About

You Can Only Keep 3 is a social game in which people take a set of similar items, often movies or pieces of food, and argue which three they would keep. The game grew particularly popular during the Coronavirus, as multiple Twitter accounts posted examples in the first week of April 2020.

Origin

Iterations of the game have spread on Twitter in the years leading up to 2020. One of the earliest examples was posted by Twitter user @sixxers,^[1] who posted an example with soap opera couples on May 27th, 2018 (shown below).

Spread

In the ensuing years, other popular examples spread on Twitter. Some include a March 15th, 2020 post by The Ringer^[4] which used sports video games and gained over 270 retweets and 1,300 likes (shown below, left). On April 3rd, Twitter account @RocsStarLife^[5] posted an example using various candies and snacks, gaining over 1,300 retweets and 11,400 likes (shown below, right).

On April 5th, 2020, the Twitter account for the podcast Lights Camera Pod^[2] posted an example of the game featuring the films Goodfellas, Inception, Pulp Fiction, Space Jam, Avengers: Infinity War, The Dark Knight, Toy Story, "Jurassic Park":Jurassic Park, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. The tweet gained over 1,300 retweets and 10,000 likes (shown below, left). The following day, ESPN^[3] made their version of the tweet with sports movies, gaining over 1,000 retweets and 9,500 likes. ESPN's example led several films in their poll to trend on Twitter that day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References