What would game shows be without contestants? We watch them, cheer for them, and sometimes even compete with them. But we seldom know much about them. I recently had the opportunity to learn about one remarkable game show contestant.
Now Let’s Meet Our Contestant
Born in the early 1940s, Candy Lee demonstrated an aptitude for performance at a young age. With her mother, Vilma Laska, as her promoter, she won her first beauty contest at age three and was singing for a […]
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Designing for Productive Failure: What Play Materials Reveal about How Children Persist
By: Joshita Manohar, 2026 Strong Research Fellow
A child picks up a puzzle piece, turns it once, then twice, and presses it into place. It does not fit. They pause. Try again. This time, they push a little harder, then pull it back out. For a moment, nothing happens. The piece stays where it is, slightly misaligned, waiting. On a tablet, the same moment might unfold differently. The piece snaps into place or it refuses to move at all.
These small differences […]
Tabletop Role-playing Games as Identity Creation Tools
By: Johnathen Rockwell, 2026 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
For more than 50 years, players young and old have experienced tabletop role-playing games: rolling dice, eating snacks, and creating stories. Despite their longevity and contemporary boom in popularity, tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) possess little associated scholarship, especially scholarship that addresses their unique culture and material legacies. By examining the interplay and correspondence between players and designers, and the game systems themselves, my work asks the question: Do tabletop role-playing games serve as a […]
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The Small World of Miniature Books
Recently while working on reorganizing some of the Brian Sutton-Smith’s Library and Archives collection, I began looking through our collection of miniature books. It was while going through these boxes and checking our library catalog to record them that I couldn’t help but ask some questions. Why were these made? Why would anyone wish to have a 40-volume set of Shakespeare’s works in a miniature format that is nearly unreadable? How did they make these books so tiny in the […]
Would You Like a Toy with That?
What’s the Big Deal About Fast Food Toys?
As an oldest child with a busy lifestyle, a calendar full of homework, dance classes, theatre rehearsals, voice lessons, Girl Scouts, choir, and sometimes Model UN or Math League, convenience and time efficiency were key in my childhood. My 25-minute commute to dance made me a frequent flyer at the McDonald’s that allowed me sufficient time to finish my food before we reached the studio. My meal of choice never wavered: a hamburger […]
Exploring Japanese Games and their Paratexts
By: Zari Smith, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
During the summer of 2025, I had the opportunity to visit The Strong National Museum of Play for a research fellowship. For two weeks, I had access to the collections and the rich archives that the museum owns in addition to the museum exhibits available for the general public.
I decided to apply for a fellowship from The Strong in order to find source materials that could assist me in writing my master’s thesis. My […]
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Problems with Plastic Toys
By: Alexander Parry, 2025 Strong Research Fellow
In December 2021, TIME journalist Emily Barone published an editorial about the conflict between her and her children over plastic toys. Barone explained her misgivings about the sea of “eco-terrible plastic junk” available to kids and wondered how to reconcile her environmentalism with the shelf appeal of colorful, heavily-advertised, and often battery-powered toys. These cheap and flimsy items, Barone observed, were nearly impossible to recycle, contributing to air and water pollution and to the […]
Committed To Memory: The Glynn Family Scrapbook, Part 2
When we last left off, I was twenty pages deep into the expansive Glynn family scrapbook. During my brief pause, my curiosity about the family and their memories grew. I turned to The Strong’s online archive—formally known as the Brian Sutton-Smith Library & Archives of Play—to bolster my previous “investigation.”
Through my research, I learned that, despite my initial assumptions, Maxine and Alfred were a childless couple. According to the National Library of Medicine, a third of couples during the 1930s […]
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Stacks & Steps: Growing with Interns, One Box at a Time
Being an Archivist is literally my dream job but one thing I did not expect was how satisfying it is to work with interns. You get to watch as they build confidence day by day in the decisions they make, hear them laugh as they find something unexpected or funny, listen to the yawns while they’re slogging through the “boring” tasks (removing staples from hundreds of pages can get repetitive), and best of all, see that spark ignite into “YES! […]
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