Sketchnote of the reading: high quality PDF for your viewing pleasure can be found here.
For this Read and Play, I played Mini Metro+ (Mini Metro version available on Apple Arcade, henceforth referred to as Mini Metro). Mini Metro was designed and published by Dinosaur Polo Club, originally published (as Mini Metro) in 2015 and released on Apple Arcade in 2021. Although I played digitally on an iPad, Mini Metro is also available on the Google Play Store, Steam, Nintendo, PlayStation, and Huawei App Gallery. On the App Store, it is rated for ages 4+ and generally seems like it would be targeted towards players of all ages. In Mini Metro, you design a subway system, connecting transit stations with different lines to get people where they need to go. I played multiple games on the London and Warsaw maps for about an hour.
Mini Metro is a puzzle / simulation game, which helps the system dynamics shine because they make the whole game. The main goal is simply managing and creating a system (the metro system to be specific). Thus, Mini metro can definitely represent a formal system, and a very beautiful one at that.
The beauty of Mini Metro comes from its simplicity. It has a few objects (stations, people, metro lines, locomotives, carriages, tunnels, and interchanges) and each object has a very well defined and simple behavior. Lines connect stations. Locomotives travel on lines. Tunnels travel under water. Interchanges increase the capacity of a station. Passengers will appear at stations and want to get to the specified station in the shortest number of trips. Objects also have very few properties: passengers have a station they want to go to, carriages have a direction they travel on the lines, and stations have a location on the map. However, the combination of these creates a vast possibility space when considering the relationships between them. Stations can be connected in any order and to any number of lines and in doing so, even if controlled by the simple rule of getting to their destination as fast as possible, people travel in vastly different ways. It’s a great example of an emergent system: simple rules and constraints result in complex and fascinating behaviors.
In order to make the system understandable and control game pacing, Mini Metro takes advantages of loops of different frequencies. The game starts off very simple: only three stations, three station types, three lines, and passengers that show up every so often. When passengers show up, the player must draw lines between stations to get passengers to where they want to go. If the lines are created poorly, passengers will get backed up at a station, providing clear feedback, allowing players to then update their mental model and create new lines. This is the core fast loop at the heart of gameplay.
However, the game slowly progresses in difficulty, introducing new objects and properties that drastically increase the possibility space. For example, new “special” stations are introduced, stations appear across the water or in other unideal locations, and the player can choose different objects to help them design their system, such as interchanges or carriages. The medium paced loop would be new stations being introduced and the slowest loop would be the week-by-week loop in which players choose new benefits at the end of it.
While Mini Metro does have a progression in difficulty, it does so through something more akin to skill chains, rather than arcs. Because the player is controlling a system, the emergent dynamics largely appear out of repeatedly interacting with the system, rather than experiencing a defined golden path or best solution. The ideal strategies are stumbled upon, rather than given: the game creates the scenario and the player discovers their own solution. The increasing complexity that arises out of the previously described loops creates these skill chains: only by successfully mastering easier skills (such as managing a small amount of stations) can the player reach the part of the game where new strategies must be developed. The interesting thing is that these skill chains and loops become more vaguely defined as the game goes on. This is largely a factor of the game being an emergent system: instead of prescribing certain actions, one the game reaches a critical mass of complexity, the player must learn new strategies in order to adapt and not lose.
I found that this choice to rely on loops rather than arcs made the concepts and values learned through this game much more clear and realized. The game doesn’t necessary tell you anything outright. However, by playing it, you learn that designing transit systems is hard, even if it may seem simple at first. The game also does a great job teaching certain concepts, such as why backups and congestion happen, why loops instead of lines might be helpful, and the importance of diversity in stops.
My biggest takeaway that I would want to incorporate in my game is the beauty of simplicity and the effectiveness of having players discover dynamics, rather than giving it to them. I think I really want to focus on minimally representing a system to teach players one or two big ideas that come out of gameplay. I also really like the ease of complexity: by starting with a minimal system, it’s easy for players to pick up, but still becomes fun and challenging as the game goes on.
