Ralph Baer is perhaps best known as the father of home video games. He patented the idea for playing a video game on a television and then successfully developed the first home video game system, the Magnavox Odyssey, that came out in 1972. And yet Baer’s work on video games was only one small part of a lifetime of inventing. He had worked for decades in the defense industry, ultimately heading a major engineering division of Sanders, a large military […]
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Digging for GEM icons in an Atari ST Floppy Disk
In 2018, The Strong embarked on a project to digitize floppy disks using a device called the Kryoflux to capture the data stored on 3.5- and 5.25-inch floppy disks. Reading a floppy disk in the 21st century was the first step necessary to preserve hundreds of floppy disks in The Strong’s archival collections. In some cases, the Kryoflux was a useful tool to capture old games and development materials but, with more than 1,500 floppy disk images in […]
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Domestic Hobbies: Flattening the Curve from Home
It feels so long ago when I last wrote about domestic hobbies as play. It was indeed a different world—if we told our past selves what our lives look like now, we wouldn’t believe ourselves.
But what was true then is still true today: the calm attained when lost in the flow of an activity like sewing or knitting is a powerful and addictive, and a welcome respite from daily worries. The finished products of our craft are a testimony to […]
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Building a Settlement: German-style Games in North America
January brought the start of a new year and also the start of a new project. I began to inventory and process the Mayfair Games archival materials that were donated to The Strong museum in 2017. In an effort to learn more about the company, I started reading about the board games, card games, and role-playing games it produced. I quickly learned that Settlers of Catan, one of Mayfair Games’ most recognizable titles, not only ranks as an awesome game, […]
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Remembering Educator and Play Advocate Vivian Gussin Paley, 1929–2019
Vivian Gussin Paley, the teacher, author, and advocate for the importance of play for young children, died on July 26, 2019. She was a charter member of the editorial advisory board of the American Journal of Play and The Strong’s Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play cares for a collection of her personal papers. Her pioneering technique of storytelling and story acting in the early childhood classroom earned her a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1989 and influenced […]
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Clones in the Archives: Console and Software Cloning Practices in the Early Years of Video Games
Ian Larson, 2019 Strong Research Fellow
PhD Student, University of California, Irvine; Irvine, California
Any new popular device is bound to have its share of imitators and copycats. This certainly was the case in 1972 after Ralph H. Baer and Magnavox released the first-ever home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey. While Baer’s Odyssey failed to spark a revolution, one of its many games, Table Tennis, would become the inspiration for the game that did: Nolan Bushnell and Atari’s PONG, the first […]
Masculine Discourse, Role Playing Games, & Help Seeking—Taming Dragon Magazine
Steven Dashiell, 2019 Mary Valentine-Andrew Cosman Research Fellow
PhD candidate, University of Maryland Baltimore County
My dissertation concerns the discourses of male student veterans, examining their discourses concerning their perceptions of marginalization on campus. However, I have always had an interest in research surrounding gaming, specifically the newer games of strategy that fall into the categories of role-playing games (RPGs) and collectible card games. I am fascinated by how players interact and interface with each other while they are engaged in the […]
Armchair Generals Past, Present, and Future: A Short History of Wargaming
In 2018, The Strong received a donation of thousands of artifacts, including first-edition strategy and simulation games, wargames, and role-playing games from Darwin Bromley, co-founder of Mayfair Games. The artifacts constituted the single largest gift the to the museum’s collection and will help scholars understand the importance and influence of a transitional era in games, charting their effect on the development of contemporary examples and on video games.
Darwin Bromley began playing and collecting games with his brother, Peter, […]
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Playing in the Past
Playing in the Past
Robert Whitaker
2019 G. Rollie Adams Research Fellow
Research Fellow, The Waggonner Center, Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, LA
To study the early history of digital games is to study games with historical settings. Whether the game was designed for educational use like MECC’s The Oregon Trail, or commercial profit like SSI’s Computer Bismarck, history games are an essential part of the early history of digital games as a medium.
For the past six years I’ve been studying the relationship […]