Video Games and Learning

**We've moved to Penny Arcade! New episodes weekly!**
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/ext...

Episode Three in my series of video "lectures," made in association with Edge.

http://www.edge-online.com/blogs/the-...

I'm pleased to introduce game designer James Portnow, cofounder of Divide By Zero Games. He and I will be partnering up to bring you these lectures from here on.

Loosely modeled after Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's Zero Punctuation reviews. For the first time, NOT made to be presented on screen in the classroom.

I can be reached at floydo_animation at yahoo dot com.
James can be reached at jportnow at gmail dot com.


Like the intro/outro music? Download the full tracks here!

Penguin Cap
http://www.carbohydrom.net/music/Carb...

Walk on Water
http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01527/

• Category

  Entertainment

[builder396]

World of Tanks uses tangental learning. You obviously need to know the tank youre driving and the tank in front of you, and if youre good, even calculate within seconds wether your gun is even large enough to actually damage your opponent. All provided with accurate ingame data on armor, gun and module values, (relatively) realistic physics and even a dedicated wiki containing even more information plus a complete historical background (which is copied from the normal wikipedia page).

[GIApocalypse]

I always saw an example of this in the assassins creed games with databases on various historical figures and locations.

[moorjammin]

I learned so much about Italian history by playing Assassin's creed.

crud, it worked. now I have to go look up what the sephiroth is.

[Gam0rDude]

Deus Ex made me Transhumanist.

[pnelad14]

Total war and Portal games have done this to me.

[Cherucha]

So kinda like how all of Smite's Playable gods has a lore page so you can know the basic history/story behind the god you may be interested in.I mean I never knew of He Bo,Archanida or Ao Kaung but playing Smite and reading the short lore of those gods got me to look up the actually full story's,and let me tell you the story of the 4 dragon Sea Kings is wonderful just reading Ao's lore got me interested more and lead me to a great chinese legend/story.I definitly want more games to do that.

[MrHolyRhino]

Like many other people here, I was watching most of this video thinking of assassins creed. I played the living hell out of AC2 and ACB, and about a month after I beat the ACB story-line I had a test on the renascence era. I got an A on that test. Would I have done as well if I didn't play Assassins creed? Probably not, and if it wasn't for the action-videogame relationship I had with the renascence, I wouldn't be nearly as interested in it either. Videgames are an untapped learning potential.

[MRMcLobster]

I know more about medieval Europe than most... Medieval Total War Represent!

[DeckuZora]

This video was redone in Season Two wasn't it? *confused now* penny-arcade. com/patv/episode/tangential-le­arning

[RegicideKo9]

I practically learned my entire vocabulary from RTS games and most medieval games (don't worry by medieval I don't mean "Fill my tankard full of mead once more barwench!" but ya I've learned a good bit of vocabulary and history from games.