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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4607932" data-attributes="member: 4937">I like KM's post, but I think he needs to enlarge on the idea.  In my earlier post I suggested that to answer the question, we first had to define 'game' and 'good'.  KM has defined 'game' as something competitive with an educational purpose, and 'good' as 'serves its purpose while communicating some beautiful idea'.  I'm not sure every designer would agree with those definitions, and even to the extent that I do agree with them I've this vague feeling that someething is missing in those definitions.I think the most contriversial aspect of KM's definition is that he says that for a game to serve its purpose, their must be some non-subjective metric by which you can judge your performance.  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.  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.Even more interestingly, if an RPG doesn't meet those criteria, then by KM's definition it's not that it isn't a good game, but that isn't a game at all.   So should we strictly speaking call cooperative games without winning conditions recreations rather than games?The other thing bothering me about KM's definition is the feeling that it doesn't really encapsulate what a game is fully.  For example, we've all probably encountered so called 'educational games' where a game is adopted to teach some valuable skill or impart some valuable knowledge.   Toddlers in particular get subjected to these games alot by overzealous parents, and I do mean subjected because they are usually very bad games.  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.   But at the same time, we can probably think of games that teach unfun subjects - spelling (Scrabble), vocabulary (D&D!), physics, etc. in ways that are interesting.  So I suggest that there is something about a good game that is in some way subversive, in as much as that you don't set out to play it in order to learn some skill but that you learn from the game as a result of having some other motive.  And I think that motive has something to do with 'fun', which is a concept I think KM has neglected a bit.  It's all well and good to construct educational games, but they also have to be 'fun' as well.   So I think we have to come up with some characteristics that separate fun games from unfun ones.Finally, I think KM has implicitly suggested that a game by necessity teaches something valuable or valued by the game player.  I'm not convinced that that holds true.  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.</blockquote>

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