YouTube adds six educational Playables, including Veritasium’s trivia game
YouTube's games hub now has titles from Khan Academy, TED-Ed and Black Girls Code. Veritasium's Elements of Truth is a trivia game with confidence scoring.
The tea in 3
- YouTube's Oct 28 post adds six educational Playables made with Khan Academy, TED-Ed, Black Girls Code and others.
- Veritasium's Elements of Truth is a trivia game with confidence-based scoring, built on its tabletop game.
- Electrify's Luke Lewis told Tubefilter that orders for the physical game spiked as fans shared Playables high scores.
YouTube added six educational games to its Playables hub on October 28, including Elements of Truth, a science trivia game from Veritasium. This is a launch explainer for the games that exist now, where to find them and why the tie-ins matter to YouTube.
The lineup
YouTube’s blog post says it teamed up with Black Girls Code, The Jed Foundation, Khan Academy, Math with Mr. J, TED-Ed and Veritasium. Here is what each game is, in the company’s own descriptions.
- SuperNova (Black Girls Code): help Nova audition bandmates, jam to new beats and unlock secret choruses.
- Reset Mode (The Jed Foundation): guided breathing and mindfulness exercises.
- Newton’s Glider (Khan Academy): steer pucks through directional force puzzles to test your intuition for inertia and physics.
- Lure of the Labyrinth: Vending Machine (presented by Math with Mr. J): a math puzzle about the value of coins, developed with Maryland Public Television, the MIT Education Arcade and FableVision Studios.
- BackTrack Pro (TED-Ed): build chord progressions to put a song together.
- Elements of Truth (Veritasium): a trivia game with confidence-based scoring.
Where to play
Playables is YouTube’s built-in games hub, so the games run inside YouTube. The Veritasium game has its own page, linked from YouTube’s post. Tubefilter also reports that YouTube recently added accessibility tags that help people find games that fit their device settings.
How the Veritasium tie-in happened
Luke Lewis, Director of Publishing at Electrify Video Partners, told Tubefilter that YouTube approached the company earlier this year with Playables tie-ins for its brands. Electrify invested in Veritasium in 2023. It saw a chance to promote the Elements of Truth tabletop game.
Our long-term expectations are for the game to introduce Elements of Truth to an audience of knowledge-hungry casual gamers who might otherwise not be familiar with it— Luke Lewis, Electrify Video Partners, to Tubefilter
Lewis said the early response has been “extremely positive” and that orders for the physical game have spiked as fans share Playables high scores with each other. He did not give numbers in Tubefilter’s report.
What YouTube gets out of it
Tubefilter’s read is that Playables has mostly been a collection of low-stakes casual titles, with far less reach than YouTube’s video library. It also notes that YouTube has faced ban threats in schools, including in New York City. Educational games from known STEM names give the company a counterexample. That is Tubefilter’s analysis, not something YouTube said.
The games are live on YouTube now. Whether Playables grows beyond this first batch is not something YouTube has said.
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