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In the 2006 New York Times article “The Cute Factor,” Natalie Angier investigated how cuteness affects society. She wrote “scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute.” Cute cues include roundness, floppy limbs, a side-to-side gait, vulnerability, and need, among others. After reading Angier’s article, I realized cute factors affect my game selections.
Sackboy from Geek Crafts

Mark Healey and Dave Smith’s Little Big Planet […]

Continue Reading about Video Games and the Cute Factor Published on:
September 29, 2010

Recently, as I competed in a group online challenge, a player presented me with the following puzzle:
Blank Picross Puzzle
 

I had no concept or instructions of how the puzzle worked, so I turned to my husband and asked if he had any idea. He exclaimed, “It’s Picross!”
Picross, short for picture crossword, is a Japanese logic puzzle game known also as a griddler or nonogram. Each puzzle contains a hidden picture revealed only after the player fills in squares based on […]

Continue Reading about Paper to Video: A Puzzling Game Published on:
September 17, 2010

Following the blog I wrote recently on video game preservation in Europe, readers sent me emails about a couple of other museums there. One is at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, which currently has a temporary exhibit on the history of video games. The other is the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games in Moscow. Let us know about your experiences with these or any other video game museums.

Continue Reading about More Video Game Museums in Europe Published on:
September 16, 2010

Part of a recent conversation with a friend focused on his concerns about which video games his daughter is currently interested in. Are these the right games at her age? Do they contain violent material that isn’t implied by the title? Will she be able to get online through the game console and chat with people she doesn’t know? As both a curator and a parent of young children, I share his concerns and have given them a great deal […]

Continue Reading about Age-Appropriate Play Published on:
September 3, 2010

Veteran game designer Don Daglow recently gave the International Center for the History of Electronic Games a collection of design documents, early drafts of code, play test reports, and other papers that document the development of his games, including Neverwinter Nights (1991), one of the most important games in the history of the industry.
Daglow’s team had to overcome numerous technical hurdles to produce the game. Dial-up modems operated at speeds one-hundredth or one-thousandth of the rates of modems today. Game instructions […]

Continue Reading about Creating MMORPGs: The Neverwinter Nights Story Published on:
August 30, 2010

Space Invaders. Tetris. Mario Brothers. Sonic the Hedgehog. Final Fantasy VII. Halo.
Whether you’ve played these games or not, you recognize them as some of the most influential titles ever released. They are killer applications—the type that lead  gamers to shell out big bucks for a brand new system just for the opportunity to play one game. A killer app can provide stability to a fledging game publisher for years or cause a new video game console to excel.
Space Invaders proved […]

Continue Reading about Killer Video Game Apps Published on:
August 20, 2010

As legendary game designers David Crane, Steven Cartright, and Garry Kitchen spoke at the recent Classic Gaming Expo, I couldn’t help but reminisce about some of my favorite Activision titles from the early 80s. As the first third-party developer in the video game industry, Activision released fascinating titles, such as Barnstorming, Keystone Kapers, and Kaboom!, for the Atari VCS. Crane’s classic platformer Pitfall! came to dominate my play experiences—both on the screen and off.

Pitfall image from GameFAQs

Our building efforts began […]

Continue Reading about Taking Video Games Outdoors Published on:
August 13, 2010

As a curator, I’m enthusiastic about every item I acquire for the museum’s collections, but certain acquisitions are definitely more newsworthy than others. I recently had the chance to appear on regional cable TV news, talking about the museum’s latest Monopoly set. The story involves Strong’s acquisition of this historic version of Monopoly—older even than the “tie-box Monopoly” the museum owns from 1933. The Heap Folk Art Monopoly, as it’s known, predates Monopoly “inventor” Charles Darrow’s published version by some […]

Continue Reading about The Story behind Strong’s Folk Art Monopoly Game Published on:
August 13, 2010

Recently, a couple of things have prompted me to think more about the history of video games in Europe. First, I’ve been reading Tristan Donovan’s excellent new book: Replay: The History of Video Games. One of the key contributions of the book is its attention to the often neglected history of European gaming, such as the importance of the Sinclair Spectrum for game development in Great Britain. Second, we at ICHEG have been in touch with a number of groups […]

Continue Reading about Saving Video Games in Europe Published on:
July 30, 2010