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After a historically cold May, it’s finally beautiful here in Toronto. The sun is out, the leaves are green; it’s the perfect time to explore the flora and fauna of Toronto’s High Park. Last Sunday, I got to experience a gamified version of a lovely scenic park stroll with Trainwreck Labs’ Metazooa: Live, a nature/gaming event as part of the third annual Toronto Games Week.

Trainwreck Labs, created by game designer Abe Train, is a website that hosts a handful of daily educational web games in the same vein as Wordle. I’m a huge fan of Abe’s work and have been playing his games for years now, along with plenty of other daily games (I might have a daily game addiction). One of the site’s most enjoyable games is  Metazooa, in which your job is to uncover a mystery animal based on its biological relation to the animals you guess, creating an expanding tree of creatures.  Metazooa: Live brings this idea to reality in the form of a scavenger hunt of sorts. Our task was to explore High Park and take photos of plants and animals, as AI identifies what you’re photographing and collects it in a similarly satisfying tree. 

High Park couldn’t have been a more perfect place to host this event – it has tons of plants, wild creatures, and even a small zoo that proved perfect for collecting more life forms to add to my tree. The AI wasn’t perfect (an emu was hilariously misidentified as an alpaca), but the game was an absolute joy nonetheless. 

Afterwards, I sat down with Abe Train at his High Park home base (a nice shaded bench) to discuss Trainwreck Labs and his philosophy when it comes to making games fun and educational. 

What inspired you to get into the daily game landscape? 

Wordle, unsurprisingly. I used to have a normal, more corporate-y job, and I left it at the end of 2021. I had a little bit of post-pandemic burnout and I wanted to just focus on my skills and do something more technical and creative than the data manipulation work I’d been doing.

This was around the time that Wordle was really popular, and I made this game Globle. It’s still to this day, by an order of magnitude, the biggest and most played. I got really, really lucky with the timing. I made it because I wanted to practice skills and I saw Wordle was really big. I released it into the wild around the time people were looking for their next Wordle. There was that moment where there was a Wordle for everything: Taylor Swift Wordle, Star Wars Wordle, all that kind of stuff, so it found its audience at that peak. Then, people kept playing; it became a daily habit. I experimented with a couple different things, but I decided to focus on daily educational games, and that’s what Trainwreck Labs is. 

What’s your favourite game that you’ve created? 

It’s always the last one that I made. In university, I didn’t study computer science or programming, I actually studied chemical engineering, so I finally made a chemistry game called Elemingle. It’s close to home and close to my heart since I was able to bring things full circle. It’s certainly not the most popular game on my site, but I’m really happy with how it turned out. I’m proud of it even if it’s not the biggest money maker on the roster. 

Do you play any other daily games? 

Shamefully – The New York Times ones are, of course, excellent. I love Connections. I love the New York Times crossword.

In terms of daily educational stuff, Duolingo is pretty good. It’s not a game in the same way that Metazooa is a game, but it’s certainly gamified. It’s really excellent for forming positive habits. 

Would you say your games are designed more for educational purposes or entertainment purposes?

That’s a great question. I heard a really interesting episode of the Decoder podcast; Nilay Patel [Editor-in-Chief of The Verge and host of Decoder] interviewed the CEO of Duolingo [Luis Von Ahn] and it was incredible. I recommend listening to the whole thing, but one of the things he says is that Duolingo is supposed to do three things: keep people engaged and on the app, teach and make sure that you’re getting information, and make money. Nilay asks, which is the most important? [Luis] says 100%, it’s keeping people engaged. A lot of people would say, oh, shouldn’t it be learning? He says, “I can’t teach you anything if you’re not playing the game”. 

So the answer is that the “game” part comes first. If it’s education first and it’s not fun, then you might stop playing all together whereas if it’s fun first, educational second, you’ll get the educational stuff in the process.

What other games of yours would you love to bring to life at some point?

I was thinking of a geography one that I would do to bring Globle to life. It would be a man on the street kind of thing where people are walking by and I ask, hey, do you know where X country is? And if they get it wrong, then you colour it in with the right colour somehow. I don’t even know how I would do that, but things come together. [Metazooa Live] came together!

I was wondering, how could I bring Chronogram to life? I feel like that one would be so niche, but so fun.

Hire some impersonators or something! 

Yeah! But part of that one is AI, and AI has this sour brand now. So I don’t know how much I want to publicly lean into that at the moment.

What are your general thoughts on AI?

I’m a little bit of an AI evangelist; I do use it a lot. I obviously understand all the cases to be made against it; the environmental issues and displacing jobs and all that stuff. But as an indie creator and an entrepreneur who’s running a company by himself, it’s essential. How can I compete with the big game developers and the bigger companies and corporations when they’re using these tools, and I can’t? So I think it’s just an enormous leg up. It’s an enormous boon to indie creators. I don’t love the expression “you can’t put the genie back in the bottle” because technology isn’t such a straight line, but it does feel like AI is moving really fast and it’s a good train to be on.

What’s the hardest animal to guess in Metazooa? 

I think it’s the water bear, either that or the sea sponge. People don’t even think it’s an animal. Sea life does not look like life up here, everything’s a little different and that one really throws people off. 

What’s next for Trainwreck Labs? 

I have other ideas for online games that I want to make; I was thinking about something in economics. I tried to do something with music that didn’t go the way I wanted it to, but there’s half an idea there.

It’s been suggested a number of times that I do something with languages. A lot of languages have a common ancestry, right? There’s proto-Indo-European, and then you break that into Germanic and Slavic and Romantic languages. People want to see that tree formula that you see in Metazooa but for word origins. But I like each of the games in Trainwreck Labs have a visual aspect to interact with, and I don’t want to reuse Metazooa’s. It would be something else; I don’t know what. Also, I have to think about mass appeal a little bit when I make games because I do need to make some revenue, and I have to have people playing it. It’s a quarter of an idea that I have there. 

Then there’s Metazooa: Live – this has gone really well and I’ve been very excited with how this all turned out, and I’m gonna look into what it would require to turn it into a proper app. It’ll probably have the main Metazooa daily game in it, and another part where you’ll go to your local park and take geotagged pictures. It’ll have your map of the park and other people’s map of the park, and there’ll be some scoring mechanism to keep it gamified.

Sounds amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time and I look forward to what’s next for Trainwreck Labs!

Thank you!

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