean way, but just like Sisyphus I can't help but start from the bottom. Maybe this time I'll get to the top, I tell myself, rolling that rock, swiping those numbers.

Besides, if I delete it, I'll lose my high score.

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