In her 2011 book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle wrote that “in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves.” Turkle’s concern 14 years ago that anthropomorphized machines and digital networks might counterintuitively alienate us from each other now seems almost quaint post-Covid 19 as many of us grapple with the impact of generative AI. I came to The Strong’s Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play to better understand the role of women as creators and as a market for games. By the end of the week, I realized that the most powerful part of this experience with the archives was uncovering the individual voices of creators and players page-by-page in their mimeographed, dot-matrixed, and handwritten notes. While I looked at later documents nicely printed from Microsoft Word, it was the faded, messy documents where I felt a deeper connection to their creators. In my research, I am most interested in women’s labor and leisure time when it comes to gaming. This led me to look at materials from The Strong by women in the game industry, market research, and periodicals. In this blog post, I highlight three of the collections I examined.

Computers, the internet, and all manner of tech have been blamed for isolating people from each other in exchange for an ersatz relationship with games or online life. Yet, there was evidence in The Strong’s collection that many game designers were interested in bringing people together through play. In a paper called “Multi-Player Games,” Danielle Bunten Berry, best known for 1983’s M.U.L.E., wrote, “From my point of view there is nothing a computer can do in a solo game that compares with the feeling you get from interacting with real people.” Bunten Berry was an early proponent of multiplayer games when the computer industry seemed to be moving in the other direction. Instead of envisioning a digital game as a relationship between user and computer or console, Bunten Berry saw the potential in a game to be a conduit for connection through multiplayer games.

Another collection that I felt drawn to was from HeR Interactive (1995–present), whose early motto was “For Girls Who Aren’t Afraid of a Mouse.” Unlike many other gaming companies at the time whose approach was to take an existing game but make it pink, companies like HeR Interactive and its contemporary Purple Moon (1996–1999) asked girls what they wanted in a game through interviews, focus groups and, in HeR Interactive’s case, by creating a teen advisory board. And girls weren’t afraid to share their feelings about the games. One girl wrote on her 1999 application to the teen advisory board that she wanted to be a member in order to “keep games for girls non-sexist and fun. Would like to see a game riding horses NOT with Barbie. Tired of boy games where the girl is rescued and almost always has big boobs. Would like brave and smart girls and athletic girls. Would like to see a girl save a boy.” One of my other favorites was a letter written to HeR Interactive’s president Megan Gaiser in 2011 from 15-year-old Katherine critiquing some elements in one of their Nancy Drew games, including the fact that Nancy “shrieks at the sight of a mouse despite the fact that your old slogan was ‘For girls not afraid of a mouse.’” In contrast to the assumption that girls were looking for something easy, much of their feedback was that they liked games that “made them think.” The Nancy Drew games also have intergenerational appeal. In printouts of reviews from Amazon and other game review websites, grandmothers lauded a game that they could play alone or with their grandkids.

Drawing back even further in time, I had the pleasure of looking at some early issues of the tabletop roleplaying game fanzine Alarums & Excursions (A&E), which was continuously edited and published by Lee Gold from 1975 until April 2025. Game historians Jon Peterson, Aaron Trammell, and Nikki Crenshaw have published works on A&E, but it was something else to see it myself and it took me a while to understand how to read it. Alarums & Excursions was an Amateur Press Association (APA), where contributors sent in their contributions (their own zines) to a central editor who would collate and distribute them. In Alarums & Excursions #60 from August 1980, Lee Gold estimated that she spent about 80 hours a month working on A&E, not including the time her husband Barry took to mimeograph and staple the pages. Each issue of A&E was about 60-80 pages (the maximum length accepted by Gold was 160 pages, according to A&E 68 from April 1981). Each zine was assembled from letter-sized, double-sided, single-spaced pages typed and mimeographed and stapled by the Golds. Not having seen A&E before, and having come of age in the 1990s, I had something much smaller in mind for the concept of “zine.” Before the advent of internet forums, APA publications like A&E directed comments to contributors of previous issues. Just like internet forums, there were ongoing disagreements—like whether female dwarves had beards and whether the increase in young players was a sign of success for gaming or a mere nuisance to the established gaming cohort. In almost every issue I looked at from 1978–1981, there were also discussions about women roleplayers. Contributors pontificated on why there weren’t larger numbers of women in roleplaying. More interesting to me was how deeply they discussed issues that could potentially face female characters such as pregnancy and the use of birth control. Because tabletop RPGs have their origins in wargaming, there was always a tension between the fantasy and “realism,” that is, what would be realistic given the fantastical, pseudo-medieval settings.

