Part of a recent conversation with a friend focused on his concerns about which video games his daughter is currently interested in. Are these the right games at her age? Do they contain violent material that isn’t implied by the title? Will she be able to get online through the game console and chat with people she doesn’t know? As both a curator and a parent of young children, I share his concerns and have given them a great deal […]
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Electronic Yakyuu (Baseball)
Aside from gaming, my other passion is baseball—wherever I can find it and in whatever form. Since my youth I have struggled to fill the void between the final game of the World Series and the return of baseball on opening day each spring. To get through the offseason months I have developed a large number of coping mechanisms, including reading individual player and team histories, replaying great games from past seasons, and taking a yearly winter trip to the […]
Best in Class: Game Boy, Big Wheel, and the Ball
The excitement builds around the museum every autumn as we lead up to the induction of new toys into the National Toy Hall of Fame. This year, people from all over the country sent us hundreds of toy nominations, each one making the case that their favorite toy should earn a place of honor among the forty-one classics already inducted. No coordinated nomination campaigns emerged this year like 2008 when I heard from tens of thousands of Thomas the Tank […]
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Showing Our Stuff
You might not think of museum curators as showoffs, but we are. Personally, I love speaking in public and appearing on TV. However, the type of showing off that curators like best is the kind that involves sharing our collections with the world. Sometimes we show off our collections in museum exhibits or at educational events, but neither can display the thousands of great collection objects we want to share.
So I’m extremely excited to announce that the museum’s collections can […]
Ralph Baer Brings His Brown Box to NCHEG
I was getting crushed. There’s no two ways about it—I was being soundly beaten at Ping-Pong by a man forty-five years my senior. I pride myself on being a good Ping-Pong player, but here he was, demolishing me. Serve, miss, point. Serve, miss, point. He was putting unbelievable English on the ball, and I didn’t stand a chance.
Of course, I was playing the master, the man who invented the game—the electronic version, that is. I was playing with Ralph Baer, […]
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Are You a Gamer?
Recently while visiting a friend, we began talking about Nintendo Wii. She noted that she had not purchased any video games for her six-year-old son yet and wasn’t sure if she wanted to. There was nothing unusual about this-many parents debate about when, or if, to buy video-game systems for their kids. What struck me as I looked around the room, however, was that her son already had a lot of electronic games-on a nearby shelf was a child’s play […]
Old Play=New Play?
Ever since they started appearing in kids’ lives in the 1970s, video games have caused controversy. Many grownups fret that video games keep kids glued to the screen instead of setting up a board game, heading outside to play ball, or engaging in other forms of more traditional play (click here for a great demonstration of this view).It’s true that children are spending more time playing video games. A recent study from the Pew Foundation, for example, documents that both boys […]
The Perfect Holiday Gift
Growing up in the late ’70s and early ’80s, “visions of sugarplums” never danced in my head and my dream of the perfect holiday gift never included a Red Ryder BB gun. What I really wanted to find under the tree was the latest video game. The eagerly anticipated holiday wish books sent by Sears and JCPenney offered page after page of electronic games for my friends and me to consider, and the ones we coveted most were the video games for […]