Research Fellow Archive

“Hey, you! Greenhorn. Come on out and play like a man!” challenged the dozen cowboys staring me down from an ad in an issue of Electronic Games magazine. This rhetoric surprised me in 2023, but I imagine it would have been even more jarring for readers in 1981 when the ad for Activision’s Stampede first appeared. “Play like a man!” seemed unusual, because playfulness is so rarely connected to conventional forms of American masculinity as a key trait. Yet here […]

Continue Reading about “Play Like a Man!”: How Atari Gave Adults Permission to Play Published on:
April 28, 2023

Video games have become increasingly popular over the last few years. In fact, a recent survey suggests that approximately 2/3rds of American adults partake in the pursuit. But even with this emerging success, gaming continues to be dogged by decades-old accusations. Many of the medium’s most ardent critics argue that games offer only vacuous experiences. Lying beyond the pixels, polygons, and interactive scenes is just empty entertainment. Or, even worse, they argue that games are only a vehicle for mindless […]

Continue Reading about “Serious” Fun: Social, Moral, and Political Content in Video Games Published on:
October 4, 2019

By Gleb Albert, 2018 Strong Research Fellow
In September 2018, I had the chance to go to Rochester and work at The Strong, thanks to its generous research fellowship program.  My postdoctoral research project deals with the history of computer games piracy in the 1980s and early 1990s as a subculture phenomenon. I look at the so-called “crackers”—amateur computer users who removed copy protection routines from games and circulated the modified versions to gain fame and beat the competition—their […]

Continue Reading about Piracy and the Computer Games Industry Published on:
September 23, 2019

Just after Thanksgiving of 2018, I had the opportunity to spend two weeks at The Strong museum on a Valentine-Cosman fellowship. I wanted to know how board games mirror our understanding of ourselves, and how that understanding has changed over the last half-century or so.
I arrived on a chilly morning in Rochester to what the newscasters were calling “nuisance snow”—just enough to make driving annoying but not enough to shut anything down for these hardy Upstate New York folks—and was […]

Continue Reading about Out of the Kitchen: Board Games and Our Complicated Identities Published on:
September 13, 2019

In March 2019, we spent two days at The Strong conducting research related to Intellivision, a home video game system produced by Mattel Electronics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We have beenworking on this project off and on for almost five years and expect it to lead to a book tentatively titled Intelligent Visions. As our research progressed, it became increasingly apparent that we needed archival materials to round out our analysis of Intellivision and its significance. We […]

Continue Reading about Intellivision in the Archive Published on:
July 31, 2019

In May I had the good fortune to spend two weeks as a research fellow at the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, which sits atop the too-tempting playground of The Strong National Museum of Play. My objective: to capture, using only my iPhone, every last page of Chris Kohler’s collection of 300+ fanzines. Note to future fellows: a two-minute stretch routine will help prevent back pain!
Now an editor at Kotaku and formerly of Wired, a teenage Kohler got […]

Continue Reading about Paper, Please: What I’ve Learned (So Far) from Three Decades of Video Game Fanzines Published on:
June 28, 2019

A short time ago, in an archive a few states away, I had the pleasure of exploring the far reaches of space—as represented in video games. I am working on a dissertation project examining the role of outer space in the history of the American video game industry. This has meant a lot of rewarding hours spent poring over design documents, reading internal memos, hazarding the tunnels to the fabled City of Myster  y in Vanguard, and smashing millions of […]

Continue Reading about Space to Play: A Cosmic History of Video Games Published on:
May 24, 2019

Both playing and playing with language are naturally occurring, entertaining activities for children. Regardless of the context, children’s play abilities and language abilities seem to develop together, with each enhancing the development of the other. So, whether engaged in pretend scenarios or interacting with some of the many toys designed to facilitate play with words and print, children at play are gaining an understanding of all elements of language (semantic, syntactic, phonetic, morphological, and pragmatic) that will assist them in […]

Continue Reading about Play and Language: A Reciprocal Relationship Published on:
May 10, 2019

There are very few global “cartographic events” in human history—feats of transportation that require the immediate making and dispersal of new maps. Columbus’s arrival in the New World was one. The moon landing was another. To this short list we might add Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic crossing. In 1927, he became the first to fly alone from the continental United States to continental Europe (New York–Paris).

Lindbergh’s various flight exploits are often and understandably overshadowed by his future dabbling with fascism and […]

Continue Reading about Transatlantic Play Published on:
April 18, 2019