By: Dr. Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
For generations of children, brushing Barbie’s hair has been as central to play as dressing her in the latest fashions. Beyond the familiar brush tucked into countless doll boxes, Mattel has repeatedly returned to hair as a site of innovation—designing dolls and accessories that transform styling into a creative, tactile, and sometimes experimental practice. Barbie’s evolving hairstyles chart a history of play that is as much about identity and imagination as it […]
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The Rise of Scripted Murder Games from China
Jubensha, translated from its original Chinese as “script(ed) murder,” shares similarities with Western murder mystery dinner party games, yet equating the two oversimplifies a far more complex cultural phenomenon. Since the 2010s, in China, where the scripted murder game trend originated and subsequently exploded, Jubensha has captured the hearts of many Gen Z players, making Jubensha parlors into the coveted third spaces away from home and work that many Millennials and Gen Xers once found in malls or cafes. A […]
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The Phenomenon of Rise ‘N Fly: A Black History Board Game
When South African bishop Desmond Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his anti-apartheid activism, Linda West Olds of Delaware turned to her 10-year-old son Kevin and asked: “Do you know what segregation is?”
He did not.
Perplexed, Olds probed further. Did he know who Ralph Bunche was? What about Andrew Young? Kevin drew blanks. He barely knew much about Martin Luther King Jr. As Olds later recalled, her son responded, “Well, he must be a great man, or we […]
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Double Dare You: Iconic Show Celebrates 40 Years
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
“On your mark…get set…GOOOOO!”
On October 6, 1986, Marc Summers uttered those words to kick off Nickelodeon’s Double Dare… and changed the face of television. Nickelodeon had survived a mostly unremarkable seven years on the air, originally launching an educational channel for children. The surprise success of a Canadian show, You Can’t Do That on Television, led to a philosophical shift in the early 1980s and the channel began […]
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Pokémon + Stickers = Fun
We all have our preferences, presuppositions, and favorites; the subjects, outlooks, and topics that we gravitate to again and again. That’s why I love randomness. It’s a tool I use frequently to challenge my own inherent biases in my work here at The Strong. I know that if I just follow my interests, my work will too often flow in the same channels. So sometimes I use a random number generator to call up a random artifact from our collection […]
Nintendo’s 1989 Handsfree Controller: A Corporate Chapter in a Longer Accessibility Story
By: Hana Hanifah, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
In recent years, the momentum for accessibility in games has gained significant traction. Many custom configurations, such as captions, remappable controls, and adaptable hardware, are becoming the norm as more people, especially those with disabilities, play and engage in games. The Xbox Adaptive Controller and the PS5’s Access Controller have been rightly praised and documented in the mainstream media (e.g., Forbes, Wired,Time). However, decades before they emerged, Nintendo of America released its own adaptive […]
An Archivist’s “Ephemeral Expertise”
A few years ago, while chatting with a visiting research fellow in the Brian Sutton-Smith Library & Archives of Play at The Strong, they posed an interesting question, “So, what is your area of expertise? Video games, toys, something else?” I wasn’t quite sure how to answer this. Some large libraries and archives have subject librarians who focus on individual areas such as mathematics, natural sciences, or humanities. However, at The Strong, our collections encompass all of these areas and […]
Game Show Prizes 101
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
Prizes on game shows seem fairly straightforward. Here’s a nice thing; win the prize. But there’s some slight nuance to it that’s led to muddled or mistaken information being commonly shared over the years. This month, we’re going to dive into one fairly common misunderstood tidbit about what contestants can do when they win a prize on a game show.
There’s (usually) no such thing as “requesting the value […]
Name That. . . Game Show Contestant
What would game shows be without contestants? We watch them, cheer for them, and sometimes even compete with them. But we seldom know much about them. I recently had the opportunity to learn about one remarkable game show contestant.
Now Let’s Meet Our Contestant
Born in the early 1940s, Candy Lee demonstrated an aptitude for performance at a young age. With her mother, Vilma Laska, as her promoter, she won her first beauty contest at age three and was singing for a […]
