Inside Asher Vollmer's Philosophy — loading years of depth into a single swipe

Intro — the man who bet 14 months on a single swipe

Asher Vollmer is the American indie designer behind the 2014 mobile puzzle Threes!. You swipe numbered cards in one of four directions to combine them—1 and 2 make 3, and from there matching numbers add together—and the only input is a single directional swipe. That extreme simplicity spawned countless imitators the moment it launched; the free clone 2048 in particular grew far more famous than the original. You cannot talk about Threes without this cloning episode.

But what I want to trace here is not the episode itself. It is his reaction to it, because his entire design philosophy is laid bare in it. He blamed himself—'why didn't I make it free?'—and eventually recovered to 'I feel prideful again.' In that round trip you can see clearly what he cared about while building. This is not a game write-up but a study of Vollmer the person. Every quotation is drawn only from primary sources whose text I verified (PocketGamer.biz 2014 ↗ / NYU Game Center 2014 ↗ / Threes: The Rip-offs 2014 ↗).

Background — from Flash tinkering to thatgamecompany, then going solo

Vollmer learned to program at a computer camp as a child (his father was also a software engineer), and in high school got hooked on games by making Flash animations for Newgrounds. 'Games are the easiest things to make in Flash, and it's the most fun because you get so much bang for your buck when you're programming' (PocketGamer.biz, 2014 ↗). A USC summer class before his senior year led to a project that reached the Independent Games Festival, which in turn got him into USC.

He released his first mobile game, Puzzlejuice, in 2011 while at USC. After graduating he joined thatgamecompany right after Journey shipped—'the first person they hired after completing it'—and stayed ten months. 'I love watching decisions ripple through game design,' he says of his love of ground-level prototyping. But he realized 'I didn't actually enjoy working at a company because I just felt I was missing a lot of opportunities,' and after a week among indies at GDC he gave notice the following Monday (PocketGamer.biz, 2014 ↗).

Going solo, he tried one night to write a story, got stuck, and played with the arrow keys moving the cursor in Word. Wondering if he could make a game using only the arrow keys, 'I immediately closed Word and opened up Unity. I made the prototype for Threes that night' (PocketGamer.biz, 2014 ↗). The finished Threes—made with artist Greg Wohlwend and audio by Jimmy Hinson—launched in February 2014 and became an Apple Design Award-winning hit.

Philosophy — 'simple to learn, impossible to master,' stretched over years

The backbone of Vollmer's thinking is stated plainly in 'Threes: The Rip-offs,' co-written with Greg Wohlwend. 'We wanted players to be able to play Threes over many months, if not years.' 'We worked really hard to create a simple game system with interesting complexity that you can play forever. You know, simple to learn, impossible to master. That old chess-nut' (Threes: The Rip-offs, 2014 ↗). For him a good puzzle is not consumed quickly; it opens its depth slowly over a long horizon.

This 'longevity design' is both a virtue and a deliberate bet. As he admits to NYU Game Center: 'One of the more controversial design decisions I've made with Threes is that it's designed to stick around a really really long time. It takes months or years to master.' He notes that 'a few people in our field believe this decision is disrespectful to people and their time,' then adds: 'I deeply value efficiency and I know that time itself is the most precious resource we have, but I also understand that our brains need to relax sometimes' (NYU Game Center, 2014 ↗).

So his philosophy tries to reconcile two seemingly opposed values—efficiency and rest—inside a single puzzle. The response that touches him most, he says, is people telling him 'they've used Threes to help them cope with difficult times in their lives' (NYU Game Center, 2014 ↗). A designer who refuses to waste time deliberately gifts people time to switch off. That is the Vollmer paradox.

Obsessions — keep placeholder art pretty, inject personality last

One recurring obsession is how he treats placeholder art. Some programmers make temp assets deliberately ugly to annoy the artist into working; he rejects that: 'This process feels backwards and deeply unhelpful to me… it makes the game basically unplayable.' His reason is simple: 'Visuals affect the way you feel while playing a game and feelings are pretty much all we have. Especially during playtests' (NYU Game Center, 2014 ↗).

