Game Design

That's cool! Coincidentally Dan Felder that made that video has a podcast called Remaking Magic where he uses MTG as a great platform for discussing game design. He and his co-host pick a fan made MTG card and talk about how it would do in the game. It's pretty cool, and I only play a tiny bit of Magic.

I think make the fun part the correct strategy to win to be one of the most important. Though not important enough where sometimes games that are fun in general fail to employ this rule.

For example. I like roguelikes, real roguelikes, not roguelites (I like those too! they just aren't applicable to the point I'm planning to make here. Inventory management is often a huge factor in succeeding in them. However more often than not, the player comes across a really cool/powerful/amazing item that is unfortunately either too situational, or requires too much of a rare resource/ammunition to use. Thereby making that cool ass fun item a toss-away. lame.

DoomRL is one I like, and that one, while I like the game, has some strange things the player really has to do in order to win. the first is 'blind shoot', which is basically shooting your gun around a corner without even seeing what's behind it (because the game otherwise doesn't have a cover system), this isn't terribly un-fun per say, but it's still a bit odd. If you dare play on nightmare difficulty though, the game is virtually impossible unless you spend a crapton of time doing a very dull strategy of moving a few steps, dropping a valuable that monsters are attracted to (generally med kits), retreating, and waiting until a monster reveals itself to loot the med kit (they can loot and USE med kits in that game.. well not all monsters, many can though). This enables the player to manage their health by ensuring they face enemies in smaller numbers than otherwise possible.. but really, the whole process is pretty tedious I must say myself, and doesn't really make nightmare something I really care to play for any length of time for. Despite that, Iw ouldn't call the game unsuccessful however.

Another broader example are certain tower defense games. Depending on the nature of them, they might be the kind where you manually construct your own 'maze' of towers, and the key to winning is a combination of the shape of your maze, selection of towers, and where each tower is located in your maze...However some of these games (desktop tower defense comes to mind), are literally impossible without employing the tactic known as 'juggling'. Which is often regarded as 'cheating' to many tower defense games. However you can't really accuse someone of 'cheating' when they juggle in a game that isn't possible without juggling. What is juggling? Basically it's making your maze have only one exit (which is natural by default), but when your enemies are near the exit, you sell or destroy a tower far away in your maze to create a new exit, and build a tower where your old exit was, making enemies have to turn around and travel thru your maze again (and you repeat the process again and again. This strategy effectively eliminates all the important tactics of the game otherwise, the shape of your maze is unimportant aside from having potential exits far away from each other, the location and selection of towers matters little when enemies are stuck somewhere in it indefinitely regardless, etc.

Oftentimes whenever I complain about games that require the player to do something I think is 'boring' to win, the players defend the game with lines like 'Casul too dumb to play to win cuz casul!'.

Basically it makes me happy knowing that someone else out there thinks that making the winning strategy the 'fun' ones is important.