Extra Credits, One of the Smartest Gaming Shows on the Web, Talks Gaming!

Special post today guys! We sat down with Daniel Floyd and James Portnow of Extra Credits and chatted with them about life, video games, and the awesome story about how Gamers saved their Artist’s arm. Here’s a (admittedly condensed) version of the great chat we had.

JHS: Hey guys, thanks for joining us! First of all, would you mind introducing yourselves for our audience and explain what you do on Extra Credits?

Daniel: I’m Daniel Floyd, I’m a Pixar Animator for Pixar Canada right now, and I started the show as a class project back in 2008 when I was attending SCAD. Now, I do the voice, record the narration, and I work as an editor and help revise scripts and do the final editing and rendering of the show.

James: Hey, I’m James Portnow, I run a game design consulting firm called Rainmaker Games out of Seattle. Dan contacted me years back to—actually ask me how to pronounce my name. Back then I was writing for other people in the industry, but what I realized is that I wanted to be talking to the audience at large. There’s a much more important, much broader conversation we should be having, but our industry is very quiet about everything. As soon as I saw Dan’s Video, I said “this is it, you’ve found a way to connect to people who actually play video games about more than what’s in the game itself.” Eventually, I said “I would love to start writing for this!

James: Allison (Allison Theus, the show’s artist) is a Freelance 2-D artist, she’s worked for Disney and other big-name clients in the past. Allison actually previously worked for me at my last company, and when The Escapist asked us to start doing this show on a weekly basis, I turned to Dan and said “There’s only one person I know who can get the art done every week,” so I turned to Allison, and she hopped on board.

JHS: Your show is probably the most prominent show of critical discussion of games on the internet. Why do you think making a show about thinking about games has been so successful? 

Dan: I think this is something that a lot of gamers would have been in interested all along, there just aren’t a lot of places you can hear this sort of commentary in a casual way. There’ve always been articles like the stuff James wrote for Gamasutra.com, but there’s never been an easily palatable, entertaining sort of format for that.

James: I agree with Dan—As people grow up and the medium grows up, people are looking for more out of their game. Like I’ve talked about at Penny Arcade Expo before, people are hungry for this. The industry doesn’t talk to the consumer, EVER, and that’s what we set out to do.

JHS: Can you give us a nutshell of gamifying education?

James: Sure! I’m actually doing a talk on this at PAX with some very important people from the educational side.

So, education. Education as we know it is broken. It is based on a 19^th century system called the Prussian system, designed only to drill information into children to make them better factory workers. That system no longer works, because EVERYTHING in the last 150 years has become more exciting, more engaging, more accessible. Our leisure time is much more engaging, and there’s no reason school can’t reach that level of engagement from students. All gamifying education is about is taking the principles we’ve learned from making games, and bringing that into how we teach. It’s important for kids today to not just learn information, (because we have all of that at the tip of our fingers), but to know how to USE information.

JHS: So, how about the story of Allison’s arm?

James: About two weeks ago now, Allison hurt her shoulder. And it turned out that all the muscle connecting her arm to her shoulder was basically missing. Her arm was literally in the wrong place. They told her that unless she got that repaired, she was going to do permanent damage to it. At that moment, I was panicking. I did the only thing that I could think to do to raise money, from the fans to raise contributions for Allison’s medical care. I put the Rockethub page up  for $15,000 dollars, even though I had no idea what the surgery cost…and within a half an hour, we had eight or nine thousand dollars, and I was just happy with that. I thought it would slow down and went to a dinner with some developer friends to see how else we could raise money. We’re all sitting there, trying to think how we can get this thing together, and I get a text saying we’re up to $28,000. And then I get another text saying we’re up to $32,000. It not only redoubled my faith in humanity, but it was eye opening to watch people care and sacrifice that much to help one of our own.

If there’s anything I can convey, it’s just our profound thanks. I’ve been saying thank you for the last two weeks, and I can’t say it enough.

Dan: James told me about the donation page, but I came home from work on Wednesday and saw he did it, aaand I checked the results page and we were already at the goal. So—it kept going and going and going, and I spent the entire evening clicking “Refresh” on the page with my mouth open and watching this—it’s insane, how much support people gave to this cause. I am impressed and proud to have any association with these awesome people who would actually do this.

James: The next time people say something on the internet about people on the internet, or people who play games, I know EXACTLY where I’m going to turn and point to.

JHS: Is there anything you’d like to say to potential fans of Extra Credits?

James: Thank you! I will have to at some point anyway, so I’ll just preemptively say thank you!

Dan: We’ll continue saying that for a long time, I’m sure. Thank for watching, we’re glad you’re as interested in games as we are. Thanks for being part of the conversation!

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