Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at The Strong Archive

When does play become personal? When does a person’s exploration of a dungeon or fantasy world turn into an exploration of themselves? For some, certainly the answer is “never.” The distance between the game world and the real world is enough to bar any introspection. Or perhaps their playstyle simply does not warrant it. Certainly, one would assume this was true for the fantasy tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) in the 1970s when the wargame and simulation aspects of the hobby […]

Continue Reading about Playing with Sex and Gender in Fantasy Tabletop Games Published on:
November 1, 2024

When new collections are added to an archive, they need to be formally processed. Processing an archival collection consists of performing small preservation tasks, like removing staples and paper clips, going through every box and folder to learn about the contents, and describing the collection. This allows us to create a map of the collection for future researchers. As the archivist in The Strong Museum’s Brian Sutton-Smith Archives of Play, I learn something new every day in a lot of […]

Continue Reading about OMG, Becky: Gossip in the Archives Published on:
October 18, 2024

I came to The Strong Museum to study Carmen Sandiego, the shadowy villain who stars in one of the most successful educational game series in video game history, but I left knowing a lot more about the early days of the educational game industry.
I am a Latinx literature scholar and lifelong gamer, whose research has been focused primarily on AfroLatinx literature and culture (my first book came out in June 2024). My research on Miles Morales and the Latino legacy of […]

Continue Reading about Driven by Play: A Reflection on Carmen Sandiego, Freedom!, and Games between 1980 and 2000 Published on:
October 4, 2024

A crack of thunder. The rattling of chains. Roars of monsters in the depths. A song to guide your way. These words stoke our imaginations and illustrate how stories are told via the evocation of sound. When people imagine playing a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) such as Dungeons & Dragons, they envision people in costume rolling dice, moving small, hand-painted figurines, and navigating sprawling maps of the dungeons that are being delved.
In addition to these material components, however, at the […]

Continue Reading about Role-Playing with Sound: A Sonic History of Tabletop Role-Playing Games Published on:
September 23, 2024

As a museum of play, one of the largest segments of The Strong’s collection is toys. Of our more than 300,000 museum objects (not including the additional 235,000 items in our library and archives), approximately 178,000 objects are either toys, games, miniatures, electronic games, or dolls. Play itself is an activity or experience, not an object, so when collecting around play, playthings are often the most directly related physical manifestation of play. That being said, not all play involves a […]

Continue Reading about Preserving Play: Beyond Toys Published on:
June 21, 2024

The Ouija board as we know it today was patented in Baltimore in the year 1890. Its development and success were closely tied to the rise of the American Spiritualist movement following the Civil War, but the men who patented and popularized the divination tool as a board game were not Spiritualists, but capitalists. At a time when the desire to contact the dead had coalesced into a religious movement, a group of entrepreneurs including Charles Kennard and Elijah Bond […]

Continue Reading about S-T-R-O-N-G: Investigating the History of the Ouija Board at The Strong Museum Published on:
June 14, 2024

Design Play
While play foreshadows culture, design shapes culture. Both have the potential to transform society. For the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1949), play amplifies life. Hence play is necessary to individuals as a life function and to societies as a cultural function, by virtue of its meaning, expressive value, and its spiritual and social associations. Conversely, for other scholars such as American design historian Victor Margolin, designs acquire meaning by shaping the social environments (i.e., habits, practices, lifestyles) where they […]

Continue Reading about Design Matters to Play Matters to Design Published on:
April 26, 2024

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, […]

Continue Reading about How to Find Things in The Strong’s Collections Published on:
April 18, 2024

I arrived at The Strong National Museum of Play near the end of January 2024 with nine days to spare to submit a book manuscript and a Research Fellowship lasting just five days. This, then, would not be a luxurious waltz around the vast collection in the archives. It was more a sprint through I had already reconnoitered titles in the hope of verifying previous leads, and tidying up some loose ends in some previously written chapters.
This book is about […]

Continue Reading about Seven Things Learned in Five Days in January Published on:
March 8, 2024