Crash Course: Games

The Game Room
1

I love the YouTube channel Crash Course. Except for one series, which naturally is the one I’m going to talk about.

There’s a series on Games. It consists of twenty-nine separate episodes. Here is the breakdown for what topics are covered on these episodes:

  1. An introduction to the course
  2. A history of the origins of games in ancient times
  3. Video games
  4. Video games
  5. Video games
  6. Video games
  7. Video games
  8. Video games
  9. Video games
  10. Video games
  11. Video games
  12. Video games
  13. Card games
  14. Board games
  15. Educational games - mostly video games
  16. Psychology of games - with an emphasis of video games
  17. Sports
  18. Role-playing games
  19. Designing games - with an emphasis on video games
  20. Video games
  21. Video games
  22. Video games
  23. Video games
  24. Video games
  25. Game shows
  26. Live action role-playing games
  27. Gambling
  28. Pokemon
  29. The future of games - surprise twist ending; it will involve video games

I have to say I did not find this to be a completely balanced treatment of the subject. I feel there may have been just a little too much emphasis placed on one particular form of gaming. It’s like if I wrote a thirty chapter history of the world and devoted twenty chapters to the United States.

Seriously, I think I would have been happier if they had thrown out everything else and just made this a twenty episode series on Video Games.

Or am I showing my age? Maybe I’m just out of touch with the topic. Should a history of games focus the majority of its efforts on video games?

2

Looks to me like the series is basically about video games, only talking about other modes of game-playing to provide historical context. The ‘problem’ is that the title ‘Games’ assumes video-gaming as the default; which probably is age-related…

3

Yeah, I’d expect that if you’re going to touch on board games and card games at all, you’d have an entire episode each on chess and poker.