Thread by @uberstuber

1/ Mini Metro is a minimalistic subway layout game.
The clean animations and procedural audio make for an addicting experience.
👉

2/ While on the surface it's just a game, Mini Metro can teach us a lot about Urban Planning, the Theory of Constraints, and leaving slack in a system.

Mini Metro is a great example of how powerful a simple visual representation can be.

3/ Your city starts with three stations marked by polygons. Stations are connected by transit lines. Small shapes are passengers, and where they are going.

New stations are added, the city grows, you lay new lines.

You lose when a station gets overcrowded with passengers.

4/ Learning from a Video Game?

The obvious analogy is transit planning.

5/ Play Mini Metro for a bit and you'll come to hate circle stations. They're the most common, and passengers from circles always want to go to other shapes.

Here we can see how lines with repeated circles quickly get crowded with waiting passengers:

6/ Let's think about circles as housing, triangles as retail centers, and squares as downtown. It becomes clear how difficult it is for transit to serve towns with poor zoning; large areas solely composed of only housing make for really expensive and inefficient transit networks.

7/ @humantransit writes great articles about transit planning. He's got more thoughts on Minimetro here: humantransit.org/2014/12/learni…

8/ We can also use Minimetro as a tool to understand the Theory of Constraints.

9/ @GoldrattBooks wrote about the Theory of constraints in 'The Goal'. In any system, there is at least one constraint holding back throughput. Attempting the improve throughput anywhere besides the constraint makes the problem worse.

10/ 'The Goal' is great, but not all of us work on production lines, and some of the ideas can be hard to generalize. Using Mini Metro can be a nice visual way of solidifying Goldratt's ideas.

11/ The five focusing steps for TOC are:
Identify, Exploit, Subordinate to, Elevate, Repeat

We can use this process in Mini Metro as a decent playing strategy.

12/ Identify: There's usually a line or a station that's constantly at risk of overcrowding. Find it.

Exploit: Shorten the line to allow the locomotive to cycle through stations faster.

13/ Subordinate to: Let other lines take up some of the work, by taking on more stations and flowing fewer lines into the constraint line

14/ Elevate: Now is the time to add extra locomotives and carriages. This is intuitively the step we jump to first, but carriages are a very limited resource. You may find the previous steps resolved the issue.
Repeat: As your city grows, the constraint moves!

15/ We've learned about the Theory of Constraints and got a new high score!

16/ An end-game strategy used by many Mini Metro players is to keep a line and a locomotive in reserve. This 'phantom line' can be deployed when a station is at risk of overcrowding, to quickly move impatient passengers.

17/ Leaving some slack in your 'production line' is often the best course of action. When things get hectic you've got the spare capacity to handle things with ease.

18/ This is obvious in a transit game. It's less obvious when your employees are 'slacking off', or when you've been reading too many productivity blogs and think you can work 12 hour days forever.

19/ I'm always telling people to spend time tinkering with "useless" activities. (See jamesstuber.com/tinker/)

Video games can be a huge time-sink, but here we've stumbled on a great game that also helped us learn some useful concepts.

20/ I'm sure there's more to learn from Mini Metro. Networking? Central vs. Iterative planning? What else?

21/ Minimetro is made by @dinopoloclub

You can learn more about it here: dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/
I'm not associated or sponsored, I just think it's a neat game.