Blog

Adrienne Shaw, Director, Cultural Analytics Certificate
Associate Professor, Department of Media Studies and Production
Lew Klein College of Media and Communication Graduate Faculty
Temple University  
 

This fall I donated three digital collections to The Strong museum: the LGBTQ Video Game Archive Source Files, the Rainbow Arcade Collection, and the Joshua D. Savage Digital Game Documents Archive. These are part of my ongoing project documenting the history of LGBTQ content in (primarily) digital games. By donating these files, I hope to encourage future researchers to […]

Continue Reading about Preserving the LGBTQ Game Archive at The Strong Published on:
December 17, 2020

Chris Kohler, Editorial Director, Digital Eclipse
The first home video game machines were all, as we call them today, “dedicatedʺ systems—that is, the hardware and the software were all contained in one single unit. If you wanted more games, you had to buy an entire separate machine. You can imagine why this was not exactly a solid structure on which to build a new creative medium!
For most players who were around in the late 1970s, their first “programmableʺ game […]

Continue Reading about Rare Atari Cartridge is Another Clever Invention of a Video Game Pioneer Published on:
December 10, 2020

When I was growing up and my sister and I got together with our favorite cousins, there was hardly anything we liked better than putting on a show for the grown-ups. As I recall, the five of us kids would descend to our basement rec room where we’d cook up a script, cast the parts, devise costumes from the dress-up box, and practice our dramatic extravaganza. Meanwhile, I suspect our parents were upstairs rolling their eyes and bracing […]

Continue Reading about Let’s Put on a Show! Published on:
December 3, 2020

One of the most frequently asked questions about video game history is perhaps the simplest: what was the first video game? It’s a logical question to ask. After all, we’re always curious about these questions of primacy. Who was the first man on the moon? Neil Armstrong. Who was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic? Amelia Earhart. Who was the first person to climb Mount Everest? Well, in this case it was actually two people: Sir Edmund Hillary […]

Continue Reading about What was the first video game? Published on:
November 25, 2020

Congratulations to sidewalk chalk for earning a place of honor among the three toys inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame on November 5, 2020. For a plaything that’s been around ever since our early ancestors were drawing on the walls of the caves they called home, that’s proof persistence earning well-deserved acclaim.
But 2020 wasn’t the first year that chalk received recognition as one of the 12 finalists for the Hall of Fame. Back in 2016, chalk’s inclusion on […]

Continue Reading about Chalking Up a Win Published on:
November 19, 2020

It all began following the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles, California. Louis S. Smith, II and Robert Hall worked with civil rights activists and community members to form Operation Bootstrap, a cooperative that sought to rebuild the community and provide jobs for its residents. Operation Bootstrap’s neighbor, Mattel, was impressed by its success. In 1968, Smith and Hall met with Mattel leadership. The makers of Barbie wanted to support Bootstrap’s initiative and offered to back a toy […]

Continue Reading about Baby Nancy Inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame Published on:
November 12, 2020

Born in Tanganyika (now the Republic of Tanzania) in East Africa, English national Leslie Scott and her family moved to Ghana, a country rich in wood, when she was 18. She and her family had played a block stacking game since childhood, and she commissioned sets of blocks from a local sawmill. In her 20s, Scott moved to Oxford, England, and brought some block sets with her. Her British friends loved the game to obsession, she says, “but […]

Continue Reading about Block by Block: Leslie Scott’s Jenga Game (or, in Swahili, Zuia kwa kuzuia: Mchezo wa Jenga wa Leslie Scott) Published on:
November 5, 2020

For more than a century, the newspaper trade has had to determine creative ways to prevent a decrease in circulation and to find new subscribers. In the late 1800s, the Sunday edition of newspapers began to carry art supplements, which included parlor prints and toys for kids to cut out and assemble. Art supplements proved an innovative way to build an audience—each week parents read about the next must-have paper toys in the following week’s newspaper.
Some companies used […]

Continue Reading about Extra, Extra: Read All About Newspapers and Play Published on:
October 29, 2020

Denise Chaudhari was the first woman hired for the then-secret Xbox project, where she designed more than just the original “Duke” controller that launched with the system in 2001.

Continue Reading about Designing the Duke Published on:
October 23, 2020