So he keeps placeholder art 'as attractive as possible while minimizing the amount of effort.' The result is basic shapes, icons and colors—'a fun side effect is that I can make the game design slightly more complicated. As long as I can communicate the state of the game with basic symbols I am satisfied' (NYU Game Center, 2014 ↗). Simplicity is not a limit but room to hide complexity. And 'I try to bring on artists as late as possible'—the personality of Threes and Puzzlejuice, he says, was injected last by Greg Wohlwend.

His other constant is a 'puzzle mentality.' He admits reflexes and tight timing windows are not his comfort zone: 'I enjoy concrete puzzle games where the relationships between the objects on screen are very clear and simple.' He took on the local-multiplayer RTS Close Castles only because 'when it occurred to me that I could make a local multiplayer game that has the puzzle mentality, everything clicked into place' (NYU Game Center, 2014 ↗). Change the genre, and what he never lets go of is a board whose relationships can be read.

Failure and recovery — from 'I felt like a putz' back to pride

Threes was cloned within the release weekend, and 1024 and 2048 followed. The 'failure' Vollmer speaks about publicly is his regret at not preventing it. 'It started out with pride, honestly… I was honored that people had chosen to play with the design of my game and a few even used it to learn how to program.' But 'as the clone army grew and Emperor 2048entine came to power as a cultural phenomenon it made me question all my values and decisions. I felt like a putz for not making this game free. I felt like I had failed and that I squandered Threes' potential' (NYU Game Center, 2014 ↗).

He carries the regret down to a concrete technical judgment. 'I honestly should've looked at Threes, realised it was very easy to copy, because it had such a minimalist design, and taken it out of Unity so we could release it on the web, as well as releasing it for free on the app stores.' He adds: 'if Threes was free we could have avoided that problem' (PocketGamer.biz, 2014 ↗). Rather than blame anyone, he consistently takes the responsibility onto himself.

His way through was not to hide but to 'show our work.' He and Greg published roughly 45,000 words from their 14-month, 570-email thread, with their honest feelings attached. 'Threes got a big swell of support after Greg and I posted about our feelings and documented our design process. People jumped to the defense of Threes every time 2048 was mentioned.' And he closes: 'Nowadays I'm back to feeling prideful about the whole situation' (NYU Game Center, 2014 ↗).

Design dilemmas — originality vs. virality, and 'joy vs. math'

Vollmer articulates two dilemmas in his own words. One is originality versus virality. He and Greg wrote: 'We do believe imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but ideally the imitation happens after we've had time to descend slowly from the peak—not the moment we plant the flag' (Threes: The Rip-offs, 2014 ↗). The more carefully and commercially you build, the more vulnerable you are to being copied—a structural pain.

They refuse to reduce this to mere victimhood. 'We want to celebrate iteration on our ideas and ideas in general… 2048 is a simpler, easier form of Threes that is worth investigation,' while 'piling on top of us right when the majority of Threes players haven't had time to understand all we've done… that makes us sad' (Threes: The Rip-offs, 2014 ↗). Holding praise and sadness together, offered as 'conflicting feelings' rather than a verdict, is his kind of honesty.

The other is 'joy versus math,' faced in Close Castles. 'A barebones RTS, at its core, is a math problem. It's about income and production and economics. Playing an RTS feels like you're taking a hardcore realtime arithmetic test that gets harder every time you answer a question wrong.' Into that he wants to 'inject an emotion into RTS's that isn't usually present: player joy.' He concedes 'the genre and enjoyment are at serious odds,' yet keeps chasing the reconciliation—directly continuous with the efficiency-versus-rest tension of Threes (NYU Game Center, 2014 ↗).

