• Skip to main content
hours of operation

Hours: 10 a.m.–5 p.m. | Fri. & Sat. till 8 p.m.

  • Educators
    • Pre-K to Grade 8
    • Grades 7 to 12
    • College and University Programs
    • Professional Development
    • Get in the Game
    • Scouts
  • Woodbury School
    • Woodbury School FAQs
    • Woodbury School Staff
    • Current Academic Calendar
  • Blog
  • Journal of Play
    • About
    • Journal Issues
    • Information for Authors
    • Book Reviews
    • Subscribe
  • G2
    • About
    • Volunteers
    • Benefits of Play
    • Schools
search-icon
  • Visit
    • Hours and Admission
    • Group Admission
    • Directions and Parking
    • Events Calendar
    • Membership
    • Accessibility
    • Donation Requests
    • Parties and Rentals
    • Dine and Shop
    • Digital Map
  • Exhibits
    • Museum Exhibits
    • Online Exhibits
    • National Toy Hall of Fame
    • World Video Game Hall of Fame
    • Skyline Climb
    • Play Lab
    • Butterfly Garden
    • Carousel and Train
  • Collections
    • Search Collections
    • Brian Sutton-Smith Library & Archives of Play
    • International Center for the History of Electronic Games
    • The National Archives of Game Show History
    • Research Access
    • Research Fellowships
    • Donate an Artifact
    • Preservation
  • Support
    • Expansion Campaign
    • Individual Giving
    • Corporate Giving
    • The Play Ball
  • About
    • Margaret Woodbury Strong
    • Museum News
    • Board of Trustees
    • Play Makers Leadership Council
    • Careers & Internships
    • Community Access
    • Press Room
    • Annual Reports
    • Books
    • Play Quotes
DonateTicket Options
Museum of Play mobile logo
Menu
search-icon
  • Visit
    • Back
    • Visit
    • Hours and Admission
    • Group Admission
    • Directions and Parking
    • Events Calendar
    • Membership
    • Accessibility
    • Donation Requests
    • Parties and Rentals
    • Dine and Shop
    • Digital Map
  • Exhibits
    • Back
    • Exhibits
    • Museum Exhibits
    • Online Exhibits
    • National Toy Hall of Fame
    • World Video Game Hall of Fame
    • Skyline Climb
    • Play Lab
    • Butterfly Garden
    • Carousel and Train
  • Collections
    • Back
    • Collections
    • Search Collections
    • Brian Sutton-Smith Library & Archives of Play
    • International Center for the History of Electronic Games
    • The National Archives of Game Show History
    • Research Access
    • Research Fellowships
    • Donate an Artifact
    • Preservation
  • Support
    • Back
    • Support
    • Expansion Campaign
    • Individual Giving
    • Corporate Giving
    • The Play Ball
  • About
    • Back
    • About
    • Margaret Woodbury Strong
    • Museum News
    • Board of Trustees
    • Play Makers Leadership Council
    • Careers & Internships
    • Community Access
    • Press Room
    • Annual Reports
    • Books
    • Play Quotes
  • Educators
    • Back
    • Educators
    • Pre-K to Grade 8
    • Grades 7 to 12
    • College and University Programs
    • Professional Development
    • Get in the Game
    • Scouts
  • Woodbury School
    • Back
    • Woodbury School
    • Woodbury School FAQs
    • Woodbury School Staff
    • Current Academic Calendar
  • Blog
  • Journal of Play
    • Back
    • Journal of Play
    • About
    • Journal Issues
    • Information for Authors
    • Book Reviews
    • Subscribe
  • G2
    • Back
    • G2
    • About
    • Volunteers
    • Benefits of Play
    • Schools
DonateTicket Options
Home triangle separator American Journal of Play triangle separator Journal Issues triangle separator Volume 16, Number 2 & 3

Volume 16, Number 2 & 3

Published 2024

Journal Issue Cover Image

Editors' Note


Welcome to the American Journal of Play’s special double issue on toys and the power of playthings, another in our series of themed issues. Guest edited by Greta Pennell, this issue grew out of the International Toy Research Association’s “Toys Matter: The Power of Playthings” conference held at The Strong National Museum of Play in 2023.

