Guest Blogger Archive

How do you preserve the history of a community? What even makes up a community? How can you store something so abstract, intimate, and interpersonal in files and text? These are the questions I was asking last summer at The Strong. My goal as an intern at the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) was to curate and archive the history of video game speedrunning—the act of beating video games as rapidly as possible by any means […]

Continue Reading about Saving Speedrunning and Digital Communities Published on:
July 30, 2020

Mary Valentine, The Strong Museum Trustee
Most of us know the connection that Monopoly has to Atlantic City, but for me there’s more to the story than just the board game. Now that June has officially kicked off the summer—and in some ways, it may not be the kind of summer we expected—this might be a good time to share some memories.
We didn’t have Disneyland or Hershey Park or Six Flags when I was growing up in the late ‘50s […]

Continue Reading about Memories of Atlantic City: It’s Not Just Monopoly Published on:
July 1, 2020

Mary Valentine
The Strong Museum Trustee
When I was a kid I loved to play “grocery.” Every Saturday morning, I would hear Mr. Maroni’s old produce truck groan as it came up the hill, turned the corner and slowly limped down my street. I would throw open the screen door on the porch, scamper past the glider, and fly down the steps out front to be there just as the big, uncovered wood-sided truck ground to a stop directly in […]

Continue Reading about A Precursor to Wegmans? Published on:
May 29, 2020

Mary Valentine
The Strong Museum Trustee
 
I’ve had a love of music since I was a kid—singing, dancing, listening, playing while listening. Playing while listening? Absolutely. I’m talking about musical chairs. I first played this game at my August birthday party when I was about eight or nine years old. Since I was born in the summer, the parties were held in our backyard, with my dad cooking up hot dogs and hamburgers on a round grill from Sears, Roebuck & Co, […]

Continue Reading about Musical Chairs Published on:
May 5, 2020

Mary Valentine
The Strong Museum Trustee
 
When I was a kid, Sundays were my favorite day of the week, because my dad was home (he worked Monday through Saturday) and we got to play the card game Michigan.
Growing up in a small town in New York State’s Hudson Valley, we didn’t have a lot of money for toys and games. My brother and I would amuse ourselves with playing dodge ball in front of our house on Lafayette Avenue or […]

Continue Reading about Michigan in New York Published on:
April 14, 2020

Ian Larson, 2019 Strong Research Fellow
PhD Student, University of California, Irvine; Irvine, California
Any new popular device is bound to have its share of imitators and copycats. This certainly was the case in 1972 after Ralph H. Baer and Magnavox released the first-ever home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey. While Baer’s Odyssey failed to spark a revolution, one of its many games, Table Tennis, would become the inspiration for the game that did: Nolan Bushnell and Atari’s PONG, the first […]

Continue Reading about Clones in the Archives: Console and Software Cloning Practices in the Early Years of Video Games Published on:
January 23, 2020

Steven Dashiell, 2019 Mary Valentine-Andrew Cosman Research Fellow
PhD candidate, University of Maryland Baltimore County
 

My dissertation concerns the discourses of male student veterans, examining their discourses concerning their perceptions of marginalization on campus. However, I have always had an interest in research surrounding gaming, specifically the newer games of strategy that fall into the categories of role-playing games (RPGs) and collectible card games. I am fascinated by how players interact and interface with each other while they are engaged in the […]

Continue Reading about Masculine Discourse, Role Playing Games, & Help Seeking—Taming Dragon Magazine Published on:
January 10, 2020

Playing in the Past
Robert Whitaker
2019 G. Rollie Adams Research Fellow
Research Fellow, The Waggonner Center, Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, LA
To study the early history of digital games is to study games with historical settings. Whether the game was designed for educational use like MECC’s The Oregon Trail, or commercial profit like SSI’s Computer Bismarck, history games are an essential part of the early history of digital games as a medium.

For the past six years I’ve been studying the relationship […]

Continue Reading about Playing in the Past Published on:
December 9, 2019

Jana Rosinski
2018 Strong Research Fellow
Syracuse University, NY

I came to The Strong to explore the design of early computer and video games for girls, looking to account for how female designers and games create different play experiences and player representations, along with the spaces, voices, and ways of playing they have made available. I pored over the collections of Dani Bunten Berry (for her conception of the social potential in multiplayer games), Carol Shaw (widely recognized as the first female game […]

Continue Reading about A ROM of One’s Own: Snapshots from the Games-for-Girls Movement Published on:
October 25, 2019