Video Games and Curriculum

There are three ways that I'm interested in thinking about the intersection of video games and curriculum. I'll discuss each briefly here, starting from the most-researched to the least-researched.

1) Video Games as Curriculum Support

Most of the early research on video games and learning has been about "educational games" or the less baggage-laden rebranding "games for learning." The idea is, in short, that students enjoy playing games, and so we can trick them into learning by putting curriculum into a game. If, like me, you grew up with Math Blaster, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, or Mario Teaches Typing you know what these games are like: enjoyable to a point, but ultimately limited in their appeal to the particular curricular situations in which they are employed.* Rarely are educational games - even the best of them - actually all that great as games. They are often closer to gamified curriculum than game for learning.

* OK, I get that Carmen San Diego in particular has some appeal beyond the classroom, but it really is one of the most exceptional educational games ever created.

It is fair to say that games for learning have come a long way in the past 20 years, however, and today there are many exceptionally enjoyable games that are explicitly designed to encourage learning. For example, the work of Motion Math (founded by fellow LDT students) shows the potential to engage students in a learning experience that still has good game design.

A related idea involves commercial games instead of games for learning. A recent Stanford graduate named Dylan Arena wrote his dissertation on commercial video games as preparation for future learning. The idea is that, by engaging students in a good game experience, you give them motivation and a reference point for understanding curricular material. His results are fascinating, demonstrating that we can, in fact, use games like Civilization and even the much-maligned Call of Duty to motivate students as they learn history.

In all, this is a vitally important area of research and innovation, and only good things can be said about the improvement of games for learning. The issue, to my mind, is that for many researchers the intersection of games and curriculum stops here. The question is an important one: How can we use games to teach what we already teach? But it's far from the only question we should be asking about learning and games.

2) Game Design as a Subject

As the game industry grows, there are more and more people who wish to become game designers, or to study game design and development. Game design programs are cropping up everywhere, but these are rarely founded upon principles of good curriculum development. In part this is because game design is a moving target. How can we design backwards when we don't really know what the end point should be?

Needless to say, there's a research opportunity here: how can we best teach game design? There are texts out there, but I don't think any are grounded in data about the outcomes of potential designers who go through game design programs.

I don't want to get bogged down, however, in thinking that game design should be exclusively a post-secondary and specialized study. I would rephrase the research question in this way, then: how can we best teach game design in such a way that any student at any level can better understand games and their role in society? Game design is a practical discipline and a career, in some sense, but it is also a theoretical subject with implications for just about everybody (because who doesn't play or watch games of some kind?). In this sense, game design is less about job training and more about learning to think.

3) Video Games as Curricular Artifacts

In some sense this is a related idea to the above, but I want to make a distinction between studying game design and studying games. In the above, game design is a vehicle for teaching creativity and critical thinking, but the subject is still the design process. This final idea is about games as art. Games as literature. Games as intrinsically valuable and interesting curricular artifacts. In much the way that we ask students to read books, to analyze them, to discuss them and write about them, I propose that we could and should do the same with games. Not all games, or any game, but certain games.

Why should we do this? Well, why should we study literature? Because games, like literature, can be insightful and profound, can teach us more about what it means to be human, can offend us, can expose us to other ways of thinking about the world, can allow us to imagine living lives very different from our own. And like literature, it is a waste to play (as with books, some) games unthinkingly. But when and where do we teach students to play games well? Not just to be good at games, but to be a good and critical reader/player of games? At present, the closest we get is by reading books in English class. But this is learning by analogy, when we could use games as artifacts in their own right.

The counter-argument here, of course, is that games are not worthy of the status we bestow upon books. But that is a position with which I cannot agree. True, there are a great many games which are far from great literature, but there are also a great many books which are unworthy of deep study. Why condemn games as a genre because some - and some of the most successful commercially - are philosophically, literately, or creatively deficient? There are gems (Journey, Shadow of the Colossus, To The Moon to name three) that are every bit as interesting as any text. And what's more, they afford conversations about more than just narrative: they invite questions about interactivity, about design, about linearity and non-linearity of experience. It is my conviction that a well-designed curriculum that studies games as art would be at least as effective - if not more so - at teaching the kinds of thinking, writing, and speaking skills - as well as the qualities of introspection, skepticism, and critique - we want students to acquire in humanities courses in their K-12 and college experiences.