We begin with two interviews. Artist, photographer, and founder of the nonprofit War Toys, Brian McCarty discusses art toys, war toys, and his non-profit’s work with children affected by war. Interactive games and media scholar Stephen Jacobs recounts his research on the important role of Jewish designers, inventors, and entrepreneurs in the toy and game industries. In an article that uses a dialogical autoethnographic approach, James Pennell examines the role of toys, play, and parenting decisions on his growth and development into adulthood. Anne Williams focuses on adult puzzling during the Great Depression of the 1930s and during the COVID-19 pandemic of the 2020s to explore the potential therapeutic benefits of puzzling in times of crisis. Ozlem Cankaya, Jamie Leach, and Kadriye Akdemir discuss the history and role of loose parts such as pipe cleaners, acorns, fabric, stones, and other everyday materials that children have used as playthings. In a study that analyzes more than thirty-seven hundred European and North American games from the Sorbonne’s Fonds Patrimonial du Jeu de Société board game collection, Vincent Berry and Annie Xiang examine the evolution of board game authorship between 1845 and 1984. Anne Boyd draws on visual and documentary evidence to explore the role of ethnographic toys as a form of ethnographic education that taught American children about the possibilities and limits of Arctic imperialism. Emilie St-Hilaire discusses adult doll play as therapeutic intervention. And the issue closes with two articles that consider the intersection of toys and digital media. Bhoomi Thakore analyzes popular YouTube toy play videos to explore the ways this type of play may contribute to commercializing toys and play as well as helping children socialize, learn, and develop fine motor skills. In a study that examines children’s online play groups centered on the LEGO Ninjago animated series and toys, Rebecca Horrace investigates children’s imaginative play in common, shared spaces online.

Guest Editor’s Introduction Toys Matter: The Power of Playthings by Greta Eleen Pennell


Read Guest Editor's Introduction

Interviews


Art Play and War Toys: An Interview with Brian McCarty

Brian McCarty is a photographer, Fulbright specialist, board member for the International Toy Research Association (ITRA), and the executive director of War Toys—a nonprofit organization founded in 2019, based on a photo series about children’s experiences of war that captures the severe effects of trauma and displacement on these young survivors. He assembled a team including experts in expressive therapy, childhood development, human rights, and toy design and manufacturing that continues the advocacy begun during the photo series and that develops new programs. Before founding War Toys, McCarty spent twenty years working with some of the bigger names in the toy industry, including Mattel, Hasbro, Disney, Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon. His unique photography has been exhibited by museums, acquired by prominent collectors, and reviewed in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Wired, Al-Jazeera, Reuters, and other publications. He has appeared on CNN, NPR, Fox News, PBS News Hour, BBC World Service, and ABC World News and given talks at the Carter Presidential Library, New School, Sesame Workshop, Brown University, USC Keck School of Medicine, TEDx, and the American University of Beirut.

The History of the Toy and Games Industries Seen through a Jewish Lens: An Interview with Stephen Jacobs

Stephen Jacobs is coauthor of the Game Design and Development degree program at the School of Interactive Games and Media and a founding associate director of MAGIC Center and MAGIC Spell Studios at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. His work on the Jewish history of toys and games has been presented at the Association of Jewish Studies and the Third Annual Judaica Collectors conferences in 2016, in two blog posts for The Strong in 2022, and in a panel at the Ninth Annual International Toy Research Conference in 2023. He has been a scholar-in-residence with The Strong for seventeen years, consulting on exhibit design, acquisitions, and conferences.

Articles


The Impact of Childhood Toys and Play on Adult Skills, Interests, and Life Opportunities: An Autoethnographic Analysis

James R. Pennell

The author uses a dialogical autoethnographic approach informed by symbolic interactionist theory to examine the role of toys, play, and parenting decisions on his childhood development and adult opportunities and interests. He examines how self, others, social contexts, and objects, particularly toys and adult analogues for those toys, came together to produce a range of life skills and interests central to his adult life. He also interviewed his mother, following Heewan Chang’s recommendation not simply to rely on an individual’s recall. His analysis identified three sets of skills and interests central to his identity: reading and creative writing; design, construction, and repair; and musical performance and composition. He considers these within the context of the 1950s and 1960s, including the expansion of youth culture, his suburban neighborhood, and his childhood friendships. He also reviews the potential of an autoethnographic approach to social science research. Key words: adult skills; autoethnography; child development; identity; toys

Therapeutic Play: Adult Puzzling and Hard Times

Anne D. Williams

The author examines the therapeutic value of puzzles for adults during two major crises in the United States, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s. Each period saw a huge surge in jigsaw puzzling throughout the country, she finds, and in both cases people turned to home-based leisure activities, either for financial reasons or because of lockdowns. Contemporary accounts from the two periods form the basis for the discussion. In both cases, the surge in puzzling reflected both the demand by consumers and the relatively easy entry of new small-scale producers into this area of playthings. Advertising played a major role, too, via premiums given to purchasers of consumer products in the 1930s, and more recently through social media and the Internet. Key words: adult play; COVID-19; Great Depression; jigsaw puzzle; pandemic; puzzle industry

The Journey of Loose Parts across Educational Landscapes and History: The Role of Materials, Relationships, Space, and Time in Children’s Loose Parts Play

