KM has defined 'game' as something competitive with an educational purpose, and 'good' as 'serves its purpose while communicating some beautiful idea'.
Not quite. "Games teach you things" isn't so much a definition as it is a necessary quality of a game. The "art" side of the equation isn't required for a good game (though I think the best games include this, personally).
The reason all games teach you things is because all games require some sort of player to input some sort of action to get some sort of result. If you desire the result, you put in the command, and if you don't put in the right command, you don't get the result, so games teach you things by both positive and negative reinforcement -- elemental carrot-and-stick method. Games generally are "bad games" if they don't give you a good carrot or a good stick, or require some sort of arbitrary input.
That is to say, KM suggests that the game must give you feedback on whether you are learning or not learning the lesson it is designed to teach. It seems to me that is as much to say that KM defines a game as something where you can win or lose.
Also not quite.
Feedback doesn't have to be binary. It can be win/loss, but it can also be a continuum (a high/low method) -- a score.
For instance, Golf isn't really win/loss. It's graded on how well you do (how few hits it takes you to get the ball in the hole). You can do better or worse, and you can compare a score.
Early arcade games also use this method. There might be an "end" to Pac Man but most players will never reach it, instead comparing how high their scores are.
Because I love Keita Takahashi so much, check out
Noby Noby Boy. There's no win or loss criteria but there is the GIRL in the sky that can get bigger or MORE BIGGER depending on how long everyone stretches.
D&D also isn't exactly win/loss. But it can be high/low. This is actually something that has changed between editions, too -- in earlier games, your character's simple survivability was the metric by which you measured success (and, thus, your "character level" became something of the measure of your success -- higher level, more havoc survived). It has moved from there to a more narrative place -- success is saving the princess, now, and failure is not saving the princess. The more storylines you have, the higher your score. When D&D players tell you about their character, it's like tournament Golfers telling you about their hole-in-one: it's a way of saying "look at how good at this game I am." It's also uniquely personalized in PnPRPGs, because of the "avatar" nature of the game.
I think, to a large extent, D&D (and PnPRPGs in general) have struggled with having a good metric for measuring success. I think it's been mostly up to individual DM's (you "win" by beating the dungeon or conquering the BBEG or whatever the DM establishes). I think that's part of the reason death still exists in D&D -- it's one of the few ways that the game rules themselves can tell you "you loose."
Particularly in the context of a discussion of RPG design, that a pretty startling game since generally, at least in PnP games, we normally things of RPGs as game without winners or losers and which adhere to a non-competitive model. Now, it may be that that perception is false, and that in fact 'good' RPGs meeet KM's criteria, but I'd like to hear how he plans on demonstrating it.
There is competition, always. This is part of why story structure works so well for games: there is always a conflict, a chance for "failure."
PnPRPGs will define that differently, and even different DMs will define it differently.
The "core competition" hardwired into D&D at least is
versus machina (against the machine -- effectively the DC's that the DM sets and the monsters that the DM chooses). It's competitive gameplay, it's just not against another player (the DM kind of counts as a player) as much as it is against the system itself. It's more like a videogame, or solitaire, in this respect -- your opponent is a machine, not a person.
. By KM's definition though, we couldn't really call these games bad games because they are instructional and serve that purpose. You can learn from them, and yet it is a chore to play them because they aren't fun.
No, you could absolutely call them bad games.
If they aren't enjoyable, then they aren't teaching you very well. Human beings like to learn things...they derive joy from the pattern recognition that comes with realizing the input you need to get the reward. The bad "edutainment" games generally don't include a good carrot or don't include a fearful enough stick or fail to help you learn (instead just quizzing you on what is essentially trivia).
There are a host of really good "educational games," though. From Peek-A-Boo to lion cubs frolicking to Poker and even D&D.
I think it's quite possible that a 'fun' game could be teaching valueless lessons, and indeed whether the skill is valuable or not that the game player derives no enjoyment from the skill being taught and simply enjoys the game. It's quite possible to envision a RPer who learns enough mathematics and visual conceptualization skills to enjoy an RPG, but who never applies those skills outside of that context widely or with any relish.
Sure. But knowledge is an insidious little thing, after all -- you can't control where you apply it very well, and the more you use it, the easier it gets. Adding numbers up in D&D every week or two is likely to benefit your mathematical skills more than someone who doesn't add anything ever.
