Games Archive

By: Johnathen Rockwell, 2026 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
For more than 50 years, players young and old have experienced tabletop role-playing games: rolling dice, eating snacks, and creating stories. Despite their longevity and contemporary boom in popularity, tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) possess little associated scholarship, especially scholarship that addresses their unique culture and material legacies. By examining the interplay and correspondence between players and designers, and the game systems themselves, my work asks the question: Do tabletop role-playing games serve as a […]

Continue Reading about Tabletop Role-playing Games as Identity Creation Tools Published on:
June 12, 2026

A museum about play tends to attract employees who love to play, and that leads to office conversations about toys we’ve seen recently, how our new hobbies are going and, of course, what video games we’re playing. Recently, some colleagues and I were chatting about what we would be playing when we got home and I, realizing how I was about to sound, answered Two Point Museum. I could see in their eyes a lack of recognition and dug my […]

Continue Reading about Let’s Play Museum: Museums in Video Games Published on:
May 22, 2026

While licensed titles dominated the Game Boy Advance, some developers looked to create more ambitious titles for Nintendo’s handheld. Gatehouse Games, comprised of former members of Core Design, the studio responsible for Tomb Raider, hoped that “Spiralstone” would be the next big hit. While early prototypes were made, the game would ultimately never hit store shelves. Tom Scutt and Martin Gibbins, two of the three primary developers of the title, shared with me what went wrong, and what the plans […]

Continue Reading about Game Saves: Gatehouse Game’s “Spiralstone” for Game Boy Advance Published on:
May 14, 2026

Last October, I attended my first convention for the Association for Games and Puzzles International, a community of scholars and collectors, at Italy’s World Puzzle Center. Hosts Roxanne and George Miller converted a castle in the small town of Panicale into a museum of more than 100,000 mechanical puzzles. I fell asleep each night in a room filled with puzzles. Cases of them lined the halls I walked through to get to each event. I even saw a bedroom full […]

Continue Reading about Contentedly Confounded at the World Puzzle Center Published on:
May 4, 2026

By: Zari Smith, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
During the summer of 2025, I had the opportunity to visit The Strong National Museum of Play for a research fellowship. For two weeks, I had access to the collections and the rich archives that the museum owns in addition to the museum exhibits available for the general public.
I decided to apply for a fellowship from The Strong in order to find source materials that could assist me in writing my master’s thesis. My […]

Continue Reading about Exploring Japanese Games and their Paratexts Published on:
March 24, 2026

By: Hana Hanifah, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
In recent years, the momentum for accessibility in games has gained significant traction. Many custom configurations, such as captions, remappable controls, and adaptable hardware, are becoming the norm as more people, especially those with disabilities, play and engage in games. The Xbox Adaptive Controller and the PS5’s Access Controller have been rightly praised and documented in the mainstream media. However, several decades before they emerged, there was an innovation that quietly went to the […]

Continue Reading about Nintendo’s Forgotten Accessibility Pioneer: The 1989 Handsfree Controller Published on:
February 5, 2026

The history of coin-operated games often focuses on the stories of big companies, savvy executives, talented game designers, and iconic games. But that is hardly the full story. As my colleague JP Dyson reminds us, where we play matters. That’s one reason why I was so delighted to work with the family of Steve Epstein (1948–2020) to preserve a collection of materials related to his career, including his work to turn The Broadway Arcade in New York City into a […]

Continue Reading about Steve Epstein and The Broadway Arcade Published on:
December 18, 2025

By Justin Schofield, Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow at The Strong National Museum of Play
Growing up, my brother and I played a computer game called Just Grandma and Me, a virtual book that reads to you and allows you to interact with the illustrations. I used to scramble off the bus to boot it up after school, and my brother and I listened to it together countless times.
At the time, I didn’t think of Just Grandma and Me as educational nor did […]

Continue Reading about Family Ties: A Short Story of Brøderbund Published on:
November 25, 2025

By: Yan Liu, Collections and Conservation Intern at The Strong National Museum of Play
What does it feel like to intern with the Collections and Conservation Teams at The Strong Museum? For me, it feels like learning how to nudge a pinball machine. In pinball, nudge refers to the subtle bump you give the table to influence the ball’s movement. Before I ever played on a real machine, nudge, in my hazy childhood memories of 3D Pinball Space Cadet, meant tapping […]

Continue Reading about Just Like a Nudge: My Hands-On Experience Published on:
November 19, 2025