Extra Credits is a YouTube channel focused around game development and education.
Please introduce yourself and describe what you do at Extra Credits.
I’m Matthew Krol, and I am the showrunner, narrator, and co-owner of Extra Credits and Extra History. I am the part of the operation that keeps the production of our team running. I make sure our episodes air on time, our team is talking to each other, etc.
Why do you think gaming education is important?
I think gaming education is incredibly important for multiple reasons. Some of the earliest formations of learning that I was learning was through playing games. In the earliest games I played like Dragon Warrior for the NES, I was taking notes and studying before that was something I actually needed to do for school. Gaming is one of the largest mediums on the planet now—any kind of education about video games, how they’re made, and even into gaming culture is incredibly important for making any kind of decisions around any of those things.
Has the team’s approach to talking about game development changed over time?
My favorite thing about how we talk about game development on the channel is the many different voices that write our scripts. We are getting writers from all parts of the game industry—we have two escape room writers doing an episode, we have someone writing an episode from a Twitch perspective. We’re trying to get various lawyers to do an episode. I’ve been excited to see how we can talk about things beyond our normal stable.
What are some specific games that you feel offer unique educational content to players?
My answer is a bad one, but I am a fan of games that, even ham-fistedly, teach you or help you get better at a skill that allows you to utilize that skill outside of gaming. So one answer is Typing of the Dead, where you use the keyboard and you have to type words per minute to stop the zombies from coming at you. You actually had to work on correct spelling, pronunciation, sentence structure, and speed in your typing to play the game.
Could you talk about how streaming on Twitch and YouTube contributes to the educational content EC offers?
The Twitch channel is paramount to the community building aspects of getting the word out about our shows. Even though not everything we do there is education, you invite more people to want to learn if you make that space fun. I find that Twitch and live-streaming is a way to directly talk to someone about things we want to talk about. The ability to formulate and sustain community around games and game development, as well as thinking critically about those two things and how all that fits into real life is paramount to our mission of education and showing that games matter.
Many libraries have gaming collections, and some even offer space for playing video games or have tabletop role-playing clubs; are there other ways that you think libraries should be engaging with games and gamers?
I think that by including more games in library catalogs, they are already doing something to justify the artistic and societal merit of the medium. The fact that video games are in a place that’s saying, “here is important knowledge for you” gives me a lot of hope for people’s ability to not just think of video games as a silly time-waster. These are artifacts of cultural importance that people can learn from, and if they are in libraries, that further solidifies that true statement.