Perhaps I should voice that conviction as a question: are video games valuable curricular artifacts in their own right? I may believe so, but I suspect few do. Most importantly, I know of anyone who has any data or research that supports either position.

Little Big Planet in the Classroom

Today we played Little Big Planet.

No, seriously.  We pulled the couches out from the walls, sat down, and engaged in epic 3-player platforming action.*  The students, needless to say, were thrilled, even if none of them had played Little Big Planet previously.**  They scuffled along through the first few levels, each group of three getting just enough play time to whet their appetites and to become comfortable with the basic controls.  Meanwhile their classmates played games of their own: Apples to Apples, Chess, and "Trumps," a card game similar to Whist or Spades. 

* It would have been four, but the fourth controlled wouldn't recognize the PlayStation, and I didn't have the USB cable to plug it in with.

** Isn't this generation supposed to be all game all the time?  How have they not played LBP?  I was even more shocked to discover this than I was when I heard they had not seen The Princess Bride.

Now hold on, you're thinking, how could you possibly get away with doing that in a high school creative writing class?  Games are for wasting time, for eating away at kids' brains and turning them into useless zombie-people, right?

To which I can only respond: yes, and soon my zombie army will be complete.

Actually, my reasons for playing Little Big Planet stem from the core values of the class: collaboration, dialogue, and metacognition.  The playing itself doesn't really hit those - there's a degree of collaboration, but the other two are limited - but it's not what you do that counts, it's how you do it.  On the front end of our LBP adventure we used LBP's character creator to imagine a story snippet involving a zombie-pirate, and then worked on a (seemingly unrelated) mini Design project.  On the back end, we designed games of our own using the materials available in the classroom (from Apples to Apples to dice, cards, chess pieces, and so on).  Tomorrow, the students will be writing essays about the design of LBP, their learning while playing it, and their own experience designing a game.  And then we'll be talking about how all of that connects to creative writing.

How does it connect to creative writing?  Easy, it's creative, and it's writing.  Playing a game is constructing a narrative.  Designing a game is even more so, because you have to build into your design the learning and narrative-building of your potential player.  Is that any different from writing, where you have to build a narrative, ensure that your audience can read (and sometimes learn to read) your work, and be engaged?  Perhaps the outcome is different - indeed, there's no question that the outcomes of game design and creative writing differ - but the processes might have a lot in common, after all.

That's certainly my bias, and that's a big part of why I've made design a pivotal part of my curriculum.  But it's no good doing design and restricting it to writing in the narrowest sense of poems, short stories, and essays.  The real value of design, to a writer, is taking it to other areas: games, architecture, movies, and even other-class-interrupting-presentations (about which I will remain mysterious).  Thinking outside the box - letting "writing" become bigger than just words on a page and letting "design" replace "creativity" - is a great way to become a better writer (and maybe even a better, or at least more interesting, person?).  And, what's more, a great way to learn how to become a better writer, which is the real thing.

It's no accident then, that as we wrap up our mini design projects - including game design - tomorrow with finished products, an essay, and a discussion (see, playing PlayStation can lead to actual work) we'll start looking at Invisible Cities,* start trying to repaint the campus and the city and the world in which we live in terms of both design and literature.  Having digested, or at least partially chewed, all of that, the students will be drafting a proposal for a final project.  My hope?  Collaboration, and a shortage of traditional short stories and poems.  If the lot of them want to, say, write an interactive fiction computer game as a team and publish it on the Kongregate Arcade...  Frankly, I'd be thrilled. 

* For the longest time I couldn't decide whether I should do this work in the prose week or the poetry week.  And then I realized that, duh, it belongs in the design week.  It is, really, a quintessential "design literature" book.  Heck, they even read it in architecture programs, or so I've heard.

So why Little Big Planet?  Well, it fits into what I'm doing.  But I used it not just because it fits, but because I want to model imagination, stepping beyond the bounds of what's expected, breaking "the rules."  We played Little Big Planet today because it was fun, but also because it was a small, trivial, and totally essential step towards a set of entirely original, creative, and against "the rules" final projects.* 

* Or at least I hope so...

Designing Learning

It's easy to think that learning is what happens at school.  It's not particularly difficult to imagine other places of learning to go alongside the classroom: museums, for example, or (many years ago) libraries.  It's a little more challenging to imagine learning taking place while watching TV or playing a video game, sending a text message or reading an email.  But as long as the mind is remotely active, I would argue that learning, in some form, happens.