Ozlem Cankaya, Jamie Leach, and Kadriye Akdemir

The authors discuss loose parts—pipe cleaners, acorns, fabric, stones, and so forth—as versatile materials not originally intended for children’s play that they can manipulate, modify, and use in their play activities. The authors review the historical foundations of loose parts play, focusing on influential individuals and theories, and compare the prominent materials used in each approach to the current application of loose parts in early learning environments. They elaborate four key factors in play that influence children’s participation, and they highlight some developmental benefits involving materials, space, relationships, and time. They conclude that loose parts play had a significant presence in children’s lives throughout the nineteenth century and that a need exists for further research on the benefits to children of loose parts play. Key words: children; early childhood development; loose parts; loose parts play; play materials

Cultural Legitimization: The Evolution of Authorship in Board Games in Europe and the United States (1845 to 1984)

Vincent Berry and Annie Xiang

The authors examine the evolution of board game authorship between 1845 and 1984, based on an analysis of a corpus of more than thirty-seven hundred games from the University Sorbonne Paris North’s Fonds Patrimonial du Jeu de Société, a board game collection of more than fifteen thousand titles. Overall, they show that game authors have rarely received credit from publishers, although they increasingly do so now, testifying to the existence of a legitimization process for board games. The authors also discuss the difference in the status of the author for games in Europe and North America, highlighted by the different proportion of games credited or in the terms used for such crediting. Finally, they explore the questions of author gender, transmediality, and the porous distinction between intellectual property and authorship. Key words: authorship; auctoriality; board game creation; cultural legitimation; game designer

Frozen in Time: Teaching Imperialism through Lead Toys in Interwar America

Anne Boyd

The author argues that, in the early 1920s, many urban White Americans saw in the Arctic an escape from a world of rapidly expanding technology and became captivated by images of Inuit communities. To pass down an antimodernist form of imperialism to children of the period, educators used lead ethnographic “Escimo” figurines, which rendered Inuit communities as relics of the past. Drawing on visual and documentary evidence, she holds that these ethnographic toys functioned as a form of interactive education that taught young American children about the potential possibilities, as well as limits, of Arctic imperialism. She discusses these toy sets as pedagogical tools and how they helped convey ideas about race, authenticity, and citizenship. Keywords: empire; Indigenous; Inuit; material culture; visual culture

The Therapeutic Power of Synthetic Relationships with Dolls

Emilie St-Hilaire

The author considers adult doll play as therapeutic intervention by examining how the physical properties of reborn dolls and also sex dolls provide comfort and establish needs met through care giving. She discusses dolls providing a sense of personal identity through narrative play, community, and retail therapy, and she describes the companionship attained through imaginative perception and social connections, all benefits that accompany what she calls a synthetic relationship. Drawing from research related to doll therapy in dementia care and from studies on sex doll usage, she considers original research on reborn dolls. She proposes that doll ownership can therapeutically support personal development and good social and mental health, thus improving broader social relationships for many doll owners. Key words: doll collection; dolls; doll therapy; imaginative play; play therapy; reborn dolls

Virtual Toys: The Mediatization of Play on YouTube

Bhoomi K. Thakore

The author analyzed popular YouTube toy play videos, reviewing the range of storylines and their impact and influence. She argues that, although such videos may contribute to the commercialization of toys and play, they may also facilitate development of fine motor skills, socialization, and learning. She notes that, as with all Internet content, YouTube viewing is subject to algorithmic influences, and parents must oversee their children’s use and regularly communicate with them about video content. Key words: media and play; YouTube Kids; YouTube Partner Program; YouTube and play

Playing around on Zoom: The Intersection of Imaginary Play with Technology

Rebecca Horrace

The author investigates the imaginative play of children online as they seek a common, shared space with others, in which to play. She looks at components of children’s online play experiences, including mediated actions, discourses, literacies, sense of belonging, and online restrictions as they moved between digital and nondigital realities. She discusses the future implications of such play—the possibilities of online play groups within other social contexts such as home-schooling communities, hospitals, public schools, and libraries. Finally, she explores group dynamics such as gender and multiculturalism within online play groups. Key words: digital play; discourses; literacies; online play groups

Book Reviews


Mary Benson McMullen and Dylan Brody, Infants & Toddlers at Play: Choosing the Right Stuff for Learning & Development

Rebecca M. Giles

Rob Goldberg, Radical Play: Revolutionizing Children’s Toys in 1960s and 1970s America

Howard P. Chudacoff

Mary Mahoney and Allison Horrocks, Dolls of Our Lives: Why We Can’t Quit American Girl

Michelle Parnett-Dwyer

Stewart Lawrence Sinclair, Juggling

Rhonda Clements

Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky, Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space

Mark Hines

Contributors


Vincent Berry is a professor at Sorbonne Paris North University in charge of the Game and Play Studies Master’s program. Grounded in the sociology of play and leisure, his research analyzes the evolution of contemporary playful practices and culture (toys, board games, video games, role-playing games, and similar play things), with a particular focus on the notion of experience. He examines the relationships between games, leisure, and learning. Annie Xiang is a research engineer at the EXPERICE laboratory. She manages the Board Game Heritage Collection, a collection housed at Sorbonne Paris North University consisting of twenty-three thousand board games and role-playing games dating from the midnineteenth century to the present day. Her work explores the evolution of the board game industry with an emphasis on materiality and authorship issues.

