Blog

Do you ever find yourself wishing that you could be a child again, just for a few hours? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy adulthood, but I freely admit that every once in a while I find myself wanting to be a kid again, having a snack in my parents’ living room while watching Duck Tales. I miss the characters and cartoons of my youth, and suspect plenty of others share my sentiment, regardless of what era they grew up […]

Continue Reading about Don’t Call It a Comeback: The Return of Iconic 1980s Characters Published on:
May 8, 2012

Nearly 600,000 guests come to The Strong annually, and many consider a visit to the arcade in eGameRevolution the highlight of their trip. Some visitors favor new games—slashing fruit on the giant touch-screen version of Fruit Ninja, munching opponents in the four-person Pac-Man Battle Royale, or playing the only Sega Giant Tetris game in North America. Old-school players make a bee-line for classics like Lunar Lander, Asteroids, or Gauntlet. The dozens of games featured in the exhibit give guests plenty […]

Continue Reading about Now Playing Published on:
May 3, 2012

Consider a paradox: people who play the fastest devote great lengths of time to doing so. This presents a conundrum only slightly less challenging than a Rubik’s Cube—unless you’re the current world record holder, who solved the puzzling polyhedron in less than six seconds. If you asked champion Feliks Zemdegs, he’d probably say the goal of playing quickly is achieved slowly.
 Videos abound online in which Rubik’s Cube gurus demonstrate how to solve the puzzle. Novices will have no trouble with […]

Continue Reading about Play-Time: Racing Against the Clock Published on:
May 1, 2012

Less than a minute into my scheduled interview with world-renowned sculptor Albert Paley, we knew we had a problem. I wanted to talk about how he played as a child, but Paley wanted to know what I meant by play. And just like that he became the interviewer and I was the one reaching for answers. It’s a great question. I gave the answer most people interested in play can agree with: play is self-initiated, self-regulated, and self-limited. Play has […]

Continue Reading about Albert Paley: Gravity, Sculpture, and Play Published on:
April 27, 2012

PBS recently launched the Idea Channel, a bi-weekly series that examines the evolving relationship between modern technology and art. In the episode “Super Mario Brothers as Surrealist Art?”, host Mike Rungetta advocated for the game’s place in the canon of great surrealists.
In reviewing the gameplay experience, Rungetta said “you eat a flower that lets you spit fire…and there’s this guy that throws armadillo-type things from a cloud. These sound like the ravings of a mad man.”  Of the surrealist experience, […]

Continue Reading about What if Dali Made Video Games? Published on:
April 26, 2012

…except when it comes to toys.
We spend a lot of time talking about the way the media portrays women—how images of svelte, scantily-clad models on New York City’s sky-high billboards affect us mere mortals below, for instance. The struggle with body image and beauty standards begins at a very young age for girls, often with toys like Barbie, the beautiful doll who stares mockingly up at everyone unfortunate enough to be made of something other than flawless plastic. But this […]

Continue Reading about Boys Will Be Boys… Published on:
April 25, 2012

Players disagree about what constitutes cheating. In her book, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, Mia Consalvo defines cheating as an action that “breaks the magic circle,” meaning players leave the imaginary world to reach outside for answers. This “magic circle” concept originated in Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens, in which he explains how play takes place in a closed-off area, separated either physically or mentally from the rest of the world. Consalvo further defines cheating as an action […]

Continue Reading about The Magic Circle: Cheating in Video Games Published on:
April 20, 2012

I’m a bit of a mossback when it comes to language. Specialized usages and jargon set my teeth on edge. So when I overheard the rent-a-cop at the county fair lean into his walkie-talkie with “what’s your six?” when “where are you?” would do perfectly well, I started to grind molar enamel. But of course to close one’s mind to innovation of this sort walls one off to the creativity of the evolving language. And because we Americans give ourselves […]

Continue Reading about To Gender or Not to Gender, That’s the Question Published on:
April 19, 2012

“Hey, Mom. Where do toys come from?”
Perhaps kids don’t ruminate about the origin of toys as they might about a newborn sibling, but toys do come from somewhere. Toy inventors dream new ones up all the time, to the delight of kids everywhere. The National Museum of Play’s collections include toy prototypes and design papers from a number of toy inventors like Greg Hyman, creator of popular toys such as Alphie, Talking Barney, and Tickle Me Elmo. How Hyman became […]

Continue Reading about The Path to Toy Invention: Greg Hyman Published on:
April 17, 2012