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Happy Aquarium

Recently, I reluctantly signed up for Facebook.  The site’s grown too large for me to ignore it any longer—and Lord knows I have tried.  Part of the reason I joined is because Facebook has become a huge platform for the delivery of games.  Several people I know don’t consider themselves gamers, yet they play Facebook games on a regular basis, mostly to maintain their farms in Zynga’s FarmVille and aquariums in CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium.
These real-time simulation games’ immense popularity […]

Continue Reading about Welcome to Farmville–Please Have Your I.D. Ready Published on:
February 3, 2010

What does Valentine’s Day make you think of? Boxes of chocolates? Bouquets of roses? Pledges of undying love? Sure, those are all part of the most romantic holiday on the calendar. On the other hand, from the 1840s into the early twentieth century, Valentine’s Day was also THE occasion to send insulting and downright nasty cards to your circle of acquaintances.

Somehow those proper Victorians took the tradition of sending sweet, heartfelt Valentine cards and turned it on its head. […]

Continue Reading about Have a Horrid Valentine’s Day Published on:
February 2, 2010

My fellow CHEGhead Marc Check began his last blog talking about some of the great Pac-Man artifacts in the NCHEG collection and how this character evokes in him a sense of early 80’s nostalgia. Like Marc, I too, caught Pac-Man Fever when it struck in epidemic proportion in 1981. My heart still holds a special place for Pac-Man and his family. Yes, family. Such a global phenomenon was bound to inspire spin-offs, and in this case it included a wife […]

Continue Reading about I Have Pac-Man Fever Again Published on:
January 22, 2010

Strong National Museum of Play has many historical artifacts that help to tell the story of play in the wider context of American history. One of my favorite posters in the museum’s collection shows how baseball intersected with American history in the early twentieth century.
Baseball was widely recognized as America’s national sport by the late 1800s, and it continued to grow in popularity in the early twentieth century. Two separate major leagues were in place in 1901, and by 1903 […]

Continue Reading about Batter Up, Uncle Sam! Published on:
January 19, 2010

“You are a daring deep-sea diver holed up on Hardscrabble Island, a dying little seaport all but forgotten….” And so begins Infocom’s 1984 text-based adventure, Cutthroats, about a search for sunken treasure. Gamer Tim Nichols included a copy of Cutthroats in a large lot of computer games he recently donated to NCHEG, and the game exemplifies different types of materials that are extremely useful in our efforts to preserve the history of electronic games.
Cutthroats, like so many Infocom products, features […]

Continue Reading about A Gift of Scuba-Divers, Sunken Treasure, and Secret Ink Published on:
January 14, 2010

Sometimes powerful symbols sustain the longest lasting toys. Lincoln Logs, a favorite for nearly a century, is the best example. We long admired the pioneers for their hard work and ingenuity as they turned the trees of the new world’s forest into simple and sturdy log cabins. The inventor of Lincoln Logs, John Lloyd Wright (son of the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright), designed the toy to resemble the log cabin because he knew how effectively it captured the American […]

Continue Reading about Lincoln Logs: A Name that Fits Published on:
January 7, 2010

Start with a top. It’s simple, cheap, fun, unbreakable, and memorable; its principles, too, serve as the basis for several other toys. Assembled from a sharpened peg with a wheel attached, you spin the top between a thumb and forefinger and then let it go. The spin creates angular momentum that increases the mass of the wheel, or cone in fancier versions. With forces directed outward at a tangent the top balances, magically it seems, on a point. As friction […]

Continue Reading about The Top: Start Here Published on:
January 4, 2010

This is a good question to which people give several answers. The first is historical: “Football evolved from rugby, so footballs are shaped much like rugby balls, though they are a bit pointier.” This answer is exasperating because it invites another question: “So exactly why are rugby balls shaped that way?” Still thinking historically, clever speculators reason that because rugby balls were once made from inflated pig bladders and because pig bladders are shaped, well, you know, like footballs, rugby […]

Continue Reading about Why Is a Football Football-Shaped? Published on:
December 31, 2009

Even though many homes already display bright lights or pine wreaths and most stores are stocked to the gills with Christmas merchandise, some folks can’t quite begin the holiday season until they see the latest Hess toy truck.
Every year since 1964, Hess Corporation, a gasoline and automotive products retailer, has offered a new and different toy truck or vehicle for the holiday season. People of every age admire the trucks for their (mostly) familiar green and white Hess colors, their […]

Continue Reading about The Toy That Starts the Holiday Season Published on:
December 29, 2009