Paul Reiche III

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

By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
In a well-publicized 1997 showdown, world chess champion Gary Kasparov competed against Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer built by IBM. Deep Blue won. Kasparov vehemently complained that the computer hadn’t been programmed so much to play chess as it had to specifically compete against him, but it was a huge victory for IBM.
Still, IBM acknowledged that success in a game like chess wasn’t such an extraordinary achievement. Eric […]

Continue Reading about The Computer that Took on Jeopardy! Published on:
February 26, 2026

By: Alexander Parry, 2025 Strong Research Fellow
In December 2021, TIME journalist Emily Barone published an editorial about the conflict between her and her children over plastic toys. Barone explained her misgivings about the sea of “eco-terrible plastic junk” available to kids and wondered how to reconcile her environmentalism with the shelf appeal of colorful, heavily-advertised, and often battery-powered toys. These cheap and flimsy items, Barone observed, were nearly impossible to recycle, contributing to air and water pollution and to the […]

Continue Reading about Problems with Plastic Toys Published on:
February 20, 2026

When we last left off, I was twenty pages deep into the expansive Glynn family scrapbook. During my brief pause, my curiosity about the family and their memories grew. I turned to The Strong’s online archive—formally known as the Brian Sutton-Smith Library & Archives of Play—to bolster my previous “investigation.”
Through my research, I learned that, despite my initial assumptions, Maxine and Alfred were a childless couple. According to the National Library of Medicine, a third of couples during the 1930s […]

Continue Reading about Committed To Memory: The Glynn Family Scrapbook, Part 2 Published on:
February 13, 2026

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. However, several decades before they emerged, there was an innovation that quietly went to the […]

Continue Reading about Nintendo’s Forgotten Accessibility Pioneer: The 1989 Handsfree Controller Published on:
February 5, 2026

Cats have been beloved members of our families for centuries. Their curious and often silly nature makes them the subject of many works of art, sources of humor, and entertainment. The Strong was recently gifted a delightful collection of 74 “Mainzer Dressed Cat” postcards, which feature brightly colored scenes of anthropomorphic cats dressed in human clothing and engaging in a variety of humorous activities, in situations that often threaten an impending calamity.
This collection of cards was designed by Swiss painter […]

Continue Reading about Cats, Cards, and Calamity! Published on:
January 26, 2026