Sure, that reveals that Kirk is so unwilling to accept the very premise of an unwinnable scenario that he would rather break the parameters of the challenge than engage with it on its own terms. It also kinda goes on to bite him when he’s faced with an unwinnable scenario that isn’t being facilitated by a computer he can hack.
I had genuinely considered discussing this, even wrote out a lengthy paragraph about it, and deleted it thinking "eh, that's just me enjoying the sound of my own voice." Perhaps I was mistaken!
The thing is, both sides have a point. The
Kobayashi Maru scenario says, if you're gonna command, you gotta be able to pick your battles--and sometimes that means accepting that, even with magical technobabble, some problems aren't soluble without sacrifice. Of course, it does this in an extremely heavy-handed way, which rather cheapens the lesson if you do anything even slightly off the beaten path, but it's still a good lesson to learn. Kirk's point is, don't get complacent: creativity, particularly in the form of changing the rules of engagement, can wrest victory from the jaws of defeat. Of course, his problem is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good--and holding himself to an impossible standard, such that when it breaks in spectacular fashion (resulting in the death of his son), he's incapable of moving past it, and it haunts him for at least a decade thereafter.
Those are both valid points with pitfalls if taken too far. You could argue that the synthesis of the two comes together in the well-known prayer (probably, but not conclusively, originating from Richard Niebuhr): “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things that I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” The
Kobayashi Maru tries to teach the former, the serenity to accept the things you can't change. Kirk preaches the latter: havea the courage to change everything you can. It's thus incumbent upon us to develop the wisdom to tell the difference.
In this topic, many CRPGs (BG3, Dragon Age etc) have an ending where the PC can sacrifice themselves in order to save the world.
I almost invariably choose that ending.
Often, so do I!
Because guess what? (A) The game is ending anyway. There is no more story to tell, except perhaps an epilogue, so the sacrifice does not come at the cost of my continued participation, indeed, the player usually gets to see all subsequent story regardless. (B) A noble sacrifice to save another is a beautiful end to a character's arc, especially if that sacrifice is the culmination of a story about someone who would never have entertained such a notion. (C) By that point, you presumably will have completed a huge amount of content, and can thus say that you really got quite a good journey out of it, as opposed to the way random lethality works in actual D&D games, where it strikes out of the blue and usually well before anything has been even remotely resolved.
That's why I always talk about
random, permanent, irrevocable death. None of these sacrifices you speak of are
random. They are very consciously chosen. I cannot overstate how
VAST a difference a consciously-chosen sacrifice is over "random mook #112 got a lucky crit and you died." You'll also note how both BG3 and the Dragon Age games
don't permanently kill characters off. BG3, you have the existing 5e rules, and every companion comes with one or more scrolls of
revivify, and even those are rarely necessary because there's an NPC you can't avoid recruiting who can revive dead party members for you (albeit at a small gold cost.) DA games have nonpermanent death; characters stand back up. BG3 has non-irrevocable death; the dead stay dead, unless revived, for a cost. IMO, it's a slap-on-the-wrist cost and it would be implemented better if there were actual narrative consequences for death, as was the case in, frex,
Planescape: Torment, but that's a separate issue.
Truly random, permanent, irrevocable death is rare in CRPGs, for a variety of reasons. That's why the best of them use costs and consequences that aren't the death of the player character in order to give weight to things. BG3, to continue the example, has the half-ilithid and full-ilithid transformations.
Also, there is the dark reflection if the "noble sacrifice ending": A character doing something monumentally and lethally stupid, which the player
has been warned is monumentally and lethally stupid, and which they choose to do anyway, consciously and intentionally ignoring or dismissing the risk. That is also not a random death, but for rather a more disappointing reason. Namely, the player, ahem,
fooled around and found out. A player who does this once usually does not need to be told thereafter that if you play stupid games, you will win stupid prizes, but if it
does happen more than once, a heart-to-heart is almost certainly required.
