Ms. Pac-Man

Last October, I attended my first convention for the Association for Games and Puzzles International, a community of scholars and collectors, at Italy’s World Puzzle Center. Hosts Roxanne and George Miller converted a castle in the small town of Panicale into a museum of more than 100,000 mechanical puzzles. I fell asleep each night in a room filled with puzzles. Cases of them lined the halls I walked through to get to each event. I even saw a bedroom full […]

Continue Reading about Contentedly Confounded at the World Puzzle Center Published on:
May 4, 2026

Recently while working on reorganizing some of the Brian Sutton-Smith’s Library and Archives collection, I began looking through our collection of miniature books. It was while going through these boxes and checking our library catalog to record them that I couldn’t help but ask some questions. Why were these made? Why would anyone wish to have a 40-volume set of Shakespeare’s works in a miniature format that is nearly unreadable? How did they make these books so tiny in the […]

Continue Reading about The Small World of Miniature Books Published on:
April 26, 2026

As soon as I saw the dollhouse known as Fantasy House (probably made in France in the mid-20th century), my curiosity was piqued, to say the least. In preparation for The Strong’s fall 2025 exhibit entitled Dollhouses Unveiled, I was able to spend time examining a number of dollhouses from our founder Margaret Strong’s original collection with curator Michelle Parnett-Dwyer. We both couldn’t help but linger on this piece, marveling over the extent of the details inside, which was a […]

Continue Reading about Fantasy House: A Lesson Learned on the Importance of Accessing Historical Information for an Object Published on:
April 20, 2026

What’s the Big Deal About Fast Food Toys?
As an oldest child with a busy lifestyle, a calendar full of homework, dance classes, theatre rehearsals, voice lessons, Girl Scouts, choir, and sometimes Model UN or Math League, convenience and time efficiency were key in my childhood. My 25-minute commute to dance made me a frequent flyer at the McDonald’s that allowed me sufficient time to finish my food before we reached the studio. My meal of choice never wavered: a hamburger […]

Continue Reading about Would You Like a Toy with That? Published on:
April 10, 2026

BY: Robert King, 2024 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: What can drive cars, write essays, diagnose diseases, and is bad at jokes? Answer: Artificial Intelligence. (With apologies for the crummy riddle.)
Ever since AI’s astonishing advances in recent years, news of its accomplishments has been accompanied by a sour note: it can’t do humor. A 2023 study gives the statistics. When asked to generate over a thousand “original” jokes, ChatGPT returned the same 25 jokes in some […]

Continue Reading about Filling in the Blanks: A Media Archaeology of Computational Humor Published on:
April 3, 2026

By: Zari Smith, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
During the summer of 2025, I had the opportunity to visit The Strong National Museum of Play for a research fellowship. For two weeks, I had access to the collections and the rich archives that the museum owns in addition to the museum exhibits available for the general public.
I decided to apply for a fellowship from The Strong in order to find source materials that could assist me in writing my master’s thesis. My […]

Continue Reading about Exploring Japanese Games and their Paratexts Published on:
March 24, 2026

The Education Task Force of Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women held a “Women’s History Week” celebration to correspond with International Women’s Day in 1978. The movement spread and, in 1987, Congress passed Public Law 100-9, which designated March as Women’s National History Month. Despite these initiatives, I have no memory of special celebrations or lessons on women’s contributions to history while growing up in public schools in the 1980s and 1990s. In a note to her readers, […]

Continue Reading about Women’s History Month: Celebrating Five Women in Toys and Dolls Published on:
March 13, 2026

As I prepare to leave The Strong after 37 years on the museum’s curatorial staff, I’ve been reflecting on highlights from my career. The museum has seen incredible changes over those decades and moved from a sleepy museum focused on how everyday Americans lived between 1820 and 1940 to a vibrant institution that draws more than 600,000 guests every year to explore the ways play has changed lives through American history and continues to transform all of us each day.
As […]

Continue Reading about Adventures in Collecting Published on:
March 5, 2026

Hello, and welcome. I’m new to blogging and only a few seasons into making maple syrup myself—but I’ve been around the process my entire life. What I didn’t realize until recently is that what keeps pulling me back to sugaring isn’t just the syrup. It’s the play. 
I’ve always been a hands-on, take-it-apart, fix-it kind of person. Give me something mechanical, inefficient, or slightly broken, and my brain lights up. Sugaring fits right into that wheelhouse. The constant tinkering, the problem solving, the incremental improvements—it’s all part of the draw. But when I zoom out, I […]

Continue Reading about Sap, Smoke, and the Sticky Business of Play  Published on:
February 27, 2026