Unsurprisingly, the privileging of what Aaron Trammell calls the “accuracy of simulation over the ethics of simulation” did not sit well with everyone. In issue #63, electrical engineering graduate student Nancy Jane Bailey goes on a “tirade” (her word), letting readers know exactly why there weren’t more women in tabletop roleplaying. Among her reasons, she directly addresses the ongoing discourse about female characters, sex, and pregnancy, which was a commonly discussed topic in these early issues. Bailey argued that without access to reliable birth control, sexually active female characters would be at a strong disadvantage. She added, “In a world where magic is common, there must be some safe, reliable form of magical birth control… There is no purpose to female characters being penalized for having the same sort of active sex-life that most players seem to feel is necessary for the male characters.”

In the issues that I observed at The Strong, Lee Gold often retyped her contributors’ submissions to format them correctly. In some cases, that meant retyping commentary that she disagreed with. In issue #53 from January 1980, she wrote, “From time to time I contemplate charging an additional fee to insult others in A&E. (Say one dollar per paragraph). You have nudged me slightly closer to instituting this surcharge.” From a contemporary perspective, that A&E was an open forum despite having a single editor is striking because Gold could have easily rejected such pieces.

This was my first time working in a physical archive and it was a unique experience. For five to six hours a day, I would sit in a very cold, quiet room, my cell phone tucked away in a locker, flipping through gaming history alongside one or two fellow researchers. On paper, it sounds a little isolating, but on the contrary, observing documents, especially those that are not publicly available, was incredibly intimate. I had expected a wow factor to seeing some of the documents, but there was also a mix of other emotions—sadness, loss, anxiety, and hope— bound up in the personal and business papers of early gaming contributors. I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to access these collections which helped me with my research but, more importantly, allowed me to connect across time and space with women who were pioneers in gaming.

The post Game Changers: Women Who Built Community Through Play appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

Over the course of a week immersed in The Strong’s exceptional archives—including the papers of Carol Kantor, Carol Shaw, Steve Kordek, and Mark Lesser, as well as an expansive collection of Atari design documents and internal memos—I began to see these questions in a new light. The word music appears rarely in these early materials, and when it does, it’s often interchangeable with other terms—sound, tone, jingle, beep, tune, even thump. At times, what we would now call a sound effect is labeled as music in developer notes. These documents aren’t sloppy—they simply come from a time before today’s distinctions between “sound effects” and “music” had crystallized in game design discourse.

What struck me most was how little evidence exists that music was seen as essential to game design in the first place. It’s not just that it was technically difficult to implement; it doesn’t seem to have been a conceptual priority. A handwritten page of notes by Ed Logg—creator of Asteroids and Centipede—lists qualities of “Great Games” but makes no mention of sound at all. Elsewhere, Atari’s internal memos go months at a time without referencing audio. Sound was present, of course, but it was rarely dwelled upon.

More telling still is a 1980s press release for Atari’s 5200 console, which trumpets two “revolutionary features”: a Trak-Ball controller and a Voice Synthesizer module. The release boasts that voices would become “an integral part of game play, not just a sound generator,” promising “the ultimate in video game realism.” It’s hard to miss the implication: the sonic future Atari envisioned was one of simulated speech, not music. Voice, not melody, was framed as the pinnacle of immersion.

This reorients the traditional narrative. Perhaps the Holy Grail of early game sound wasn’t music at all; perhaps it was voice. From that perspective, adding background music to a perilous jungle or the far reaches of outer space might have seemed artificial—or even at odds with the era’s growing emphasis on realism in game design, a trend that became especially clear during my time at The Strong. This raises broader questions. To what extent have our expectations of game audio been shaped by film, a medium in which music gradually came to be understood as essential? And what does it mean when the soundscape of early games resists those same expectations?

I haven’t finished puzzling through these questions. But that’s precisely what made the fellowship so valuable: the time and space to reflect, reframe, and reconsider.

