risky play

It’s 1995. I’m 4 years old, in my pajamas, planted in front of my television. In the VCR is a VHS tape with a recording of the 1987 A Garfield Christmas special. A Garfield stuffed animal (also in his pajamas) is within reach. Cut to a Sunday morning with my grandmother. At the kitchen table, she sits with her instant coffee reading the “funnies.” Populating the newspaper page are the likes of Cathy, Dilbert, Peanuts and, of course, Garfield. It’s […]

Continue Reading about I Hate Mondays: Exploring the Garfield Franchise Published on:
June 18, 2026

By: Johnathen Rockwell, 2026 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
For more than 50 years, players young and old have experienced tabletop role-playing games: rolling dice, eating snacks, and creating stories. Despite their longevity and contemporary boom in popularity, tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) possess little associated scholarship, especially scholarship that addresses their unique culture and material legacies. By examining the interplay and correspondence between players and designers, and the game systems themselves, my work asks the question: Do tabletop role-playing games serve as a […]

Continue Reading about Tabletop Role-playing Games as Identity Creation Tools Published on:
June 12, 2026

I’m always surprised that more people don’t ask “What’s in a Conservator’s Toolkit?” because we usually have some rare and very cool favorite tools at our disposal for various tasks. Not your typical screwdriver, hammer, tape measurer stuff, I’m talking about tools you really wouldn’t find universally or at your local hardware store. What’s even more interesting is that each conservator’s favorites will be vastly different depending on the individual. So, I’m lifting the veil on my top five favorite […]

Continue Reading about What’s in a Conservator’s Toolkit? Published on:
June 4, 2026

In the fall of 1950, Charles Schultz’s first Peanuts comic strip ran in the daily newspapers. The comic centered on the disenchanted figure of Charlie Brown and a cast of characters with realistic faults and deep observations about daily life. Schultz introduced Charlie Brown’s dog, Snoopy, in the third comic strip. Snoopy first won my heart during a meet and greet at Knott’s Berry Farm in California. I was four years old. Now, a few decades later, I understand how […]

Continue Reading about Collecting “Peanuts” Playthings Published on:
May 29, 2026

A museum about play tends to attract employees who love to play, and that leads to office conversations about toys we’ve seen recently, how our new hobbies are going and, of course, what video games we’re playing. Recently, some colleagues and I were chatting about what we would be playing when we got home and I, realizing how I was about to sound, answered Two Point Museum. I could see in their eyes a lack of recognition and dug my […]

Continue Reading about Let’s Play Museum: Museums in Video Games Published on:
May 22, 2026

While licensed titles dominated the Game Boy Advance, some developers looked to create more ambitious titles for Nintendo’s handheld. Gatehouse Games, comprised of former members of Core Design, the studio responsible for Tomb Raider, hoped that “Spiralstone” would be the next big hit. While early prototypes were made, the game would ultimately never hit store shelves. Tom Scutt and Martin Gibbins, two of the three primary developers of the title, shared with me what went wrong, and what the plans […]

Continue Reading about Game Saves: Gatehouse Game’s “Spiralstone” for Game Boy Advance Published on:
May 14, 2026

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