I’ve got my Halloween candy ready for the trick-or-treaters and a plan for how I’m going to decorate my front door with construction paper bats, but it was still a bit of a surprise to arrive at the museum this morning and find half my colleagues dressed (tastefully, of course) for Halloween. I should have expected it—Halloween’s become a big deal for people of all ages.
When I was growing up, an unspoken rule said that you were supposed to drop […]
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Get Your Goo
Here’s a neat opportunity you might want to seize from 2D Boy Games.
Their World of Goo is a unique and quirky physics-based puzzle game that won both the Design Innovation Award and the Technical Excellence Award at the Independent Games Festival in 2008.
World of Goo’s success demonstrates not only the rise in popularity of independently-developed games, but also the emphasis on physics in several recent puzzle games. World of Goo is included in a survey of casual games guests can play […]
Did You Get Your Goo?
Now that the special is over, I am curious to see what you paid for World of Goo. Do you think the game is a worthy investment?
POW! – The Original Online Game?
Howdy Buckaroos!
If my greeting strikes a familiar chord with you then it is likely that:
1. You’re a native Rochestarian;
2. You’re my age, give or take a few years.
If you’re still clueless, let me help you out.
Ranger Bob
“Howdy Buckaroos!” was the catch phrase of Ranger Bob, host of the appropriately titled, Ranger Bob’s Buckaroo Club. The show aired on WUHF 31 in the late 1970s and early `80s. This was before cable television (Ranger Bob only had a clear picture […]
Play it Again, Sam
Recently my wife and I heard Michael Feinstein in concert. Feinstein has earned fame not only as a pianist and singer of popular songs from Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood, but also as a dedicated researcher into the history of popular song in America. His knowledge was on full display during the concert, when he would often pause between songs and recount the back story of the next number. He explained, for example, why the movie Casablanca featured the […]
Showing Our Stuff
You might not think of museum curators as showoffs, but we are. Personally, I love speaking in public and appearing on TV. However, the type of showing off that curators like best is the kind that involves sharing our collections with the world. Sometimes we show off our collections in museum exhibits or at educational events, but neither can display the thousands of great collection objects we want to share.
So I’m extremely excited to announce that the museum’s collections can […]
Creating an Ideal Community
The games I love to play as an adult—strategy games such as Age of Empires: The Asian Dynasties and Sid Meier’s Civilization IV—are clearly influenced by my childhood favorites, perhaps most significantly Utopia for Mattel Intellivision. If you’re not familiar with this groundbreaking simulation game, I suggest you check it out.
Will Wright revolutionized the game industry, yet nearly a decade before his city-building classic SimCity launched, legendary game designer Don Daglow produced Utopia, the industry’s first construction and management simulation […]
Comic Book Heroes and the Battle of Good vs. Evil
Joseph Campbell, the scholar of comparative myth whose work inspired the Star Wars saga, reminded us that every archetypal hero of fable and fiction is drawn into an adventure, enlists the support of trusted comrades, passes alone beyond a threshold of ordinary endurance, survives the crucial ordeal, and then remerges steeled and restored. Whether his name is Gilgamesh, Quetzalcoatl, Hercules, Odysseus, Orpheus, Beowulf, or Luke Skywalker, every typical hero of myth endures the arduous tests that give him moral substance, […]
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You Say It’s Your Birthday
My mother just celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday. Her kids came home to Clinton, NY, from California and Colorado, from Ohio and Rochester, of course. Her grandchildren showed up, and so did three of her great-grandchildren. Friends and family, nieces and nephews, cousins and colleagues all gathered at Mom’s favorite restaurant for a dinner and birthday party. Mom got cards and good wishes, a few presents, a cake with candles, and, of course, a crown to announce her status as the […]