One of the greatest pleasures of my week in this regard was the camaraderie that developed with fellow research fellow Kristin Fitzimmons. Though our projects came from different disciplines, our daily conversations—sometimes at the archives, sometimes over dinner—became a kind of informal salon. We exchanged observations, challenged each other’s assumptions, and helped refine the ideas that were still half-formed in our own heads. In a field like mine, where research is often a solitary pursuit, that kind of dialogue was invigorating. It sharpened my thinking and reminded me that scholarship isn’t just better when shared—it’s shaped by the sharing.

By: Andrew Schartmann, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow at The Strong National Museum of Play

The post Rethinking the Sound of Early Video Games appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

Then, in 1996, an unprecedented hot-pink box appeared in the software aisle: Barbie Fashion Designer. Unabashedly feminine, the game stuck out from its peers not only for its aesthetics, but for its dress-up gameplay. It was one of the first games designed specifically for girls. Barbie Fashion Designer was an instant sensation and commercial success for Mattel, and alongside Sega’s Cosmopolitan Virtual Makeover, these two games ushered in a new wave of games designed for girls. Game studios like Purple Moon responded to this burgeoning market by developing these “girl games,” characterized by gameplay involving dress-up and fashion, domesticity, dating, and shopping, all wrapped up in “pinkified” Barbie-inspired aesthetics.

Just as girl games became immediately popular, so too did they immediately generate controversies. Some feminists were concerned by the potentially sexist content of girl games, arguing that their gameplay perpetuated a narrow ideal of femininity centered around fashion, appearances, and relationships with men. Those on the other side of the debate claimed that playing girl games was actively participating in female culture and thus constituted an act of feminist resistance. In either case, girl games remain popular today, with recent titles like Infinity Nikki (2024) and Dress to Impress (2024) garnering millions of dedicated players. The last 30 years have proven that girl games (and the debates around them) are here to stay.

Most conversations about girl games place their emergence as a genre in the mid-90s with the release of Barbie Fashion Designer and Cosmopolitan Virtual Makeover. But digital games don’t just spring into existence—they are often rooted in an analog past. Girl games are no exception. As a longtime lover of girl games, I wanted to discover if there were any common threads between analog girl games and their video game descendants.

With The Strong’s generous support, I made the journey from Montana to New York to explore the museum’s vast collection of 19^th– and 20^th-century board games. My research goals were twofold. First, I hoped to contribute historical context for modern girl games and deepen our collective understanding of this significant, enduring genre. Second, as a game designer myself, I wanted to use my findings to offer informed suggestions to other designers working within the genre, so that we can continue to make girl games without perpetuating sexist ideals. My delightful weeks at the museum consisted of playing all manner of board games featuring women or girls. In addition, the knowledgeable staff at The Strong gave me the excellent suggestion of exploring the museum’s collection of trade catalogs, helping me uncover how these games were marketed during the period I was studying.

Before the 1960s, there were very few games that included depictions of women and girls; this was also true of men and boys. In fact, most games designed and sold from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries were traditional—like Dominoes, Checkers, Crokinole, Parcheesi, and various card games—which tend to be abstract in nature. Far from being gendered, these games were touted as appealing to all ages and sexes. The 1873 Milton Bradley catalog, for example, depicts both men and women playing games in parlors. A Sears catalog from 1936 describes a Carrom board as offering “endless amusement for the whole family from little sister to grandfather.” For nearly a hundred years, traditional games dominated the market in America, purchased by middle-class families to play in parlors to entertain guests or pass the time.

The few board games that did depict women during this era, like The Coquette and Her Suitors (1858), The Game of Captive Princess (1875), and Witzi Witch the Fortune Teller (1928) didn’t follow the conventions of the modern girl game genre. Notably, these board games don’t let you roleplay as women; rather, the woman serves as the player’s reward for winning. For example, both Coquette and Captive Princess feature male-only playing pieces, and players must race opponents to the finish line to win the maiden’s hand in marriage. This framing evokes the “damsel in distress” trope common to many early video games—but not girl games. Furthermore, the late 19^th– and early 20^th-century games I surveyed don’t feature the classic pink aesthetics typical of the girl game genre, nor do they include gameplay centered around fashion, beauty, or shopping. While most games featuring women from this period did include game mechanics and themes relating to marriage and courtship—a staple of modern girl games—the presentation of these themes and the lack of other important elements indicate that these early games don’t belong to the girl game genre.

