James Portnow is an American writer and game designer, co-founder of the YouTube channel Extra Credits for which he wrote many of the episodes from 2013 to 2019. He is known for his theories on socially positive design and has worked as a design consultant with Zynga and Riot Games. In 2013 he was listed by Complex Media on their list of "25 Video Game Personalities You Should Know Who Aren't Developers."
About
Portnow received his undergraduate degree from St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a master's from Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center before getting a job as a designer at Activision, working on the Call of Duty franchise. He has also done consultant work for game development companies Zynga and Riot Games. For four years, he taught undergraduate game design and master's-level game software production courses at DigiPen Institute of Technology. In 2008, Portnow co-founded the video lessonseries Extra Credits, creating 16 seasons with hundreds of videos discussing issues pertinent to video games and game studies such as video game development, the legitimacy of video games as art, and sparking intellectual discourse on important issues in gaming culture. He wrote a majority of the episodes on a wide variety of topics such as narrative creation, level design, gamification, tangential learning, sexuality and gender discrimination both within games and in the gaming community, and bullying in the community. In 2012, Microsoft invited Portnow to a special meeting to discuss potential solutions to the toxicity present on Xbox Live, and he was interviewed by the New York Times and Al Jazeera for his fight against toxicity. In 2013, the British game development companyCreative Assembly sponsored a series of episodes about the Punic Wars. After a positive reception, the crew launched a Patreon campaign to create Extra History, a spin-off series designed to teach viewers global history. Portnow wrote a majority of the series, including Sengoku Jidai, The Battle of Kursk, and "The History Of Non-Euclidean Geometry". In late 2017, Extra Scifi started with Portnow's exploration of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein before becoming a regular series on the Extra channel. On October 30, 2019, in the episode "The Perfect Horror Protagonist - Writing a Character for Fun & Terror", it was mentioned that Portnow, the only member of the original lineup, was leaving Extra Credits after 10 years of being the show's writer, even though his scripts would be used for future episodes.
Public speaking
Portnow has been a regular speaker at many gaming conferences, including being the keynote speaker at the Argentina Video Games Exposition in Buenos Aires in November 2011, the Konsoll 2014 conference, hosted by the Game Developers Guild of Norway, and in 2018 was keynote speaker at the Georgia Game Developers Association's 12th annual Southern Interactive Entertainment and Game Expo. He has also regularly been asked to give talks on gaming at many universities and colleges, including Vancouver Film School, Indiana University Bloomington, and Smith College.