Now, it's not particularly interesting that learning happens all the time.  In some ways, it's so obvious that it's hardly worth mentioning, and so much of our learning is so mundane that we'd rather not hear or think about it for fear of choking on our boredom.  Learning, for example, that it's slightly faster - or at least more pleasant - to walk to the left of the science building on the way to class in the morning, is not particularly groundbreaking for anyone, including the learner (unless he were to fall through an unnoticed but open manhole, but that's not the point).

No, what's particularly interesting about this learning that happens all the time is how much of it is designed, despite how incidental it seems.  That is, even the route from car to classroom is designed in some sense, if not with learning in mind, with learning as a kind of ancillary and unanticipated outcome.  Of course, a science building on the whole very much is designed with learning in mind in a much more direct way.  And that's only the beginning.

Rather than list all of the myriad areas where learning design is potentially relevant, I want to talk about a couple in particular, an obvious one and a not-so-obvious one.  The first is the school, the classroom, the curriculum.  The second, video games, and not those horrid "educational games," so many of which pollute the game-o-sphere with their terrible controls, their convoluted plots, and their utter disdain for fun.  No, I mean real games, games like Portal or Final Fantasy, Civilization or Little Big Planet.

What do I want to say about each of the very different worlds of game design, on the one hand, and traditional education, on the other?  Well, I want to say that, at their hearts, they share a fundamental commonality: they are both designed, and they are both deeply concerned with learning.  Now, education might shun the "design" label and games might shun the "learning," but words are just words, and the actual actions behind these particular words bridge the vocabulary gap with or without my help.

That game design and curriculum construction have much in common is hardly a unique idea.  James Gee's career, for example, is largely built on recognizing the parallels between gaming and more traditional teaching and learning.  It is my opinion, however, that there's more that could be done here, not just in recognizing and defining those parallels, but in uncovering how the two might inform each other better, seeing what game design has to teach educators, and what educators have to teach game design.  I would not be surprised, moreover, if the expected conversation - that is, with game design bringing an understanding of design, and education bringing an understanding of learning - is totally reversed.  Game designers may know a lot more about learning than we'd like to give them credit for,* and educators more about design, even if they're using different language.

* Consider the challenge they face daily: make a game that is just hard enough to keep the player's interest, and make sure that difficulty scales well as the player gets more advanced.  In doing so, however, the designer must take into account the learning of the player - that is, the rate at which he or she improves - as well as the wide variety of potential play styles, learning styles, and personalities that might come in contact with the game.  In many ways, that's very much what a teacher does, with the added difficulty that the game designer has to code his game ahead of time.  He has to anticipate, because he won't be there to fix it on the fly, except in the abstract way of writing patches.

These suspicions of mine, however, about the potential exchange of information, ideas, and learning design between two very different industries are not sufficient or advanced enough to be beliefs or even arguments.  Rather, they are questions.  What explicit and hidden learning design processes does the gaming industry use?  What about education, both formal and informal?  What are their vocabularies?  What are their objectives, and how do those objectives aid or detract from improving learning (for example, does making learning itself your core objective make it harder to produce good learning)?

Within the gaming industry - as within the world of education - there are, I'm sure, an infinite variety of approaches.  There are certainly a variety of types of studios, from the major AAA production companies like Electronic Arts or Sega to the smaller, lesser-known mid-market studios like Paradox or Stardock, all the way to the miniature independent producers like 2D Boy (makers of the wildly popular World of Goo).  In addition to wondering about the game industry as a whole, I think it's fair to ask about the differences within the game industry.

I suppose what I'm suggesting is a kind of ethnography of learning design in the video game industry, and in traditional education.  The value of such an effort seems to me to hinge on the observation that learning - if only learning how to play the game - is built into each and every game that gets put on the market.  Failure to do so means failure to sell and, thus, failure to survive.  Despite the (mostly) non-profit incentives in education, failure to adequately design for learning has much more dire and far-reaching consequences, and yet the conceit of the educator (or education policy maker, or education researcher) is too often to assume that no one else has faced the question of how to design for learning.

