Back in 2019, Dr. Sami Schalk contributed a piece to Inside Higher Ed titled “Lowbrow Culture and Guilty Pleasures? The Performance and Harm of Academic Elitism.” The article was in response to Times Higher Education reporter Jack Grove’s tweet, which put out a call to “some scholars who would write for THE about their guilty cultural pleasures/unashamed love for supposedly ‘lowbrow‘ subjects/activities.” Dr. Schalk argued that the uncritical use of term “lowbrow” ignored the biases embedded in such a word, […]
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The Exorcist’s Game Show Connection
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
The Exorcist is one of the most chilling horror films of the 20th century. Pea soup, flying furniture, and the terrifying guttural voice emitting from a 12-year-old girl came together to create a disturbing and impossible-to-forget experience for moviegoers.
And we have Groucho Marx to thank for it.
Groucho Marx’s comedy quiz show, You Bet Your Life, was firmly an institution by the start of 1961, having already logged more […]
Design Matters to Play Matters to Design
Design Play
While play foreshadows culture, design shapes culture. Both have the potential to transform society. For the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1949), play amplifies life. Hence play is necessary to individuals as a life function and to societies as a cultural function, by virtue of its meaning, expressive value, and its spiritual and social associations. Conversely, for other scholars such as American design historian Victor Margolin, designs acquire meaning by shaping the social environments (i.e., habits, practices, lifestyles) where they […]
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How to Find Things in The Strong’s Collections
The Strong National Museum of Play has the world’s largest, most comprehensive collection of playthings. That’s amazing. It’s also daunting! Researchers, whether they’re coming here on site or searching through our digital holdings, often struggle to locate the materials that would be most useful for their research projects. Some of that is inherent in the vast size of the collection, but some of it reflects the fact that objects of diverse types are cataloged using a number of different systems, […]
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The Solo Games Barbarian Prince, Barbarian Vince, and Barbarian Mints
Game designer Arnold Hendrick designed the solitaire fantasy board game Barbarian Prince in 1981. It was called quirky and poorly balanced, and the website BoardGameGeek famously named it the most difficult solo game ever. But many players admit to loving the game, and it won the Charles S. Roberts award for Best Fantasy Boardgame that year. Without reading the rules, a player can win Barbarian Prince on their first turn, but they can also play it through 50 times and […]
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Mister Rogers’….Game Show
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
More than two decades after the final episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired in 2001, the legacy of Fred Rogers has endured. Rogers has been the topic of a major feature film, It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood starring Tom Hanks, and a documentary film, Won’t You Be My Neighbor. His namesake company, Fred Rogers Productions, has produced numerous public television series, including the spinoff Daniel Tiger’s […]
Game Saves: Galactic Force
While SEGA fans are likely familiar with the company’s arcade hit Galaxy Force, developer Tengen once had a game in development with a very similar name: Galactic Force. Despite being nearly complete, it would ultimately be cancelled. This episode of Game Saves looks at the game’s development timeline, from a very early test build to a version that is nearly finished, complete with a new name.
Preventive Conservation: Preserving Entire Collections for the Long Term
Have you ever heard the saying ”an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.?” A truer saying couldn’t be more appropriate for the preservation and care of collections. Spending funds and energy proactively on preventive care is the most efficient way to preserve an entire collection for the long term, rather than reacting and treating damage that has already occurred to an individual object. Any type of action that can be implemented to mitigate the agents of deterioration—physical […]
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Seven Things Learned in Five Days in January
I arrived at The Strong National Museum of Play near the end of January 2024 with nine days to spare to submit a book manuscript and a Research Fellowship lasting just five days. This, then, would not be a luxurious waltz around the vast collection in the archives. It was more a sprint through I had already reconnoitered titles in the hope of verifying previous leads, and tidying up some loose ends in some previously written chapters.
This book is about […]
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