It’s not that I play too much, quite the contrary. The Guitar Hero game I’ve had at home since last Christmas is still wrapped in cellophane. I just can’t bring myself to buy the guitar controller required to play the game.
My reluctance is not a reflection of the game, which is by all measures popular, fun, and imaginative. Guitar Hero is more than a game actually. It’s a pop culture and gaming milestone that has opened doors for an […]
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Sesame Street at Forty and Still Counting
It’s hard to believe that Sesame Street is turning forty. But then again, it’s also hard to believe that Sir Michael Philip “Mick” Jagger, another 60’s figure, is old enough to qualify for a British “old age” pension. Sesame Street has aired long enough for its viewers now to include great-grandparents and great grand-children.
Way back before Sesame Street, “educational television” usually meant Sunrise Semester—a six a.m. televised college lecture that was so tiresome that it made you want to crawl […]
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Best in Class: Game Boy, Big Wheel, and the Ball
The excitement builds around the museum every autumn as we lead up to the induction of new toys into the National Toy Hall of Fame. This year, people from all over the country sent us hundreds of toy nominations, each one making the case that their favorite toy should earn a place of honor among the forty-one classics already inducted. No coordinated nomination campaigns emerged this year like 2008 when I heard from tens of thousands of Thomas the Tank […]
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New Interest in Old Text-Based Adventures
“You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.” “There is a small mailbox here.”
These words introduced me to computer games, though I didn’t actually read the words on a computer screen—I read them in stacks of perforated, green-and-white-striped printouts that my older brother, Chris, brought home from school. The stacks of printouts came from an amazing game he and his friends had discovered on the high school’s computer system (a DEC […]
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Thanks TEDx
To everyone who came out to the inaugural TEDx Rochester—and especially to those who stopped by to play an arcade game or two in the lobby of host Geva Theater Center—I would like to send my deepest thanks. It was an honor to be part of this event and to speak about the rich history of electronic games and our current initiatives at NCHEG.
The “I remember when” stories many of you shared between games are a reminder of why we […]
Preserving Memories: Baseball
In my last blog, I reminisced about spending summers with my mom’s parents, which led me to my career preserving cultural artifacts. And while my other grandparents didn’t shape my profession, my summers with them helped lead me to my love for baseball.
The relative isolation of another summer in the country wore on me as I grew older. I was ten now and ready to play organized baseball. Little League beckoned. My dad’s parents, who lived in the village of […]
Remembering the Dark Tower
As I took the field and prepared for battle, a tiny yellow flag with a double-headed eagle marked my kingdom, the Citadel of Durnin.
While this fantasy adventure took shape, my friend handed me a cardboard score chart and some tiny red plastic pegs to keep track of my men and supplies. Much of what my friends were setting up looked familiar: molded plastic warriors and dragons, cardboard tokens, and, of course, a colorful game board. And then they took it out—the […]
Halloween Hoopla
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 […]
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 […]