Graphics or Gameplay

I loathe dichotomies, because it seems to me that usually the things we see as opposed are more complementary than we think.  Opposition itself is a kind of relationship, after all, and a close one at that.  Up and down, I am fond of saying, are a lot closer to each other than up and penguin are.

Given my distaste for things which are allegedly, but not actually, "mutually exclusive," you may not be surprised to learn that I believe that good games often have both good graphics and good gameplay.  Often, in the modern gaming world, it seems to me that you get one or the other; the development team blows its budget on good graphics designers or good game designers, but rarely both.  And, what's more, even if they want to do both, hardware may not be up to the challenge.  Really good gameplay - and especially a strong AI - might take up too much processor power and memory to make it possible for really nice, anti-aliased, 3D, shiny graphics to be feasible, even on a super-machine.

Of course, my natural position is to reconcile the paradox of gameplay and graphics by pointing out that graphics are a part of gameplay.  It's easy for a gamer to get caught up in thinking about the graphics as being icing on the cake, but graphics go beyond what's happening in the center of the screen.  The UI (user interface) is a part of graphics and gameplay, for example.  The PC (player character), if there is one, should look good, but also serves a the vital gameplay function of telling the player where he is.  That maybe goes without saying, but I think that many in the gaming world - or at least game players - have largely forgotten about the importance of functionality in graphics.

The dragon on the menu screen might be a bit much

To me, then, good graphics are functional graphics.  Age of Wonders may not be the flashiest, most beautiful game every made - and no wonder, since it's some 10 years old now - but the graphics are extremely functional.  The player can tell, at a glance, what his army's composition is, where they are on the map, where the nearest towns are and how big those towns are, and even how much income those towns have in the form of farmland.  All of that is modeled in 2D sprites, of course, but the advantage of 2D sprites is not to be ignored: they free up processor and memory resources for other things, like running the AI.

In the modern computing world - as we've gone to multi-core processors - this is even more important.  A game like, for example, Elemental: War of Magic (in many ways a spiritual successor to the Age of Wonders series) is modeled in 3D, but with low-intensity graphics and the option to play on an essentially 2D cloth map.  The relatively non-taxing graphics, compared with multi-core, threaded processing support allows the AI to run in the background (to plan its next move) while the player is playing.  Hence both a better AI and quicker turn times, both leading to improved gameplay.

I want to talk about four games I've played recently, and how they manage the graphics / gameplay issue.  All four, I think, do a good job (if for different reasons), and all four are from genres I prefer: rpg, strategy, and simulation.  I'm not going to bash graphics-happy, but fundamentally crappy FPS games (oops, I just did), or lament about how they are destroying PC gaming or how gameplay is dead or anything like that.  No, all four of these games are contemporary, and while they may not sell like the flashier, more braindead fare that even the least game-happy of you hear about (games like Call of Duty, Civilization Revolutions, or World of Warcraft), they are an indication of the way in which PC gaming is improving, even in the face of graphics-first consoles.*

* This isn't totally fair either.  While AAA titles on the consoles certainly tend to be dumbed down, there are also fantastic innovations happening on XBox and PS3.  Games like Flower and Flow, for example, are fantastic implementations of console technology.  Likewise, small developers like Penny Arcade are making hilarious and amazing cross-platform RPGs.  Not everything on console is FPS or the latest Madden game.

Avencast: Rise of the Mage

Wandering the Kyranian Wastes in search of demons

Avencast is an action RPG made by a very small team of programmers and artists.  The voice acting is mediocre, the story is a bit predictable, and while the graphics are nice enough, they're not going to blow anyone away.  What makes Avencast good, then, is its gameplay.

I'm not an action RPG buff by any means.  Generally speaking, the "action" there means no thinking, no strategy.  It means clicking on enemies to kill them, over and over and over.  That is still true in Avencast, to a degree, but not in the way you're used to if you're a Diablo fanatic.  Rather, in Avencast you are - not surprisingly - a young Mage, and your endless clicking casts a variety of spells, ranging from the tactical (freeze your opponent for no damange) to the devastating (unleash a meteor shower on your foes and wipe them all out).

The spell casting system is fun, because it's all key-combination based.  Rather than queuing spell one to the "1" key, and spell 2 to the "2" key, you press a combination of movement keys in succession, and then cast the spell.  This feels a bit more magical - if only marginally so - than many similar games.  Taking into account the motions, tactics, and vulnerabilities and resistances of your enemies, you have to be careful about what spells you use when, meaning the gameplay isn't just hack and slash.

