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There was something particularly playful about Muhammad Ali, the boxer who rivaled Pele as the most famous worldwide sports celebrity of the 20th century. But whereas Pele was known for his quiet dignity and his sheer enthusiasm for the beautiful game of soccer, Ali was not only the greatest boxer of his era, he was also a genius of repartee, someone who played with the media like he played with his (usually) helpless […]
Theodore Roosevelt and the Redemptive Powers of Play
As a man, President Theodore Roosevelt preached and lived a muscular gospel of action. T.R. commanded the bully pulpit, busted corporate trusts, hunted big game, and willingly took on—both metaphorically and literally—anyone in a match of fisticuffs, even as President. But as a boy, Teedy (as he was known to his family) was weak and sickly, prone to bouts of serious, even life-threatening illness. How he remade himself is a story that has been often told but is worth looking […]
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A Place for Play
Where we play often determines how we play. This fact is often forgotten when we look at the history of play, whether that’s in a monograph or a museum collection. Place shapes play.
Let’s consider this historically. For most of human history, living quarters were nasty, brutish, and cramped. There was little room for interior play in a dark, dirty hovel, unless that play was fairly confined. In a northern climate like Iceland in the Middle Ages, that might mean playing […]
Why Barbie Fashion Designer is a GREAT Selection for the World Video Game Hall of Fame
Most years when we pick the finalists for the World Video Game Hall of Fame—and then when our International Selection Advisory Committee and fans help determine the inductees—there is controversy over one of the picks. Our very first year in 2015, for example, we named Angry Birds as a finalist along with eventual inductees Doom, Pac-Man, Pong, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, and World of Warcraft. Hardcore gamers were outraged, even after it wasn’t selected— “Angry Birds does not deserve to […]
Lawn Games: From Croquet to Jarts
How we play sometimes depends on where we play. Activities indoors are often constricted by space, crowding, and the presence of breakable objects. “Go outside and play,” is a cry of desperation uttered by a frustrated parent whose rambunctious kids have been cooped up inside too long. But where does that play take place?
For most of human history, kids spent their free time in the half-cultivated land around settlements or the adjacent fields or woodlots. As cities grew and more […]
Atomic Play
After the dropping of two bombs in 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, humanity’s ability to harvest the potential of nuclear energy became a recurring theme in play. In the beginning, nuclear power seemed like an awesome force that offered great promise, even as it was recognized as perilous and destructive. As time went on, however, its catastrophic capacity began to outweigh its potential for good in the public mind, as fears of global destruction invaded the imaginations of toy and […]
David Ahl: Getting Creative with Computers
Play begins in anticipation. This is true not only for play generally but also specifically for video games. We discover a game from an advertisement or through word of mouth or perhaps from reading or watching something that someone else—often a professional journalist—has written or produced about the game. We begin to daydream about the game and think about what we’ll do in it, what surprises we’ll discover, and what challenges we will have to overcome. Our fingers itch to […]
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Margot Comstock, Publishing Pioneer
This week we’re celebrating our annual Women in Games event that spotlights women who have shaped the video game industry, and so it seems fitting to post a blog honoring Margot Comstock, a publishing visionary who helped people become familiar and fall in love with computers and computer games. Sadly, Margot passed away on October 22, 2022.
When Margot Comstock began her work in the 1970s, personal computing was just taking root. Computers, as they first developed after World War II, […]
Playing with Primes
I was a math kid, one who enjoyed solving simple problems of multiplication and division, arithmetic and subtraction. For many years my favorite toy was DataMan, a calculator themed as a space hero that was created in the late 1970s by Texas Instruments, the same company that introduced not only the portable calculator but also such electronic toys as the Little Professor and Speak n Spell. Still, none of these simple calculations captured my fancy the way prime numbers did.
I […]