I came to The Strong Museum to study Carmen Sandiego, the shadowy villain who stars in one of the most successful educational game series in video game history, but I left knowing a lot more about the early days of the educational game industry.
I am a Latinx literature scholar and lifelong gamer, whose research has been focused primarily on AfroLatinx literature and culture (my first book came out in June 2024). My research on Miles Morales and the Latino legacy of […]
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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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Pinball at The Strong Museum
Why pinball? This is the question that people repeatedly ask me when I state that my dissertation investigates pinball’s history. When I explain that I am a PhD candidate in NYU’s Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies, people become even more confused. What does pinball have to do with cinema? And is it worthy of a book length treatment? I answer those questions by replying that pinball is one of the most controversial American games, hence my title for my […]
Contact Moments with Japanese Game Magazines at The Strong Museum
On a snowy winter day in January 2024 at The Strong National Museum of Play, I read about the far-off land of Hyrule, inhabited by fiery dragons, rock-monster-people, and evil twin-sister witches. I pored over issues of Weekly Famitsu, the most popular Japanese gaming magazine, looking at their coverage of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. On page 89 of issue no. 507, I see the heading 謎の少年の正体が明らかにされる? (roughly: “Will the identity of the mysterious boy be revealed?”), with […]
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Birth of the Modern Game Show
By Bob Boden, co-founder of the National Archives of Game Show History
On September 4, 1998, ITV network in the United Kingdom premiered a one-hour primetime game show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It featured one contestant, sitting across from host Chris Tarrant, answering up to 15 multiple choice general knowledge questions of increasing values, from £100 to a top prize of £1 million. As long as the player answered questions correctly, they could remain in the “hot […]
Scrabble: A Television Hit?
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
Board games and television don’t seem like they would go together. It would be hard to imagine millions of viewers tuning in regularly to watch people play a game of Risk or Settlers of Cattan. But 40 years ago this month, viewers across the country had a six-year-long daily habit of watching people play Scrabble every day on NBC.
The Scrabble game show originated with Exposure Unlimited, a prize […]
S-T-R-O-N-G: Investigating the History of the Ouija Board at The Strong Museum
The Ouija board as we know it today was patented in Baltimore in the year 1890. Its development and success were closely tied to the rise of the American Spiritualist movement following the Civil War, but the men who patented and popularized the divination tool as a board game were not Spiritualists, but capitalists. At a time when the desire to contact the dead had coalesced into a religious movement, a group of entrepreneurs including Charles Kennard and Elijah Bond […]
Wheel of…Shopping?
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
With host Pat Sajak’s departure from Wheel of Fortune after more than 40 years as host, one can’t help but reflect on the impact that Wheel of Fortune has left on popular culture. The average American knows how the game is played, whether they watch it or not. Our language itself has been influenced by the show. The consistency and simplicity of the game has led to many […]
Design Matters to Play Matters to Design
Design Play
While play foreshadows culture, design shapes culture. Both have the potential to transform society. For the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1949), play amplifies life. Hence play is necessary to individuals as a life function and to societies as a cultural function, by virtue of its meaning, expressive value, and its spiritual and social associations. Conversely, for other scholars such as American design historian Victor Margolin, designs acquire meaning by shaping the social environments (i.e., habits, practices, lifestyles) where they […]
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