By the 1960s, however, the first obviously recognizable tabletop girl games entered the market. This marks an important shift in the history of analog girl games. While gender-neutral, family-oriented games were still designed and produced, games made specifically for girls appear now, advertised as “For Girls Only.” One example is Miss Popularity Game (1961) where girls compete against one another in a popularity contest to win a bright pink trophy; “The game that all girls love to play!” emblazons the box. The rules are straightforward: draw a card and see what happens. Cards like “Most Attractive Teen” and “Pretty Legs” score girls popularity points. Breaking up with their boyfriend (“Break Up”) and neglecting their personal appearance (“Careless”) loses them points. Drawing “Wardrobe!” and gaining a full closet awards 100 popularity points, the highest possible in the game. With a girly pink aesthetic, a strong focus on appearance and fashion, and themes related to dating and marriage, Miss Popularity Games serves as a quintessential “girl game” despite predating Barbie Fashion Designer by 35 years.

Miss Popularity Game is only one example among many. From 1960 to the mid-1990s, all board games branded as “For Girls Only” use the same pop-pink aesthetics characteristic of girl games today. Again, like modern girl games, half of these earlier board games contain themes or gameplay related to marriage and dating. For example, the entire premise of The Bride Game (1972) is planning the perfect wedding; in multiple others, getting a steady boyfriend is required to win the game. Most strikingly, every single board game analyzed from this 30-year period drew attention to the player’s appearance, discussing her wardrobe, body type, hair, makeup, and attractiveness.

Focusing on the player’s appearance is necessary for dress-up and fashion games. However, many of these board games went a step further, punishing players for not being pretty enough, not doing their makeup well enough, or not being able to afford to go to the salon. In Girl Talk (1988), players must put a large red “zit sticker” on their face, intended to shame her if she fails. In What Shall I Be? The Exciting Game of Career Girls (1966; 1972), drawing a “personality card” describing the player as overweight means that she is unfit for pursuing a career as an airline hostess or ballet dancer. Many of these early girl games do present a narrow ideal of femininity, and girls learn they must be young, thin, white, attractive, and at least middle-class to “win.” This framing is tragic; no game designer should include mechanics that punish or shame players for failing to meet unrealistic beauty standards. No more zit stickers, please!

Of course, no genre of game is free from problematic titles. Despite the controversies, girl games tapped into experiences girls and women could relate to. Girl games established a new kind of engaging gameplay, which has maintained player interest for 75 years and counting. The aesthetics of girl games are eye-catching and vibrant; dressing up is a form of self-expression and engages the player’s creativity; relationships are important to our lives and negotiating them in game spaces is fun, allowing us to experiment safely. It’s not that we need to rid ourselves of girl games at all—in fact, I think we need more girl games, ones that broaden our understanding of what femininity is, and who it’s for. Rather than depicting femininity as something you can “win” and “lose,” girl games should give players a safe space to experiment with what gender means to them. Rather than being marketed only to girls, everyone should get the chance to dress up, play with romance, and wear whatever they want—including boys. I hope the girl games of the future invite everyone to play with femininity.

Written by, Ashley Rezvani, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow at The Strong National Museum of Play

The post From Girl Talk to Girl Games: The Analog History of Games for Girls appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

For those who are not familiar with CCGs, this is a genre of card games that emerged in the early 1990s, and encompasses games that are also called trading card games, customizable card games, expandable card games, among others. The general idea behind CCGs is that cards that are used to play the game can also be treated as collectible objects. This is achieved primarily through the use of randomized card distribution in booster packs, similar to how baseball cards are sold. Examples of CCGs you might be familiar with include the Pokémon Trading Card Game and digital games such as Hearthstone.

At the museum’s Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archive of Play, I found a wealth of material that directly addressed many of my research questions about the early days of the CCG genre. While the creation and growth of the first CCG, Magic: The Gathering, is well-documented, the months and years after the release of Magic, which saw the rapid growth of the CCG market and industry, has largely remained forgotten. Since the larger goal of my research is to look at the CCG genre broadly, its complete history was something that I felt needed to be recovered.

