I'm Pongame driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work.

Okay, so today is a game designer talk. I'm going to talk... this is a podcast... this is a topic that I got from my blog.

The importance of strengths and weaknesses in your game. So I'm obviously going to use magic a lot to explain this, but this is a general principle

I'm going to explain that's true for all games, not just magic.

So why do games want to have strengths and weaknesses?

The strength part probably isn't too hard to explain, although it is part of the bigger picture.

The weakness is a little trickier, but I'm going to explain it all.

Why? Why should things be good at things and bad at things, you know?

Okay, so first off, let's explain a structural thing.

So I've talked before about what the purpose of a game is.

The purpose of a game is not to make things easy for the game player.

I've often talked about how if you made, you know, when you make a lamp, if someone makes a lamp, the goal of the lamp is to turn the lamp on.

And you want to make sure it's as easy as possible to turn on the lamp.

That the switch to turn it on is the most obvious place and, you know, how to turn it on and off, it's obvious.

That normally when you design something, the whole goal of the design is to make it as easy to use, as functional as possible.

But that's not what games do. The goal of a game is to challenge you. The goal of a game is to put up some resistance because it's the act of

overcoming the obstacles that is the point of the game. That it's not like I'm supposed to make

a set of rules for you. Like the goal of the game is to push this red button. Okay, go. I push the

red button. Oh, I'm done. Eh, not a very compelling game. The push the red button game,

probably not a big seller.

So what we want in the game is we want to make sure that there are obstacles built in.

We want to make sure that the act of achieving what you're achieving is not easy to do.

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