Often written off as charming novelties of childhood, paper dolls can serve as powerful indicators of the drastic sociopolitical changes occurring in the early 20th century. Like many toys, they reflect the cultural values of their creators and their consumers, providing insight into the lives of women and children during a tumultuous political era. During my time at The Strong National Museum of Play, I was able to examine a wide variety of paper dolls created between 1900 and 1940 […]
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Jerry Lawson, Video Soft, and the History of the First Black-Owned Video Game Development Company
By 1980, Jerry Lawson was ready for a change. The 40-year-old electrical engineer had spent most of the 1970s working for Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation in Silicon Valley. In 1976, he led a team of talented engineers who took an Alpex Computer Corporation prototype and developed it into the Fairchild Channel F, the first home video game console to use interchangeable game cartridges. Although revolutionary in concept, the Channel F was quickly eclipsed by another cartridge-based console […]
Little People, Big Hopes: Exploring a Potential Play Intervention for Early Childhood Autism
Krystal Starke
2021 G. Rollie Adams Research Fellow
PhD Student at The State University of New York at Buffalo
I came to The Strong with an open-ended mission: to soak up everything I could surrounding my research interests in early childhood autism and play as part of my dissertation research. Fortunately, The Strong’s Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play is filled with rich secondary materials that provided a lens to understand the primary sources within the museum’s collections in a new way.
I […]
The Play of Fortune
Is our destiny in our hands, in God’s hands, or are we merely tossed on the winds of chance?
Those deep questions of causality and chance have long preoccupied philosophers and thinkers, and I was reminded of them a while ago when reading a book about 17th-century Puritan belief. This followed a conversation I had with a researcher at The Strong who was interested in the links between popular understandings of quantum mechanics and thinking about play. “God doesn’t play dice,” […]
Hunting for Treasure
Who doesn’t love a good treasure hunt?
Whether we’re children or adults, there’s something irresistible about following a trail of clues (a map makes it easier and more fun) to some hidden cache that promises untold riches. Most often treasure hunts live only in the world of fiction—Treasure Island with its memorable characters Long John Silver, Jim Hawkins, Billy Bones, and Captain Flint—set the mold that has been imitated by countless books and movies such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, […]
The Coin-op Industry Legacy of ICE President Ralph Coppola
Have you ever played hockey with miniature stick-wielding players and a thumbnail-sized puck on a three-foot table covered by a plastic dome? If so, you have probably played Innovative Concepts in Entertainment’s (ICE) Chexx (or later Super Chexx) “bubble hockey” arcade games. First released in 1982, the iconic game is, in part, the work of Ralph Coppola (1948–2018), who, along with business partner Jack Willert refined David M. Barcelou’s initial invention and brought it to market. Over the course of […]
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Playing with Words and Images: Animals with Human Characteristics in Children’s Literature
Eva Nwokah, 2019 G. Rollie Adams Research Fellow
Professor, Our Lady of the Lake University, San Antonio, Texas
My current research is focused on how animals in children’s literature are portrayed with human characteristics through what they wear and what they say—in other words, animals that are anthropomorphized. Why do children find that animals speak and behave like humans appealing? This playful aspect of stories encourages children’s imagination, holds their attention with silly images, and has been used by authors […]
My Week with Brian: A Conversation with the Collected Works of Brian Sutton-Smith
Alec S. Hurley, 2018 Strong Research Fellow
PhD Student, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
Despite growing up in Rochester and routinely passing The Strong museum en route to the family business on Oregon Street, I failed to take advantage of the museum’s wonderful exhibits and its abundant collections until late June of 2018. Then, over the course of five days leading up to the July 4th holiday, I was fortunate enough to take a break from my doctoral […]
I Hope This Blog Bores You
“Only boring people get bored.”
This was my mother’s retort every time I told her I was bored. Like, so bored. Like “roll your eyes and sigh and flop down on your bed in exasperation” bored. When toys, TV, and friends fail you, it feels like the end of the world. Most of us have not experienced that uncomfortable feeling of boredom in our adult lives very often. There has always been something to do, something new to see (even if […]