As soon as I saw the dollhouse known as Fantasy House (probably made in France in the mid-20th century), my curiosity was piqued, to say the least. In preparation for The Strong’s fall 2025 exhibit entitled Dollhouses Unveiled, I was able to spend time examining a number of dollhouses from our founder Margaret Strong’s original collection with curator Michelle Parnett-Dwyer. We both couldn’t help but linger on this piece, marveling over the extent of the details inside, which was a […]
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All Work and No Play? Fun in the Workplace
Employees at The Strong are fortunate to work in a place that encourages a fun and playful environment. It’s in our mission statement: “Through play, we encourage learning, nurture creativity, promote discovery, and transform the lives of people of all ages.” This applies not only to our approach to the visitor experience, but also to ourselves as we work.
As a member of the Collections team, I get to test games in the Infinity Arcade exhibit once a month before the […]
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The Same Game, Twice
If you were to replace the original raster monitor on a vintage Pac-Man arcade game with a modern LCD display, would it still be the same game?
That’s the sort of choice we often must consider as we care for the hundreds of coin-operated games in our collection at The Strong, and while the answer is rarely straightforward, the process of thinking it through is instructive as to the larger question of how you preserve a video game, especially arcade games.
A […]
Growing Up with The Strong: Revisiting Childhood Play
By Génia Abbey, 2025 Collections and Conservation Intern
How many people can say they’ve had the opportunity to work somewhere they used to love as a child? This summer, I have been lucky enough to return to a place that holds cherished childhood memories for me, The Strong National Museum of Play. Over the course of my summer internship, I have not only had the chance to discover what happens behind the scenes at a large museum and to learn more […]
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Dollhouses Unveiled: An Exhibit Celebrating Dollhouses and Miniatures
Once adult playthings, dollhouses originally showcased finely crafted furnishings made of exotic materials and served as symbols of wealth. But miniatures fascinated children as much as adults, and toymakers began producing variations of these houses for kids to enjoy. And dollhouses remain a favorite plaything today, as well as an inductee to the National Toy Hall of Fame.
Margaret Woodbury Strong, the museum’s founder, was an avid collector of dollhouses. A ticket from 1958 invited guests to the “First Public Showing […]
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Infinity Arcade Exhibit Explores the History and Impact of Coin-Operated Games
Back in 2010, The Strong opened eGameRevolution, the museum’s first permanent exhibit to focus on the history of video games. For more than a decade, that exhibit informed and delighted millions of museum guests. We recognized early on that the exhibit’s arcade was a hit with guests who loved playing and learning more about coin-operated video games. So, when the museum opened its ESL Digital Worlds: High Score and Level Up exhibits as part of its 90,000-sq. ft. expansion in […]
Teaching Dungeons & Dragons: Continuing the Years of Storytelling
It is always an exciting thing to have your personal hobbies suddenly become relevant to your work. But imagine my shock when I got asked by multiple teams here at The Strong Museum to run Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) games so that my colleagues could get familiar with the game in preparation for working on our Dungeons & Dragons: 50 Years of Storytelling exhibit!
While I have run multiple tabletop role-play games (TTRPG) for friends, I had only recently started dipping […]
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Role-Playing with Sound: A Sonic History of Tabletop Role-Playing Games
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 […]
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Bruce Shelley Papers at The Strong
What does it mean to preserve the history of video games? This is something I thought about a lot when I started this work at The Strong National Museum of Play in 2006. My training in fields such as the history of the book and history of science convinced me that among the materials that needed to be preserved were not just the games themselves but also the work of the creators who made them. To that end we began […]