Anne Boyd
is a PhD. candidate at Boston University in the American Studies Program. Her research examines race and the American cultural landscape, and her dissertation explores physical representations of the Lost Cause mythology in the twentieth century. She has presented her work at the American Studies Association, the American Historical Association, and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies.

Ozlem Cankaya is an Associate Professor of Early Childhood Curriculum Studies at MacEwan University, Edmonton, Canada. Cankaya’s research focuses on the interaction of four areas shaping cognitive competence: cultural artifacts, cognitive domains, interpersonal contexts, and individual factors, as observed in young children’s play. Her work aims to help educators and parents support children’s cognitive development and learning. Jamie Leach is an Assistant Professor in the Child and Youth Study Department at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada. Leach’s research involves children’s social communication during play, the influence of materials on children’s play, and the implementation of sustainable curriculum frameworks in early childhood education. Kadriye Akdemir is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and an instructor at Concordia University of Edmonton. Her research and teaching have focused on young children’s play.

Rebecca Horrace is an educational researcher with nearly two decades of experience in children’s education. Her work focuses on integrating developmentally appropriate practices into toys, media, and technology. Horrace teaches educators, publishes on children’s play literacies, and presents at conferences on play-based education. Most recently, Horrace was appointed director of the nonprofit Let’s Play America.

James R. Pennell is professor emeritus of Sociology at the University of Indianapolis and former codirector of the Community Research Center there. He is the author of Local Vino: The Winery Boom in the Heartland, concerning the development of
the Midwest wine industry. His research examines teacher leadership, organizations and work, and community engagement.

Emilie St-Hilaire holds a PhD from the interdisciplinary humanities program at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her dissertation examines the phenomenon of reborn dolls from a feminist perspective. St-Hilaire has often been interviewed by journalists on the topic of reborn doll ownership, and her research has been cited in The Guardian (U.S.A.), Le Temps (Switzerland), Gehirn & Geist (Germany), Cosmopolitan (U.S.A.), and in radio interviews including NPR in the United States and CBC in Canada. St-Hilaire’s scholarly articles appear in RACAR (Canadian Art Review) and Le Journal International de Bioéthique.

Bhoomi K. Thakore is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Associate Director of Asian and Asian American Studies in the Department of Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut. Her research covers social inequalities, media sociology, and the scholarship of teaching and learning— subjects about which she has published a variety of articles. Her forthcoming book will be a sociological analysis of YouTube that includes a historical examination of the platform from the perspectives of both consumers and creators.

Anne D. Williams is a professor emerita of economics at Bates College. She is the author of The Jigsaw Puzzle: Piecing Together A History, as well as two other books and dozens of articles about the history of jigsaw puzzles and their usage in the United States. She has curated several jigsaw puzzle exhibitions and is a charter member of the Association for Games & Puzzles International.

Sign Up for Museum News
  • Youtube Icon
  • X/Twitter Icon
  • TripAdvisor Icon
  • Instagram Icon
  • Facebook Icon

One Manhattan Square
Rochester, New York 14607
+1 (585) 263-2700
info@museumofplay.org
We are Hiring!
  • Visit
    • Hours and Admission
    • Group Admission
    • Directions and Parking
    • Events Calendar
    • Membership
    • Accessibility
    • Donation Requests
    • Parties and Rentals
    • Dine and Shop
    • Digital Map
  • Exhibits
    • Museum Exhibits
    • Online Exhibits
    • National Toy Hall of Fame
    • World Video Game Hall of Fame
    • Skyline Climb
    • Play Lab
    • Butterfly Garden
    • Carousel and Train
  • Collections
    • Search Collections
    • Brian Sutton-Smith Library & Archives of Play
    • International Center for the History of Electronic Games
    • The National Archives of Game Show History
    • Research Access
    • Research Fellowships
    • Donate an Artifact
    • Preservation
  • Support
    • Expansion Campaign
    • Individual Giving
    • Corporate Giving
    • The Play Ball
  • About
    • Margaret Woodbury Strong
    • Museum News
    • Board of Trustees
    • Play Makers Leadership Council
    • Careers & Internships
    • Community Access
    • Press Room
    • Annual Reports
    • Books
    • Play Quotes

Copyright 2025 The Strong. All Rights Reserved.

  • Careers & Internships
  • Privacy & Terms of Use
  • Site Map