Influences — the lineage of Tetris, and lessons from thatgamecompany

On influences, there is little material where he flatly says 'this influenced me,' so I avoid guessing and record only the lineage and biography he places himself in. He situates Threes in the lineage of Tetris. In the cloning essay he likens the Threes/2048 relationship to 'Tetris and Dr. Mario,' writing that 'maybe not a lot of people know Alexey Pajitnov made Tetris, but of those that care… it's fairly obvious that Tetris came first' (Threes: The Rip-offs, 2014 ↗). He frames his goal as 'that old chess-nut'—simple to learn, impossible to master—invoking chess.

The clear school on his résumé is thatgamecompany. He calls it 'probably the best company I could work for,' one that 'hire[s] the smartest people on the planet,' where he 'learned an incredible amount.' He especially valued joining at the earliest stage to 'make decisions on the ground level' and watch them ripple (PocketGamer.biz, 2014 ↗). His habit of locking down a design's skeleton at the prototype stage reads as continuous with this.

And the visuals and 'personality' of Threes came from collaboration with Greg Wohlwend, known for Ridiculous Fishing. Vollmer says Greg 'found a way to inject massive gobs of personality into my otherwise dry prototypes… he has knocked it out of the park every single time' (NYU Game Center, 2014 ↗). His authorship rests not on a lone-genius image but on a division of labor with trusted collaborators.

Kizuki's reading — the man who rewrote minimalism from weakness into signature

From here is my own reading, Kizuki's, stepping one pace beyond his words. I read Vollmer as a designer who rewrote the meaning of minimalism through the cloning episode. Line up his statements and a reversal appears. In the thick of the clone storm he spoke of being minimal as a weakness—'I should've realised it was very easy to copy, because it had such a minimalist design.' Simplicity was a synonym for being easy to steal.

Yet in his craft talk he speaks of that same simplicity as a strength. Keeping placeholder art to basic shapes lets him 'make the game design slightly more complicated,' and a simple board is the condition for 'relationships that can be read.' For him minimalism is not stripping away ornament but a vessel for loading complexity. I read these two statements not as contradiction but as growth: the episode taught him 'simplicity is easy to take,' and he then re-chose 'but simplicity is the core of my design.' That, I'd argue, is why in his next work he deliberately brought a simple-reading mentality into a genre (RTS) that does not read simply.

And one more thing. An efficiency zealot who declares 'time is the most precious resource' also says 'our brains need to relax' and gifts people a time-killer that lasts for years. In refusing to stop while holding that contradiction, I see Vollmer's core. He does not pick efficiency or inefficiency; he preserves the tension in the shape of a game. Threes cannot be 'finished,' I read, because he himself never settles this conflict.

Closing — where to start

If you want to understand Vollmer, first spend even a few minutes with Threes!. From the minimal input of a one-way swipe you can feel, at your fingertips, why 14 months of depth rise up. Then read 'Threes: The Rip-offs,' the piece he and Greg published, and the conflict and honesty behind the hit come into three dimensions (Threes: The Rip-offs ↗). Moving between the work and the confession brings this person into focus.

For adjacent reading among designers this site has covered: Alexey Pajitnov, who never ends the play of making order (and whom Vollmer names as lineage); Zach Gage, who rebuilds games we already know; and Daniel Cook, who returns to the human through few rules. On the theme of loading long-playable depth into minimal rules, they reward comparison.

Sources

Primary sources cited or referenced in this article (only those whose text I verified):

・PocketGamer.biz interview, “Threes creator Asher Vollmer on growing up, going indie, and the dangers of cloning” (2014) ↗

・NYU Game Center, “Game Designers in Detail: Asher Vollmer” (December 2014) ↗

・Asher Vollmer & Greg Wohlwend, “Threes: The Rip-offs & Making Threes” (March 2014, published by the creators) ↗

・(Reference interview, not quoted here) Designer Notes 32: Asher Vollmer (Idle Thumbs / Soren Johnson, 2017) ↗