The BEST episodes of Extra Credits
Every episode of Extra Credits ever, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of Extra Credits!
Join James Portnow, Daniel Floyd and Allison Theus each week as they take a deeper look at games; how they are made, what they mean and how we can make them better.
#1 - The Content Conundrum - Why So Many Games Feel Generic
Season 2018 - Episode 16 - Aired 6/20/2018
Procedurally generated content seems like a really appealing route for a lot of indie developers--it's what AAA game studios are doing, and it seems to protect game balance! But often times it's worth the extra effort to craft a few handmade pieces, even at the risk of "breaking" the game.
#2 - Impractical Research - How Academia Can Make Better Games
Season 2018 - Episode 8 - Aired 4/4/2018
Academic research in games should be challenging our need for commonly accepted principles like Skinner boxes or certain narrative structures. Historically it tends to be focused on finding only certain types of quantifiable data, which can be distracting from the medium's overall progress.
#3 - Unpleasant Design - When Bad Design is Used to Hide Problems
Season 2018 - Episode 9 - Aired 4/18/2018
Sometimes bad design is created intentionally, to cover up a flaw in the system instead of fixing it. Using cities like Seattle and London as examples, we examine how architecture is designed to remove homeless people from the public eye without actually helping them.
#4 - Wolfenstein vs Call of Duty - The Need for “B” Games
Season 2018 - Episode 10 - Aired 4/25/2018
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus offers up one of the most honest depictions and criticisms of Nazism and bigotry in modern mainstream games, and part of that is due to its "b"-game-like nature--similar to b-movies that transgress the standards of their time.
#5 - The Digital Museum - Assassin’s Creed Origins Discovery Tour
Season 2018 - Episode 11 - Aired 5/9/2018
The Assassin's Creed Origins team recently added a non-violent exploration mode to their game coupled with an educational voiceover narrating facts about ancient Egypt. How could we improve on this museum-like experience
#6 - Choice Paralysis - Too Much of a Good Thing
Season 2018 - Episode 12 - Aired 5/23/2018
Game designers must decide how to segment and present choices so that the player isn't overwhelmed. From character creation to strategy, there's a lot of complexity to the user experience.
#7 - Blockchain Games - Can Blockchain Technology be a Game Mechanic?
Season 2018 - Episode 13 - Aired 5/30/2018
Say hello to Matt Krol, our new narrator! Today we're talking about about that cursed buzzword "blockchain" that's appeared on the fringes of the game industry within the past year, most infamously Cryptokitties. How could blockchain tech actually provide good game design value?
#8 - Ladders and Team Games - Doing it Wrong
Season 2018 - Episode 14 - Aired 6/6/2018
Thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. The first 500 people to sign up at this link get their first 2 months for free: http://skl.sh//extracredits Why do team-based video games like Overwatch seem to struggle with judging team cooperation and not just individual skill? The answer, surprisingly, comes from chess.
#9 - Games You Might Not Have Tried #14 - Mechs, Monsters and More!
Season 2018 - Episode 15 - Aired 6/13/2018
These games are definitely perfect...ly suited to expanding your game design knowledge, even if they have some flaws here and there. It's another edition of "extra" game reviews: Games You Might Not Have Tried!
#10 - Break Points - Balancing the Math with the User Experience
Season 2018 - Episode 7 - Aired 3/28/2018
Why does a small, incremental increase in a stat sometimes feel like an overpowered boost? How can we use break points to improve the player's experience? Guest art by Allison Utterback! https://twitter.com/ingrid_archer (No, not THAT Allison, but a very awesome Allison nonethless.)
#11 - College E-Sports - Road to Glory?
Season 2018 - Episode 17 - Aired 6/27/2018
E-sports scholarships are becoming slowly more commonplace, but they have inherited some of the bad qualities of other college sports, as well as unique issues like the usually short lifespans of video games themselves. Should you pursue an esports career?
#12 - The Three Pillars of Game Writing - Plot, Character, Lore
Season 2018 - Episode 18 - Aired 7/4/2018
Let's examine the elements that make up "game writing." Plot, characters, and lore all have to be balanced depending on the type of game you're making--knowing what to cut from your story bible is just as important as knowing what to keep.
