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The year is 2013. I’m in my college dorm, putting little board game pieces into bags. The year is 2026. I’m in my office, putting little board game pieces into bags. The more things change, the more things stay the same. But these bags are archival polyethylene, I’m wearing nitrile gloves, and I might be overthinking it.
As one of The Strong’s curators, I decide which board games and puzzles are added to the museum’s collections. Once they’re added, I’m responsible […]

Continue Reading about Bagging Board Games for Fun and Nonprofit Published on:
September 25, 2026

It’s interesting how as time passes, something that felt like a cultural fixture becomes a blink in time. For me, the iPod exemplifies that phenomenon. I was in middle school and high school around 2008 to 2012, during its prime, when I upgraded from a simple mp3 player to the iPod and its world of iTunes and digital music downloads. In 2008, I was rocking the 3rd generation iPod nano, and suddenly my music player could also hold and display […]

Continue Reading about iPlay Published on:
September 18, 2026

By: Dr. Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
For generations of children, brushing Barbie’s hair has been as central to play as dressing her in the latest fashions. Beyond the familiar brush tucked into countless doll boxes, Mattel has repeatedly returned to hair as a site of innovation—designing dolls and accessories that transform styling into a creative, tactile, and sometimes experimental practice. Barbie’s evolving hairstyles chart a history of play that is as much about identity and imagination as it […]

Continue Reading about Let’s Talk About Barbie Hairplay! Published on:
September 11, 2026

Jubensha, translated from its original Chinese as “script(ed) murder,” shares similarities with Western murder mystery dinner party games, yet equating the two oversimplifies a far more complex cultural phenomenon. Since the 2010s, in China, where the scripted murder game trend originated and subsequently exploded, Jubensha has captured the hearts of many Gen Z players, making Jubensha parlors into the coveted third spaces away from home and work that many Millennials and Gen Xers once found in malls or cafes. A […]

Continue Reading about The Rise of Scripted Murder Games from China Published on:
September 4, 2026

When South African bishop Desmond Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his anti-apartheid activism, Linda West Olds of Delaware turned to her 10-year-old son Kevin and asked: “Do you know what segregation is?”
He did not.
Perplexed, Olds probed further. Did he know who Ralph Bunche was? What about Andrew Young? Kevin drew blanks. He barely knew much about Martin Luther King Jr. As Olds later recalled, her son responded, “Well, he must be a great man, or we […]

Continue Reading about The Phenomenon of Rise ‘N Fly: A Black History Board Game Published on:
August 28, 2026

By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
“On your mark…get set…GOOOOO!”
On October 6, 1986, Marc Summers uttered those words to kick off Nickelodeon’s Double Dare… and changed the face of television. Nickelodeon had survived a mostly unremarkable seven years on the air, originally launching an educational channel for children. The surprise success of a Canadian show, You Can’t Do That on Television, led to a philosophical shift in the early 1980s and the channel began […]

Continue Reading about Double Dare You: Iconic Show Celebrates 40 Years Published on:
August 27, 2026

We all have our preferences, presuppositions, and favorites; the subjects, outlooks, and topics that we gravitate to again and again. That’s why I love randomness. It’s a tool I use frequently to challenge my own inherent biases in my work here at The Strong. I know that if I just follow my interests, my work will too often flow in the same channels. So sometimes I use a random number generator to call up a random artifact from our collection […]

Continue Reading about Pokémon + Stickers = Fun Published on:
August 18, 2026

By: Hana Hanifah, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
In recent years, the momentum for accessibility in games has gained significant traction. Many custom configurations, such as captions, remappable controls, and adaptable hardware, are becoming the norm as more people, especially those with disabilities, play and engage in games. The Xbox Adaptive Controller and the PS5’s Access Controller have been rightly praised and documented in the mainstream media (e.g., Forbes, Wired,Time). However, decades before they emerged, Nintendo of America released its own adaptive […]

Continue Reading about Nintendo’s 1989 Handsfree Controller: A Corporate Chapter in a Longer Accessibility Story Published on:
August 18, 2026

A few years ago, while chatting with a visiting research fellow in the Brian Sutton-Smith Library & Archives of Play at The Strong, they posed an interesting question, “So, what is your area of expertise? Video games, toys, something else?” I wasn’t quite sure how to answer this. Some large libraries and archives have subject librarians who focus on individual areas such as mathematics, natural sciences, or humanities. However, at The Strong, our collections encompass all of these areas and […]

Continue Reading about An Archivist’s “Ephemeral Expertise” Published on:
August 7, 2026