Read:
Play:
For this Read-and-Play, I noticed that of the several listed games that I own, I actually have played them before (for once)! This left me to play a digital game that I had never seen before: Mini Metro, a minimalistic railway-design game by Dinosaur Polo Club (available on Windows, Mac, iOS, PlayStation, and Switch). This game is centered around creating a system of interconnected rail lines on an ever-growing map of rail stops, in order to fulfil the destination needs of the passengers at each stop.
The game starts off very simply and is reminiscent of a “cozy” game, letting the player get a grasp of the general mechanics and lay out a preliminary rail design (i.e., making a few basic connections and seeing how passengers move).
The map then increases in size, hosting a greater number of stops and stop types as time progresses so to increase the complexity. At the end of each week, the player is given a choice of upgrades – such as the ability to build another rail, more tunnels/bridges to surmount obstacles, more trains for a given track, etc. – allowing the player to expand their rail network and alter their strategy into increasingly complex permutations. While the core goal stays the same over the course of the game (ensure passengers wanting to reach a certain destination can reach it within a set time), the number of passengers, number and type of stations, and even capabilities of your stations change over time so to increase this complexity and allow for a continuously variable gameplay.
As can be seen by the photos of gameplay, the game presents itself in a style very reminiscent of metro transit maps. Interacting with these lines and nodes, and seeing how they draw out paths very similar to the concepts of railway maps in our head, makes up a good portion of the fun, I like to think! It’s minimalistic style and theme lend well to it being a puzzle/strategy game, and helped in presenting its system information more concisely. Because the (target) player has seen transit maps before, they are familiar with the information design, and more intuitively get the objects and relationships of the game! The players know what rail stops are, and how moving them changes how individuals can go between rail stops (i.e., their relationships and properties). In being given the opportunity to move them, and having a pressure of passengers needing to move, the player discovers the necessary actions/behaviors to do so. I hope to be able to take this idea of using evocative spaces with me in making my own strategy game, in having players interact with a set of objects (and their associated relationships) that are already familiar to them – but are presenting in a way that can be fun and conducive to making strategy!
In my roughly hour and a half playthrough, I experienced a wonderfully scaling journey of loops that exemplified the idea of emergence: that is, complex, unpredictable play does not require a complex underlying system. The game utilizes the same basic loop over and over – where the player learns how to make a line connecting various stations – in order to solve any and all challenges in the game. Yet, the structure of the player’s railways is always in flux, creating a sprawling out network of ever-changing patterns despite little change in the core game. I believe the game hosts the values of efficiency and simplicity – which can be seen in the way it presents this information to its players, to the way players find the necessary solutions to its problems.
Overall, the game does an excellent job in representing the idea of a formal transit system to its players. It structures itself around minimalism and efficiency, while evoking the thoughts and feelings of transit information design and architecture we all have already implicitly subscribed to. It was very fun to be able to see how something so simple could do such an excellent job in representing and evolving a complex, yet familiar system!
