This post isn’t about 300 game mechanics, it’s about Three Hundred Game Mechanics, the website by Sean Howard that was the instigating inspiration that convinced me to start www.guyinterlinked.com.1 Three Hundred is as it sounds, a repository of (nearly) 300 game mechanics for all different types of games.2 According to the website’s about page

[Three Hundred] was a challenge … to create a new game idea or gameplay mechanic once per day for 300 days. I failed this challenge … However, I still occasionally update with new entries as the impulse hits me. I hope to reach the full three hundred one day.” (Sean Howard, Three Hundred)

I have not read all, or even most of the mechanics on the site, but the game mechanics aren’t the point.

Those who can’t do, blog3 4

Conventional wisdom is that “ideas are easy, execution is everything,”5 and I don’t dispute it. Anyone can come up with an idea, but very few actually execute an idea. In this context, it would be easy to interpret Three Hundred as some kind of failure, as it is “merely game ideas,” and not “game executions.” I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it.

Snapshot of Three Hundred Website
The Three Hundred webpage, filled with ideas

Three Hundred isn’t merely a list of game ideas, it is a list of ideas illustrated and described in detail. The ideas are solidified, crystallized, if not in game form, then in at least a pleasing form. Look again at what the website is intended to be: it’s a challenge to create 300 game mechanics, and it is a wonderful execution of that idea.6 The copy is fun to read, illustrations are colorful and informative. A lot of effort went into the execution of delivering these ideas.

Card Stack Hacker
Card Stack Hacker!

I consider myself a thoughtful guy. I am always making notes, constantly writing down ideas for things I’d like to make one day. Games, books, poems, movies, songs, all sorts of stuff. Until I made www.guyinterlinked.com, all those notes could ever be is writing on a page. In my youth I thought, “yeah, one day I’m going to make that thing,” but for most of those ideas, “one day” will never come. Even if I had the knowledge and skill to execute, there just isn’t enough time. My personal challenge is that many of these ideas won’t get out of of my head. I find myself making the same notes over and over, in different note books and different files, because the the thoughts are never fleshed out and given proper home. There is no sense of closure. Three Hundred, for me, is a great example of how to execute on communicating ideas. I cannot execute every idea I have to completion, but I absolutely can communicate about them, and perhaps in that way put them to rest.

Another inspirational piece of Three Hundred is that it isn’t complete. More specifically, there came a point where the ideas could not be fully fleshed out in a post, and instead are shared as images scanned from a notebook page. This matches my own experience thus far with executing from idea to blog post. There is some level of “doneness” of an post that I aim for, and not all ideas make it that far in a timely fashion. Though I hate to admit it, not all ideas should be fully fleshed out, but are still worthy of being shared in some form.

Infinite Regression

As opposed to digression, which I embrace with reckless abandon, regression is something I wish to engage with carefully. Each post I write has a topic, theme or thought. But behind that topic, theme or thought, is another thought. And sometimes behind that thought or topic is my inability to express it adequately. And behind that inability is my frustration. And sometimes what I want to do is capture that chain of things behind things, and express that. I want to move the metaphorical camera along the infinite path of feelings behind thoughts behind topics.7

The situation is much like this picture.

Photographer's infinite regression (28820301634)

If the door is the actual thing I want to make, then the guy closest to the door is me writing a post about the idea of the thing. But sometimes the guy closest to the door isn’t me (or at least not me in that moment) and I’m actually the second guy and I can only see the first guy, and not really a good shot of the actual thing. And sometimes I’m the third guy.8 If that isn’t complicated enough, sometimes the actual thing I want to make is a post about an actual thing.9

Three Hundred has allowed me to give myself permission to express my ideas as they are, rather than store them up inside (or in notebooks) to rot. In the practice of sharing these ideas, I’m encouraged to develop the thoughts further than I may have otherwise. Paradoxically, although www.guyinterlinked.com was created as an admission I could not execute the actual thing, it has lead to me creating more actual things (in this case posts) than anything else in my life up to this point.

My suggestion to you is to do something similar to what I did. Create a website to document your ideas. Find an illustrator (or draw it yourself) to bring life into your ideas and give them form. Don’t just use text. Nobody on the internet can read. Also, I’ve found that attempting to illustrate concepts tends to make you think through them in more detail. (Sean Howard, Three Hundred)

I have not given up hope of making actual things. I am encouraged by the example of Mark Brown from Game Maker’s Toolkit, who for years has been making great videos about game design and has recently started making great videos about making his own game.

Three Game Mechanics

Before I end this post, I’d like to share a small selection of mechanics from Three Hundred that I find interesting. I hope you find some interesting ones too.

  • #219: Madness in the Museum: a heist based hidden-role game. It reminds me of the board game Clue: Great Museum Caper
  • #131: Composition Army: you build armies in specific configurations, and they fight other armies in their specific configurations based on rules. The idea itself isn’t as interesting as the fact that it was revisited three times. I like rumination.10
  • #251: ASCII 3D: an interesting premise of a 3D projection of 2D ASCII world. One comment on this reddit thread suggested Sean failed to understand why people use ASCII in the first place, but obviously that not the point. I love the idea.

Further Reading

Footnotes

  1. Honestly, this post isn’t really about Three Hundred Game Mechanics either. ↩

  2. “Mechanics” may be not be the most accurate term for what is going on over there, but the content is interesting enough for me to let it slide. ↩

  3. An interesting article suggests “those who can’t, teach” is a fallacy. ↩

  4. The heading here used to parallel the original phrase: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” During editing I found that even though I knew how the phrase should be read, I still glossed over the commas ended up reading it as “Those who can do. Those who can’t blog.” I still prefer the original structure, but it is too ambiguous in this context, and can’t trust you to read it correctly. ↩

  5. Doerr, John. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs. John also says in that book “if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing,” which is a mite discouraging because I want to focus on everything all the time. I’ll probably continue to do it. ↩

  6. I once read a story where these people were gathered for a dinner at the king’s palace, and all evening wonderful smells wafted out of the kitchen. Course after course, as the evening progressed, each smell was better than the last. But not once was any food brought out to eat. At the end of the evening the people complained to the king, saying, “We came for food, why have you given us nothing?” The king replied “Didn’t I feed you with the smell of the food?” At the time I thought the story was stupid, and I suppose I still do. As I grow older though, I find that sometimes I am satisfied with the idea of the thing rather than the thing itself. I wouldn’t actually be interested in playing most of the games made from game mechanics on the Three Hundred, but I am satisfied to read them. ↩

  7. There is a fine line here, because if one is too aggressive with regression, the whole work collapses under the weight of itself. I was sorely tempted the other week to write about a post that I had intended to write, but that is funny nearly one time. I could see making a footnote about posts I didn’t make, but a whole post about it seems self-indulgent. Come to think of it, my post about procrastination is a form of regression, me looking at myself not able to make a post. I suppose it could get funny if I really commit to the bit and like keep regressing. After all, repetition legitimizes. ↩

  8. Please don’t ask me how I managed to take this picture… ↩

  9. All of this has me thinking about the website Unphotographable, where each post is a text description of a photo the author did not take. As in, they could have taken it, or wish they had taken it, but for one reason or another were unable. ↩

  10. Apparently rumination has the negative connotation of obsessive thoughts. But I am speaking in the more literal sense of the digestion of ruminants were they regurgitate partially digested food from the stomach to the mouth in order to further process. I want to metaphorically chew an idea until it’s digested! ↩