The fabled Mirzakhani wand is the most powerful magical item ever created. And that's why the evil wizard Moldevort is planning to use it to conquer the world. You and Drumbledrore have finally discovered its hiding place in a cave, but...

An athlete is preparing for a game. They've put on their gear and done their warmup, and now it's time for one more routine — stretching. Typically, athletes stretch before physical activity to avoid injuries like strains and tears. But...

So we ended the last episode nearing the close of the 1980s and Nintendo had become the dominant player in the home console market, but Sega, originally a slot machine game company during World War 2, was looking to get its own console...

So last week Andre talked about Atari's role in the rise of the video game industry, but Atari wasn't the only major player in the 1970s. So we're going to step back a few years and first talk about Ralph Baer who designed the first...

When the Museum of Modern Art's senior curator of architecture and design announced the acquisition of 14 video games in 2012, "all hell broke loose." In this far-ranging, entertaining, and deeply insightful talk, Paola Antonelli...

So we've talked a lot about what makes games so great in this series, but we haven't really addressed the big question: why do we play games anyway? And well, the answer is pretty complicated, especially when you consider that some...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. In the United States, two institutions guide teenagers on the journey to adulthood: college and prison. Sociologist...

Today, we're going to step away from video games and take a closer look at a game type that has been with us for over a millennium - card games. Since Tang Dynasty China, cards have proven to have quite the staying power spawning a...

Welcome to Crash Course Games! In this series our host Andre Meadows is going to discuss the history and science of games. We're going to talk about video games of course, but also board games, role playing games, card games, even...

In a talk and demo, Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear shares his vision for the future of interactive entertainment -- and explains how video game streaming is helping people build communities online. "I am excited for a world where our...

Today, we're FINALLY going to talk about PC Gaming. So the personal computer is the precursor to the console, but it's not quite accurate to say that it just led to the console. PCs and the video games created on them have and continue...

Today we start our unit on language with a discussion of meaning and how we assign and understand meaning. We’ll cover sense and reference, beetles in boxes, and language games. We’re also getting into the meaning-making game ourselves:...

Today, we're going to talk about board games, but instead of trying to trace their histories, which we've already covered a bit of in ep2 on ancient games, we're going to look really closely at just two board games - Monopoly and The...

Townspeople are demanding that a corrupt merchant's collection of 30 rubies be confiscated to reimburse the victims of his schemes. The king announces that the fine will be determined through a game of wits between the merchant and the...

Today, we're going to explore the world of role-playing games. Role-playing games are different than most, because they're technically a form of interactive storytelling with one player managing the game as the game master (or dungeon...

You don't have to be a professional scientist to make a contribution to our collective knowledge. Today, we look at several projects that have benefitted from the power of citizen science!

So, variables. There are lots of them when trying to test an idea. The trick is to isolate one variable at a time to get reliable results every time. But, how do we do that? In this episode of Crash Course Kids, Sabrina shows us how to...

Today we're going to do something a little bit different and take everything we've learned so far and apply it to a case study on (arguably) the biggest game franchise in the world: Pok_mon. Now Pok_mon, like a select few other games...

To thrive in today's competitive economy, you need to constantly reimagine your business. So what's the secret to sustained success? Strategist Martin Reeves makes a pitch for embracing play to spark innovative business ideas -- and...

Today we create a game and then build an AI to destroy it. Our game is called TrashBlaster, and it’s like Asteroids but with trash in the ocean, and instead of a spaceship John Green Bot is wielding a laser. We'll use machine learning...

In the card game SET, what is the maximum number of cards you can deal that might not contain a SET?

In this video Paul Andersen shows conceptual thinking in a mini-lesson on scale mechanisms within complex systems.

T
ERMS:
Cause and effect relationships - one event that gives rise to ano
ther event
Complex systems - a...

As we mentioned last episode, one of the best test spaces for building new AI systems are games. This is because games provide a great framework for an AI to learn an objective and slowly improve. In recent years, AI has made huge...

Today, we wrap up our discussion of the console wars by taking a look at Microsoft's Xbox which was announced in 2001. The early 2000s saw a lot of innovation in hardware and games and we'll cover some of that, but one significant change...