But it mostly is.  I don't think Avencast is a great game, by any stretch, but it's a good one.  There is one thing that is great about it, however: the graphical rendering of spells.  Spells in Avencast look great, but, beyond that, they look how they should.  That's an important distinction.  Many magic-based games have generic spell effects that do little to differentiate a fire spell from an ice spell, or a shielding buff from a stat-raising one.  In Avencast, on the other hand, every single spell looks exactly right.  Your fire-wall looks like fire, and then when it gets upgraded to be half-fire, half "soul magic," it retains its fire billows but blanches to a white, soul-magicy hue instead of red.  The aforementioned meteors hit randomly in a wide area, and where they hit randomly really matters.  Sometimes they miss, and you can tell.  The quick, "oh no I'm about to get hit" shield that you can cast blocks incoming attacks or effects for exactly as long as it is visible.

All of that sounds like a no brainer, but not all games do it.  Avencast does it so brilliantly that, in the rare event that you fight another mage, you really feel like you know what spells the mage is casting (even if you've never seen the spells before) simply from the animations.  That's a good use of graphics to improve gameplay.  Attractive and functional is the right combination.

Europa Universalis III
 

China has always been huge

Paradox Interactive recently released a 5th expansion for Europa Universalis 3, a game that has been around since before I graduated from college.  Indeed, "Divine Wind," the newest add-on, is the second since Europa Universalis Complete was released.

Though still in need of patching, Divine Wind improves the graphics of EU3 considerably (if subtly), and also adds even more depth to what is already one of the deepest games there is.  I've written about EU3 before, but to summarize, it's a grand strategy/simulation game based upon the history of the world from 1400 until the mid-19th century.  The player leads a historical world power starting any time during that period (and ending any time), and plays without victory conditions, in an attempt to mimic or distort real history by expanding, fighting wars, engaging in diplomacy, colonizing, getting caught up in the reformation, and so on.

What makes EU3 so impressive is how much is going on in the background.  There are literally hundreds of nations, each with their own AI plugging away and making decisions.  The computing power needed to pull this off means no fancy 3D graphics.  But, as you can see in the screenshot, the game still looks attractive - if you like nice maps, anyway.  Armies and navies are easy to command, and indicators pop up to tell you which provinces are doing what.  Perhaps most useful is the menu system - which hardly looks or feels like menus at all - that you use to manage the nuts and bolts of your empire / merchant republic / monarchy / tribal despotism.  Information on your current ruler and heir is presented succinctly and conveniently, hiring new advisors is made easy, with all the information you need on one page, and managing your economy - while an art that takes practice - is only hard because of the game mechanics, and not because of the interface.

EU3 has one of the steepest learning curves of any game I have every played.  Indeed, I have owned various versions of it for almost four years now, and I'm still learning to play.  Only recently, for example, have I fully understood the drawbacks of expanding (the hit your research takes, for example, with more provinces, especially those that are of a different culture).  But one thing is clear: the folks at Paradox chose gameplay first, and then chose graphics that are not bad, but rather that complement that gameplay and are immersive to the armchair-leader who is more fascinated by changing borders and movements of armies than by individual soldiers wiping their noses.

Football Manager

Football Manager is probably the best selling simulation game in the world.  You may not have heard of it, because it's huge in Europe and relatively small in the USA, where soccer is still a fringe sport.  But a recent interview with a SEGA executive in Game Informer would let you know that FM is in the same stratosphere as the Total War series in terms of profitability.  Which, if you consider how soccer-happy Europe is, should come as no surprise.  Who, after all, doesn't want to manage their favorite sports team?

I'm still playing FM 2010, despite the release of FM 2011, because I'm still wrapped up in a career I started in the earlier game.  As you can see, I'm currently coaching Canvey Island, a small English semi-professional team.  The screenshot comes from inside a match against Dartford, and while the majority of the game takes place in a menu-driven, text-based interface, this, I think, is the heart of Football Manager.

Hooray for scoring goals

In any sports simulation, the match or game engine is what makes the thing go.  It's all well and good to have a solid high-level system, but if the games themselves are unrealistic and clunky, the game falls short.  Bowl Bound College Football, for example, had an intolerably bad play-calling system.  Most EA games, as another example, are horribly unrealistic, and thus make bad simulations.  Current online games like those at WhatIfSports are great because of the competition inherent in facing other humans, but their match and game engines are extremely opaque, entirely textual, and not very accurate.

