Ding. Ding. Ding. People of a certain age may remember the sound of cranking the elevator on the Fisher-Price parking garage, or the way the stop sign at each floor lowered when the lift reached that level. This ingenious plastic contrivance raised cars up and down the three-level garage, tipping them out when they reached the floor. I still recall not only the auditory experience, but also the tactile hitch as the wheel turned a gear and the momentary stutter […]
The Stories of Michael and Muffy Berlyn
Video games are many things, but in the main they consist of three primary elements: art, play, and story. Of course, these elements may not be distributed equally in every game. In Tetris (1985), for example, the play element predominates; there is no story and the art is mere adornment (as evident by the fact that Alexey Pajitnov created it originally on a Soviet minicomputer, the Electronika 60, using only basic characters for graphics). Flower (2009) offers minimal play and […]
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Play in an Icelandic Saga
The forms of play are many and various. Take a look around a contemporary playground and you’ll see all sorts of play: physical, active play; imaginary play; conversational play amongst the children and adults; play with sticks, pinecones, wood chips, and other found objects; daydreaming; and the list might go on. What is true now has always been true in human history, and so when we look at almost any historical source we can find in there evidences of play […]
Bruce Shelley Papers at The Strong
What does it mean to preserve the history of video games? This is something I thought about a lot when I started this work at The Strong National Museum of Play in 2006. My training in fields such as the history of the book and history of science convinced me that among the materials that needed to be preserved were not just the games themselves but also the work of the creators who made them. To that end we began […]
How to Find Things in The Strong’s Collections
The Strong National Museum of Play has the world’s largest, most comprehensive collection of playthings. That’s amazing. It’s also daunting! Researchers, whether they’re coming here on site or searching through our digital holdings, often struggle to locate the materials that would be most useful for their research projects. Some of that is inherent in the vast size of the collection, but some of it reflects the fact that objects of diverse types are cataloged using a number of different systems, […]
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Play is the Best Medicine
A proverb in the Bible states, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”
There’s sound wisdom in this, as anyone knows who has felt better after laughing uproariously at a silly pet video. Play is not necessarily a panacea, but it is good medicine, a way of introducing fun into life and making it a little more bearable along the way. Because of these beneficial qualities of play, it is not surprising that over […]
The History of NPCs
NPCs are having a moment. That raises, of course, an existential question: can an NPC have a moment?
For those not familiar with the term, NPC stands for Non-Player Character. It refers to some living, sentient being in a game that players interact with in a way that’s not purely hostile. A monster you encounter and fight in a game, with little or no conversation outside the moment of combat, could perhaps be considered an NPC, but in practice monsters seem […]
Muhammad Ali, Champion of Play
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee….
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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