The first things that I sought out at the library were periodicals focused primarily on collectible card games, namely magazines such as The Duelist, Scrye, Conjure, and Inquest. These publications grew out of the CCG boom in the early- to mid-1990s, but eventually disappeared in the 2000s as access to the Internet became more widespread. The Strong has an extensive holding of these publications, as well as foreign language magazines and even smaller publications such as zines. I also found a wealth of trade catalogs and flyers sent out by CCG publishers to distributors and game stores among the library’s holdings. 

The other category of material I looked at were archival documents from Mayfair Games, the game publishing company founded by Darwin Bromley. My particular interest in the Mayfair Games archive has to do with the firm’s role as the designer and publisher of SimCity: The Card Game, a CCG adaptation of the very popular computer game created by Will Wright, which was released in 1994. 

From examining these materials, here are some of the things that I’ve found that relate directly to my research. The first was the immediate impact on the gaming industry of the 1993 release of the first CCG, Magic: The Gathering. While I have said that the history of the game has been written about, this history is mostly told from the perspective of the publisher and game designer. For players, as well as other game designers and publishers, the weeks and months after the release of Magic were hectic. 

Within the Mayfair Games archive, I found printouts of message board posts about Magic from the time. These posts range from reviews of the game, reports from frustrated players about the scarcity of the game in local stores, and posts about the possible financial value of the cards. I also found message board posts from game designers, trying to understand how the game was made in the first place, and how the cards were being distributed randomly.

In the publications that I looked at, that same excitement is palpable in the letters sent in by players. Players wrote in about new or powerful cards they managed to find in packs, or unexpected card interactions that won them a game, or trades they’ve made to get cards they wanted. 

One magazine even had a section where game store owners from across the U.S. and Canada wrote in to report about the sales and activity around CCGs. A common thread in these game store owners’ early reports were the huge demand for the game and the very limited supply. Later, when other CCGs began coming out and Magic’s supply had risen to the point that it could fill the demand, the tone of these reports shifted to that of unsold boxes, accompanied by doubt and worry about the future of the market for these games.

The other thing that I found of real import to my research is an insider’s view of how one game company—in this case Mayfair Games—tried to figure out the CCG genre and market. As I mentioned, Mayfair Games published SimCity: The Card Game in 1995 but, as it turns out, they had worked on many other CCGs in the mid-1990s. The company tried to create CCGs based on the Parker Brothers card game Touring, the magazine National Geographic, and their own role-playing game DC Comics Heroes, based on the popular comic book IP.

However, of these many CCGs, Mayfair ended up producing only two, the first of which was SimCity. Mayfair Games had acquired the license to create a card game based on the video game in 1993. Mayfair Games believed that the SimCity CCG would be the game that would appeal, not just to fantasy and science fiction gamers, but to the mass audiences, as well. 

The Mayfair Games archive presents the history of the game’s development from its inception to its production, and finally its release and reception. One particularly interesting thing to find in the archive was the inclusion of cities in my home county, the Philippines, on the list of cities the game would have featured if it had achieved the massive success Mayfair Games had hoped it would be. The archival material also outlined the difficulties of producing and releasing the game. This included delays in design and in printing, as well as issues with how stores were allocating shelf space for the game. 

The other CCG Mayfair Games produced was called Fantasy Adventures and was released in 1996. Based on a card game the company had published in the 1980s called Encounters, Fantasy Adventures drew heavily from the fantasy genre like Magic and Spellfire, a CCG-based on the seminal tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. 

Unlike other CCGs of the time, which utilized original artwork from fantasy artists, Mayfair Games went to seasoned fantasy artists and bought second-rights to their artwork, many of which either appeared in magazines or graced book covers. This was one of the primary selling points of the game—that top-notch artists had created the art on the cards—because the company believed that the success of CCGs could be traced to the artwork on the cards. 

The other thing of note about Fantasy Adventure was that, even as the first edition of the game was being developed, Mayfair Games had already begun making deals with video game companies and publishers to create tie-ins. 