Football Manager is in a class by itself, then.  While it's not perfect, the match engine is ever-improving, and what's best about it is that you can watch, as you coach, your players actually execute your tactics.  Now, for a non-European the learning curve here was very high, because I had to learn soccer tactics first, and then I had to learn the game, but over time I've come to see what a brilliant engine FM has.

Now, Football Manager currently does support 3D rendering of matches, but I choose not to use it.  I do lose a little in terms of seeing who really tripped who (circles don't do a good job of indicating who's on the ground), but I stay with the 2D view for two reasons.  First, it's a lot easier to survey the entire field, so I know not just what's happening on the ball, but what my, for example, left back is doing while my striker moves in to score.  Second, the 2D graphics are better than the 3D ones anyway.

Football Manager's 3D graphics are choppy and clunky.  Watching them, I feel like I'm playing a soccer simulation game.  The 2D graphics make me feel like I'm coaching a soccer team.  Odd?  Perhaps, but I think it gets to the deeper point: graphics, in a game, are not a substitution for imagination.  I can suspend disbelief a lot easier with circles running around, because I know it's an abstraction, than I can with clunky 3D models that don't really look like people, but look enough like them to ruin the abstraction.  Immersion doesn't just come from pretty pictures: even mere text can do the job, and 2D is sometimes better than 3D.

Distant Worlds

2D + Space = lots of ugly stacking; also, amazing gameplay

 Last but not least, I want to mention Distant Worlds, a game that is so massive, so complex, and so wonderfully fun that it could only work in 2D.  Huh?  Look at it.  It's ugly.  The ships are small, the space station looks horrible, and the planet is bland.  The space looks empty, and everything is so dark.

Distant Worlds is a classic "don't judge a book by its cover" kind of game.  The screenshots look unimpressive, but the reason the game looks so flat is because it has to, because in 3D it would be nigh unplayable.  Whereas with other games we've discussed here there's a kind of interplay between sacrificing graphics for gameplay, in Distant Worlds there's actually a synergy.  Simply put, there's so much to do in DW that 3D graphics would only disorient the player, making an already complex game needlessly more complicated.

What makes DW special?  Scale.  In a way, this is almost EU3 in space, only with ship design and without historical basis.  DW takes place in galaxies ranging from the hundreds to the thousands of stars, each of which has planets or asteroids that - if they are not inhabitable - may have resources vital to the success of your empire.  Indeed, economics drive DW, but they do so in the background.  In a fantastic innovation, Codeforce - makers of the game - set up an automation system that takes care of huge swatches of your empire for you.  No matter what, there is always a civilian economy that runs in the background of your military empire, collecting and exchanging resources, migrating between planets, and even visiting resort bases.  But you can also let the AI take care of research and/or ship design and/or fighting wars and/or engaging in diplomacy and/or espionage and/or construction and/or colonization.  The result: an incredibly complex 4X strategy game (that runs in real time, no less, though it can be paused) that is easy to learn because you can simply automate anything you don't want to worry about.

And, above all, the game looks right.  It's easy to tell where your ships are, which colonies are yours, what kinds of ships you're using, and even how much commerce is going on (if you choose to let the game display civilian ships; which makes the game run very slowly on large maps).  Above all, though, the abstraction of playing in 2 dimensions - instead of the 3 of, for example, Sword of the Stars - prevents the player from getting disoriented, and allows for seamless zooming from one side of your empire to another to address whatever problem might arise.  In short, the graphics may not look like much, but they're supremely functional, and they're supported by such in-depth gameplay that they're almost irrelevant.

In summary, then, graphics do not make the game.  Or, rather, graphics are how the player and the game interact, but they need not be fancy or high tech to do their job.  Indeed, sometimes 3D is less immersive than 2D.  Sometimes more flashy and fancy takes away from good gameplay.  In PC gaming, in particular, it's important for developers and players to remember that the more complex interface (keyboard and mouse versus controller) and the more powerful hardware allows for games that are deeper, more engaging, and, ironically, maybe less pretty than games made for the consol.  Kalos and agathos aren't always the same thing.