Blog

Recently, Minecraft fever struck my house. All four of my children now play the game and one Saturday morning my kids showed me the houses, sheep farms, mines, and other creations they built in the game using blocks they mined or harvested from stone, ore, wood, or other materials. The buildings were creative, beautiful, and strong enough to survive late night monster attacks.
While Minecraft is relatively new, what strikes me most about it is how ancient the game play is. […]

Continue Reading about Minecraft and the Building Blocks of Fun Published on:
April 4, 2012

Stroll into nearly any home, school, grocery store, or gas station and, if you look around,  you’ll begin to notice books everywhere. I say “if you look” because books have become so commonplace that they barely register in the mind’s eye. Through fiction or fact, verse or prose, art or photography, books exist to spark your interest, ignite your imagination, and propel you on a journey of the mind. Doomsayers may predict the gradual disappearance of books as modern technology […]

Continue Reading about One for the Books Published on:
April 3, 2012

Fun for me is talking with people at the top of their field, finding out how they got there, and hearing them trace the roots of their fascination. I like a good chat about the whys and wherefores of being a person who has fundamentally changed how we think about something.
With just such a conversation in mind, I recently headed to the bucolic, village of Scottsville, New York, to meet with Wendell Castle, the restless innovator and trailblazer of the […]

Continue Reading about Wendell Castle: Creative Childhood Player and Master Furniture Designer Published on:
March 30, 2012

Long before I began working in museums, I studied photography as an undergraduate student. My interest began as a teenager, sparked by a love of black and white documentary photographs. I was captivated by the universal language the medium spoke and the idea that with the push of a button, a single moment could be captured, documented, and kept forever. You can imagine my delight when I recently found myself tasked with sorting through photographs from our collections here at […]

Continue Reading about A Lens for Life Published on:
March 27, 2012

I’m always interested when one of the classic toys in the National Toy Hall of Fame earns its share of media attention, and this time Etch A Sketch had its moment in the spotlight. When one of Mitt Romney’s aides recently compared the fall presidential campaign to the timeless drawing toy, my ears perked up. Eric Fehrnstrom was quoted as saying, “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over […]

Continue Reading about Romney, Etch A Sketch, and the National Toy Hall of Fame Published on:
March 23, 2012

With free-agent superstar quarterback Peyton Manning headed to Denver and Tim Tebow to New York, I’m left wondering at the residue that fleeting celebrity leaves behind and how kids at play take in fame and make of it something of their own. And here I turn to my sister-in-law Lynn, who puts the “fanatic” in Broncos fandom. She lives in Boulder and teaches in grade school there, where she’s well-positioned to follow and observe kindergarten kids playing at recess. Last […]

Continue Reading about Tebow Tag: Reverse Football Published on:
March 23, 2012

With more than 10 million subscribers and a Guinness World Record for most popular MMORPG, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (WoW) ushered in a new generation of online gaming. Last year, Blizzard auctioned approximately 2,000 original WoW server blades (stripped-down server computer) to benefit St. Jude’s Research Hospital, and ICHEG was pleased to add one to our collections. Our WoW server blade represents the North American Barthilas Realm, in use from June 9, 2006, until June 9, 2010. Although no longer […]

Continue Reading about WoW Server Blade and the History of Role-Playing Video Games Published on:
March 22, 2012

Do you marvel at the toys and dolls on display at The Strong? Ever wonder how they came to the National Museum of Play? As curator of games—board games, card games, and many more—I’m responsible for acquiring historic playthings and popular new examples. But how exactly do we do it?
One way is through donation. And some of my favorite donations include stories about who played the game and what that experience involved. For example, the museum received a Monopoly game […]

Continue Reading about Monopoly and More: How The Strong Builds Collections Published on:
March 20, 2012

Alas, the letter with the little red complimentary AARP membership card comes to us all in good time. I tore mine up because it seemed the quickest and most expressive way to deny the passage of time. But denial didn’t keep me from perusing the instructive AARP website, or from spending a half hour with the Brain Health tab and the useful games it offers.
I say “useful” because the games promised to exercise and train recall, to improve ability to […]

Continue Reading about Playing with Words and Other Brain Games Published on:
March 16, 2012