By Dovi Kutoff, Guest Blogger
As CEO of OrangeOnions, I’ve built my career as part of a team designing toys that bring comfort, creativity, and connection across generations. But long before patents, plush characters, and partnerships, it all began with one beloved object: My blankie.
For nearly 50 years, my blankie traveled with me—from childhood bedrooms to red-eye flights, through family milestones and global meetings. It wasn’t just my comfort—it was my cape, my tent, my magic carpet. And recently, I made […]
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Next Game Show Creators
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
It’s back-to-school time, so this is a reminder to the parents and guardians out there to make sure your students are all stocked up on class supplies—pencils, notebooks, folders, buzzers, and bells. Wait, buzzers and bells?
That’s right. Game shows have gone back to school. In 2024, National Archives of Game Show History co-founder Bob Boden and longtime Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! executive producer Harry Friedman established a curriculum […]
From Girl Talk to Girl Games: The Analog History of Games for Girls
Opening the 1989 Sears Christmas catalog and perusing the fifteen-odd pages of video game advertisements, filled with pictures of boys and accented with blue, reveals what many women have felt for decades: games just aren’t made for us. Until the 1990s, video games were almost exclusively marketed to boys and men. Women, of course, can and did still play video games; but playing them meant wading through a swamp of sexist portrayals, if we were even lucky enough to encounter […]
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Researching Collectible Card Game History at The Strong
In May 2025, I had the pleasure of spending two weeks at The Strong Museum as a Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow to conduct research on the collectible card game (CCG) genre. While the field of Games Studies has grown significantly in the last decade, locating texts, artifacts, and archival materials focused on games and play in most institutional libraries and archives is difficult. Given my own research focus is understudied, even within the field, the problem was compounded for me.
For those […]
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Apple II Powered Game Show
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
After its founding on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer Company had one of the fastest rises ever for an upstart company. Their first computer was named, simply, Apple I, but in June 1977, the company changed the world with the Apple II. With an external shell for containing the components, a built-in keyboard, game paddles, cassettes for saving data, and glorious full-color graphics, the Apple II was credited […]
How Play Is Preserved
How do you use objects to capture and preserve a concept as abstract as play? For although play stands as a universal phenomenon, it is also a deeply subjective experience, which can look and feel completely different depending on the time, place and people engaging in it. How can anyone, much less an entire museum, adequately convey such a personal and imaginative experience through artifacts in a way that does play justice? In my time as an intern with The […]
Pee-Wee Herman…the Game Show Star?
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
The two-part documentary Pee-Wee as Himself, now available for streaming on HBO Max, chronicles actor Paul Reubens’ unexpected rise to fame as the character Pee-Wee Herman. As the documentary explains, game shows had a small role in the rise of Reubens and his bizarre alter ego.
Reubens’ earliest shots at the big time came from The Gong Show. He and actress Charlotte McGinnis appeared on the daytime show as […]
Chasing Brian Sutton-Smith and Gregory Bateson: Retracing Metaplay
I had the amazing opportunity through a G. Rollie Adams Research Fellowship to visit The Strong National Museum of Play in order to conduct research for my project on metaplay.
The purpose of this fellowship was to build on my dissertation research, specifically delving further into the theory of metaplay. In my review of the literature, metaplay was poorly defined and inconsistent in its (under)utilization in scholarship since eminent anthropologist Gregory Bateson loosely introduced the idea in a conference paper in […]
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Relational Play
Contemporary travel is a special kind of pandemonium, an admixture of excitement, fear, consumerism, and intense security measures. It can be a rather playful experience too, particularly in the U.S. The stops that took me from Pullman, Washington, where currently I live and work, to The Strong National Museum of Play are a case in point. First it was Pullman to Spokane, then it was Spokane to Las Vegas, where I transferred to a flight to Rochester, New York. To […]