The biggest of these tie-ins was a set of cards featuring the world of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, which would be playable with the base game. Jordan himself would be involved in the development of this card set. The Mayfair Games archives includes letters from Jordan himself providing guidance and giving approvals for cards and the artwork that would appear in the cards. The company even tapped into Jordan’s massive fanbase to try and get the flavor of the cards right, by asking them to playtest the cards. Unfortunately, Fantasy Adventures was just one of more than 70 CCGs released in 1996 and, like all of them, the game soon went out of print.

While the study of successful CCGs such as Magic and Pokémon can tell us about what makes the game genre appealing to players and collectors alike, examining the largely forgotten games in the early days of the genre tell us about how the gaming and collectible industries adapted to the emergence of the CCG.  

Written by, Francis Paolo Quina, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow at The Strong National Museum of Play.

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What impact do adults—and the stories, movies, television shows, and games they create—have on children’s imaginative play and development? For decades, researchers explored this question and arrived at a variety of conclusions. But few play scholars of late 20th and early 21st centuries proved more influential on this research than psychologists Dorothy G. (1927–2016) and Jerome L. Singer (1924–2019). Having grown up in the years before television when radio captured children’s imaginations, the Singers did not see television and new media as inherently negative. But as they noted in their 2005 book Imagination and Play in the Electronic Age, they worried that children growing up in a culture awash in television, video games, and later the internet were in danger of being left “adrift in cyberspace.” As they observed in their research, children who watched a lot of television (three or more hours per day) weren’t using their imaginations in their play as much as those who watched less (one hour or less per day). Similarly, they asserted that, in their pretend play, children increasingly acted out stories and characters predetermined by the media they consumed rather than formed from their own imaginations. To help address these concerns, the Singers believed that adults should create better television shows to help enhance children’s imaginative play and that caregivers and educators had a special role to play by guiding children through what some deemed a vast wasteland of media and television programming.

In 2021, the Singer family donated to The Strong a collection of Dorothy and Jerome’s books and professional papers that help document the couple’s significant work as play scholars, with an emphasis on their roles as codirectors of the Yale University Family Television Research and Consultation Center. A deep dive into this collection illustrates (among other things) that through their work at the Center the Singers sought to help shape children’s television through their own research on kids and adults; consulting with television producers and evaluating their programming; and advising parents, educators, healthcare professionals, and policymakers on children and youth television usage.

The massive proliferation of television in American homes in the 1950s and 1960s spurred many media scholars to study its potential effects. As pioneers in an emerging scholarly field, the Singers wondered if the medium could help educate children and enhance their creativity. In 1974, the couple began studying the children’s public television program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968–2001), a show in which host Fred Rogers brought viewers into a fictional “neighborhood of make-believe” populated by puppets. This research suggested that television programs like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood could enhance children’s imaginative play. But the show was most effective if parents watched television with children to act as, what the Singers called, “intermediaries” or “translators.” Backed by these conclusions, the Singers founded the Yale University Family Television Research and Consultation Center in 1975. Over the next nearly four decades, the Singers published dozens of articles and books including, Television, Imagination, and Aggression: A Study of Preschoolers (1981), The House of Make-Believe: Children’s Play and the Developing Imagination (1990), and the edited Handbook of Children and the Media (2001 and 2012), which examined, at least in part, television’s potential role in children’s development.

The Singer’s earliest research on specific children’s television programs started with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, but it didn’t end there. The Center also studied shows such as Sesame Street (1969–present), Captain Kangaroo (1955–1984), and Degrassi Junior High (1987-1989). The couple had a particularly important influence on Barney & Friends, a program aimed at two- to five-year-old children and that centered on a costumed purple dinosaur named Barney. Launched in 1992 by Connecticut Public Television, the show remained on air until 2010. The Singers’ papers contain a bounty of materials related to the series, including research studies, content analyses, episode evaluation reports, research proposals, season synopses, scripts, and correspondence. All these materials paint a vivid picture of how much work went into producing a television series backed by research on the developmental benefits of watching Barney & Friends. But as the Singers contended, some of those benefits depended on how children watched.

