Frequently my two-year-old daughter Sidney greets me with two words: “chase, Daddy.” It’s a request that usually leads to lots of laughter and me circling around tables and chairs as I chase her throughout our house. In psychologist Peter Gray’s book Free to Learn, he notes that young mammals of nearly all species play chase games.
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Study or Visit Space with this Video Game Series
Physicists and astronomers tend to maintain two schools of thoughts on space exploration. The first school focuses on cost management and quick results and concludes that robotic, unmanned missions prove the best approach to space exploration. The second school advocates for humans to travel to space. “It’s our prerogative as an intelligent species, our cosmic mandate, children love it, and love science for it,” physicists and astronomer Marcelo Gleiser pronounced in a NPR article. Yet few individuals meet the requirements […]
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Hunting for Easter Eggs
I recently read Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One. The story captivated me and likely appeals to other gaming fans, especially those who—like me—happen to love 1980s pop-culture. Although the book takes place in the future, the plot encouraged me to think more about games from the past.
In Ready Player One, America becomes a wasteland. To escape the onset of depression, the vast majority of citizens flee into Oasis, a virtual video game world. When the creator (James Halliday) of […]
Preserving John Romero’s First Computer at ICHEG
ICHEG collects a vast array of materials. Sometimes they come in groups of thousands, like the archives of the Atari Coin-Op divisions we acquired, and sometimes they come in ones and twos, like John Romero’s first Apple II+ computer and design notebook that he donated. John recently joined us in installing these items in The Strong’s eGameRevolution exhibit.
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Inside the Atari Coin-Op Divisions Collection: What’s in an Ad?
Recently The Strong acquired a colossal collection of materials related to Atari’s coin-operated video game and pinball divisions.
The task of processing and preserving such a collection is multi-faceted, and in the coming months, The Strong’s curators, conservators, catalogers, and archivist will continue to evaluate, stabilize, conserve, and archive the collection. When archivist Julia Rossi and I inventoried a portion the collection, I was struck by the Atari coin-op game advertising mock-ups and proofs—materials used to draft, edit, and demonstrate how […]
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Difficulty in Video Gaming
Some video games make us want to throw our controllers against the wall and swear never to play again. But somehow we always seem to find ourselves plopped back on the couch, controller clutched tightly in our hands, determined that this time will be different.
Frustration and challenge are part of the appeal of a good game and that fits with much of what we know about what makes good play. More than 50 years ago, Benjamin Spock (the pediatrician, not […]
The Oldest-Known Computer Baseball Simulation
Statistics sit at the heart of baseball. A hitter’s batting average predicts his success at the plate, a pitcher’s Earned Run Average measures his overall effectiveness, and a fielder’s rate of errors correlates strongly with his likelihood of making a play. Since computers prove effective tools for measuring probabilities and statistics, it is not surprising that some of the earliest applications of computers for game play involved baseball simulation. John Burgeson has donated the oldest-known computer baseball simulation, a game […]
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Explore Your Reading List with These Video Games
My reading list seems to grow longer each year. It seems impossible to read all of the intriguing titles available; the Library of Congress alone has approximately 838 miles of bookshelves.
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A Case for Slow Play in Video Games
When I give guests a tour through The Strong, I always plan to spend a few extra minutes in the museum’s Dancing Wings Butterfly Garden where approximately 800 butterflies fly around. I’ve noticed that if you move quickly through the space you miss many butterflies that are resting or feeding. But when you stay still, your perception sharpens and you notice more butterflies and moths perched on leaves, on branches, or on fruit. In general, the principle holds true that […]