Extra Credits
Extra Credits is a series of educational videos concerning mostly games. Created by animator Daniel Floyd in 2008, later, since 2010 with collaboration of games producer James Portnow and other artists; in a few years it became a highly popular online show with lessons about games as a medium, their topics, improvement, design, and other issues particular for gaming culture. At first connected to the online magazine The Escapist and then to Penny Arcade, in 2013 Extra Credits began to appear on their independent YouTube channel. So far, by the end of September 2017 Extra Credits acquired above 1.1 million subscribers.
In 2013 another cycle joined the channel: Extra History – videos on significant events and processes of world’s history; usually these consist of animated shorts, and, occasionally, non-animated lectures, always enriched with some references to online editions of the sources or important Wikipedia entries in the description. A new episode of the series is published on YouTube every Saturday.
The episodes of both Extra Credits and Extra History are not animations in motion, but sequences of illustrations flipped quickly one after another with the narrator’s voice sped up by 10 percent. All of this gives the show a very fast pace, making it easily accessible for modern viewers who tend to be easily bored by long speeches or texts and slowly moving audiovisuals – one must remain all the time focused in order to catch all of the information; moreover, the illustrations are prepared in a way that can be viewed as amusing and stimulating imagination, sometimes with the use of material such as photographs or Internet memes in order to represent past events and concepts in an unexpected manner.
Sources:
Wikipedia profile (accessed: June 18, 2019)
List of Extra Credits episodes (accessed: June 18, 2019)
“The Show” & “Our Current Team” at the website of Extra Credits (accessed: June 18, 2019)
Prepared by Joanna Kłos, University of Warsaw, joanna.klos@al.uw.edu.pl
Records in database:
- Extra History (Series): The History of Writing – Where the Story Begins / The History of Writing – The Alphabet
- Extra History (Series, S01E01-04): Rome: The Punic Wars – I: The First Punic War / Rome: The Punic Wars – II: The Second Punic War Begins / Rome: The Punic Wars – III: The Second Punic War Rages On / Rome: The Punic Wars – IV: The Conclusion of Second Puni