#13 - The Price of Randomness - Balancing RNG
Season 2018 - Episode 19 - Aired 7/11/2018
Let's compare the RNG design in Hearthstone and Slay the Spire and figure out how we can design RNG for strategic difficulty without veering into completely frustrating players.
#14 - Ma, The Space Between - Uncluttered Game Design
Season 2018 - Episode 20 - Aired 7/18/2018
Today we're talking about a Japanese word "ma" and how it applies to game design. Incorporating rest, space, and emptiness can make the rest of the gameplay, action, and narrative stand out.
#15 - Game Therapy - How Can Games Improve Mental Health?
Season 2018 - Episode 21 - Aired 7/25/2018
Games can help us heal, emotionally as well as physically. We need to do more research on their positive impacts and how we can maximize the emotional value of commercial games, not just on the harmful effects of gaming disorders.
#16 - Don't Just Hire Your Fans - Creating a Good Design Team
Season 2018 - Episode 22 - Aired 8/1/2018
Having 500+ hours logged on a particular game or franchise shouldn't be a job requirement to work on that particular game or franchise--in fact, by working with folks who aren't already "super-fans" of your game, you'll end up making better creative design decisions.
#17 - Steam: What Sells - What Steam's Player Numbers Tell Us About Game Genres
Season 2018 - Episode 23 - Aired 8/8/2018
We can learn a lot from Steam's player numbers about why certain games, like PUBG and Paladins, continue to be popular on Steam, as well as why niche driving simulators are doing better than adventure games.
#18 - Gestalt - The Parts and the Whole
Season 2018 - Episode 24 - Aired 8/15/2018
Gestalt design principles--how we understand groups of objects as a whole unit via symmetry, proximity, closure, and more--is a powerful tool in game design to quickly and effectively communicate visual information to the player.
#19 - Losing Player Trust - The Data Dilemma
Season 2017 - Episode 44 - Aired 12/6/2017
Companies rely on metrics to tell them how players respond to a game, which can mean that short-term bumps (like revenue gained by adding microtransactions) disguises real player unhappiness with a game's quality and a publisher's integrity over time.
#20 - Prey: The Enemy Inside - Testing You Softly
Season 2017 - Episode 36 - Aired 10/11/2017
What we want to believe about ourselves and what's actually true may be very different things. Prey: The Enemy Inside starts with a simple psychological test... and then puts you in situations that may reveal your answers to be lies.
#21 - One More Level - The Arbitrary Endpoint Trap
Season 2017 - Episode 37 - Aired 10/18/2017
When we stay up later than we wanted just to hit a progress point in our games, we have fallen into the arbitrary endpoint trap. Some games deliberately manipulate us to do one more level, but many times we're doing it to ourselves and making playtime a chore.
#22 - Games You Might Not Have Tried: Horror - Find New Games for Halloween
Season 2017 - Episode 38 - Aired 10/25/2017
If you want to try games that feel different, that feel new and ambitious even if they're not necessarily the most polished experiences, then check out this list of Games You Might Not Have Tried - Halloween Edition! We review and recommend interesting but under appreciated games for you to discover and enjoy.
#23 - The Pacing of PUBG - The Thriller Tension of Battlegrounds
Season 2017 - Episode 39 - Aired 11/1/2017
Why have we become obsessed with a game where nothing happens for minutes at a time? It's because PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is something rare in games: a multiplayer thriller. CORRECTION: This episode was co-written by Rob Rath, not only James Portnow as listed in the endslate
#24 - Games You Might Not Have Tried #13 - Find New Games
Season 2017 - Episode 40 - Aired 11/8/2017
If you want to try games that feel different, that feel new and ambitious even if they're not necessarily the most polished experiences, then check out this list of Games You Might Not Have Tried! We review and recommend interesting but under appreciated games for you to discover and enjoy.
#25 - A Eulogy for Quintet - Melancholy and Wonder
Season 2017 - Episode 41 - Aired 11/15/2017
We loved games from Quintet back in the Super Nintendo era: ActRaiser, Soul Blazer, and Terranigma touched our hearts with their gentle, melancholy exploration of themes like working through tragedy or facing the dark experiences in our lives.