What is it about construction toys that continues to entertain us as both children and adults? Is it the satisfying “click” we hear as pieces come together? Is it the towering structures we create? Or is it the tactile nature of the medium, allowing us to bring imaginative play to life, creating something that, moments before, only existed in our minds?
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A Short History of Mobile Games
I’m writing this blog while carrying a phone with the potential to play tens of thousands of games like Angry Birds, Temple Run, and Words with Friends. The incredible diversity of game options reflects a revolution in mobile gaming. Today’s smart phones offer a cornucopia of choices inconceivable to users who back in 1997 were satisfied playing Snake on their Nokia phone. But while the number of different mobile games available is new, the desire for games to play on […]
Professional Wrestling: A Ringside View of The Strong’s Collection
I just happen to know a thing or two about professional wrestling. If you ask me to name several wrestlers off the top of my head, I’ll list off The Rock, Triple H, The British Bulldogs, Jake the Snake, Andre the Giant, Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, The Undertaker, John Cena, Booker T, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka. I’m familiar with wrestling moves such as the figure-four leg lock, clothesline, dropkick, sleeper hold, and elbow drop. I know […]
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From Paper to Pixels: Magic: The Gathering Video Game
Earlier this month, The Strong opened its newest permanent exhibit, Game Time!, which traces the history of non-electronic games. The exhibit includes an artifact-rich timeline of games from the 1800s to the present, and also presents collections of some of the most popular game genres, such as race, strategy, party, and wealth accumulation. As excited as I always am to explore a newly completed exhibit, I had a special sense of pride in this one, because a small group of […]
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The Other Sara Lee: A Doll Story
A few weeks ago, while gathering some toys from The Strong’s collection for a media event, I came across a little infant doll I had never seen before. She sat alone on a shelf in storage, and I would have missed her completely if I hadn’t been looking specifically for dolls depicting African Americans.
I looked up her record in the museum’s database and found that she was made in the early 1950s by the Ideal Toy Company. Her computer record […]
Poe, Thoreau, and Dickinson as Video Game Avatars
Henry David Thoreau advised his peers, “Let us first be simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores.” Thoreau’s contemporaries professed similar emotional, individualist, and idealist sentiments. I respect authors of the American Romantic and Victorian period of literature; however, I don’t always enjoy wading through their sometimes ornate language. I recently discovered a few video game titles that provide a new format to interact with […]
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Run for Boston
In New York, Washington, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle and in many other U.S. cities and cities around the world people have gathered for “Run for Boston” events to offer tribute and support to victims of bombings at this year’s Boston Marathon.
Young and Green: My Early Environmental Education
Every day should be Earth Day, of course, but once upon a time, a group of concerned citizens coordinated its very first occasion. Earth Day began on April 22, 1970, with schools across the United States hosting concurrent teach-ins to protest practices polluting natural resources. It’s apropos, then, that my lifelong respect for the environment grew out of my own classroom experiences. And I’m pleased that my job affords me the pleasure of recognizing educational toys that promote environmental stewardship.
The […]
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Pop Goes the Achilles
After Lakers’ shooting-guard Kobe Bryant’s left Achilles tendon gave way catastrophically last Friday in a game against the Golden State Warriors, he tweeted from his hospital bed a plaintive question: “how the hell did this happen?” Bryant had dribbled hard to his left, a move he’d performed a million times. But this one time, and in an instant, the body failed him.
Failure came as a shock and a surprise even to a player who had seen plenty of injuries. In […]