What is your game? There seem to be an infinite number of games to play with one simple deck of playing cards. What game did you learn, perched on your parents’ or grandparents’ knees? What game brings you feelings of home and belonging?
My family’s game was Rummy. After we had mastered Go Fish, we were armed with egg carton card holders (30 years before the collective creativity of Pinterest) and introduced to the game, “according to Hoyle.” My sister and […]
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A Family of Meticulous Puzzle Cutters: Fiss Puzzles at The Strong
Today gamers often seem immersed in their favorite games. But serious, focused gaming is nothing new. Just after the turn of the 20th century, many Americans concentrated and deliberated in a similar manner trying to assemble the latest plaything for adults and families—jigsaw puzzles.
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Screen-Play: Games Only Fictional Characters Could Invent
Pendulous grey clouds loom ominously to the west. Today is not an outdoor day. Salvation is in the closet, where colorful boxes of boards, cards, and tokens beckon us into other worlds. Games pass the time, make us laugh, and strengthen bonds among loved ones. The Strong is proud to preserve the history of games and inventors. As I tend to do, I turn to television and find characters having a grand old time creating their own games, too. I […]
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Screen-Play: Video Game Mania on Television
“Finish him!” “Save the princess!” “Time is running out!” Video game designers excel at creating high-stakes environments. And television has earned some laughs depicting the obsessive players who heed these calls to action. Here are some of the memorable ways television shows have turned video games into life-or-death situations.
Seinfeld: “The Frogger”
George holds the high score on the video arcade machine at a pizzeria that’s going out of business. “I’m never gonna have a child,” he tells Kramer. “If I lose […]
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Play: The Cure for the Seven-Year-Old Blues
“I’m running away to Australia!” This tearful statement greeted me as I entered my son’s room. He pointed to his duffel bag, packed with everything a seven-year-old boy needs to survive the wilds of the outback: his WWE wrestling figures and his well-worn Don’t Know Much About Space book. Clearly, John Cena and Pluto are higher priorities than clean underwear.
“Why are you running away, Jack?” Out came a jumble of pent-up frustrations about being horrible at football, having to clean […]
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The Perils of Rosella and the Genius of Roberta
My family was cutting-edge back in the 1980s. We had a TRS-80. My father subscribed to 80 Micro. He dabbled in BASIC programming. My parents and my sister played early adventure games such as Zork and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We were the most technologically advanced family on the block.
I was not impressed.
I hated computer games. I could not understand the appeal of sitting for hours, huddled over a glorified television screen with a tape player attached to […]
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Screen-Play: Walking a Mile in Magic Boots
In my last post, I examined television’s stereotypical un-cool Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) player who doesn’t conform to mainstream standards of attractiveness or sociability and fits more comfortably within the fantasy world of role-playing games (RPGs). But “dork” is not a four-letter word as far as these characters are concerned. In fact, television programs offer audiences deeper experiences with D&D players than some viewers might allow themselves in real life. The shows create nuanced, three-dimensional, universally sympathetic characters who earn redemption […]
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Screen-Play: Too Cool for Ghouls? Dungeons & Dragons and Television Misfits
Why does television portray Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) as un-cool by putting it in the hands of nerds? Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, the iconic game grew out of the war-themed, strategy-heavy board games introduced in the 1950s by Avalon Hill, as well as from the miniature war games hobbyists enacted with figurines and battlefields crafted to scale. The Strong owns several copies of the original “white box” edition of D&D, created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, which implemented […]
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Screen-Play: NBC’s Community and the National Toy Hall of Fame
Community is one of the most playful shows on television. The comedy about a study group at dysfunctional Greendale Community College not only features unconventional storytelling methods and an innovative visual style, but its characters actually play—all the time. And either its writers have been looking to The Strong for episode ideas, or the toys and games featured on the show are simply as iconic as our experts say they are. In honor of the show’s fifth-season premiere on January […]
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