The Center focused part of its resources on working with caregivers, educators, and other adults on how to get those benefits from TV. Along with research partner Dianne M. Zuckerman, the Singers published Teaching TV: How to Use TV to Your Child’s Advantage (1981), Getting the Most Out of the TV (1981), and The Parent’s Guide: Use TV to Your Child’s Advantage (1990). These books aimed to assist caregivers and teachers with making sense of television and adopting strategies to harness it as an educational tool. In the early 1980s, Dorothy also contributed a monthly column on “Television and the Family” in the popular magazine TV Guide. In 1991, the Singers published Critical Viewers: A Partnership Between Schools and Television Professionals, which sparked the development of teacher and parent workshops to help train adults to make these television programs more interactive for the children that watched them. The next year, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even commissioned the Center to prepare the report “A Role for Children’s Television in the Enhancement of Children’s Readiness to Learn” for the U.S. Congress. Taken together, these books, columns, and reports show the broad influence the Singers had on how adults viewed and understood children’s television.

On one level, this collection of the Singers’ books and professional papers provides us with a unique window into the relationship between play and children’s television in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But on another level, the collection demonstrates the Singers’ life work and their sincere commitment to helping adults support children’s imaginative play and development. As the couple observed in The House of Make-Believe, when grownups think back to their childhood pretend play, those memories are “often associated with a special person who encouraged play, told fantastic stories, or modeled play by initiating games,” and who “above all showed a trusting, loving acceptance of children and their capacity for playfulness.”

The post Exploring Play and Children’s Television in the Work of Psychologists Dorothy and Jerome Singer appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

The purpose of this fellowship was to build on my dissertation research, specifically delving further into the theory of metaplay. In my review of the literature, metaplay was poorly defined and inconsistent in its (under)utilization in scholarship since eminent anthropologist Gregory Bateson loosely introduced the idea in a conference paper in 1956 and renowned play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith vaguely alluded to it in The Ambiguity of Play (1997).

In my doctoral dissertation, I utilize a three-pronged approach to metaplay that draws on three additional theoretical components of play in order to examine and analyze contemporary digital game play practices. First is metagame or metagaming, which examines optimized forms of play or forms of play that deliberately take optimized strategies in mind, as put forward in recent articles by game studies scholar Scott Donaldson. The second is paratexts, in this context meaning any auxiliary or peripheral content surrounding a game or play. Examples include visual art, textual guides, industry-published guides, user-made content, and so on. The third component is capital, as discussed by the well-known sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (The Forms of Capital, 1986), but also particularly gaming capital, as put forth by distinguished game scholar Mia Consalvo (Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games, 2007), that examines the authority or “credit” to players, content creators, developers, and publishers garner and can wield to influence the direction of play practices.

Although I focused on digital gaming, I argue this approach can be widely applied to play and interaction more generally. While maintaining confidence in my doctoral research, I wanted to see if there was anything further that I hadn’t already consulted. I was curious if previous research and scholarship, particularly from Bateson and Sutton-Smith, would reveal any secrets or possibly see if research had a metaplay lens, even if not specifically named.

In the Ambiguity of Play, Sutton-Smith loosely refers to metaplay through discussing paradoxes of play found in meta-action and meta-communication, particularly in reference to Bateson’s 1956 paper “The message, ‘This is play.’” Bateson would proceed to build on this work in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). Here, I had the extraordinary and unique opportunity to consult the very same copy Brian Sutton-Smith first read and made comments and notes in.

The same phrases Sutton-Smith uses in these notes in the 1970s would appear in The Ambiguity of Play 20 years later, particularly phrases pertaining to the paradox of play. This referencing of the paradox of play became more prominent in Sutton-Smith’s work after reading Bateson’s book. Seeing his notes in the margins and how influential this book would become to his thinking was a treat.

The most annotated paper in the book, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” would become a staple in the fields of play and game studies. The notes that Sutton-Smith made here would be informative for play scholars for years to come, though the paper did still lack a definitive answer to metaplay itself. I found myself especially intrigued by a series of notes Sutton-Smith wrote at the end of the chapter but that had been covered up.

I could not decipher what was written here, and it was not feasible or appropriate to remove the covering. Who made the patch? Was it Sutton-Smith or someone else? Was there an insight here or a misinterpretation? I continued on through the Sutton-Smith papers archive, and followed the citations found in different research and conference papers. In turn, that led me to many different kinds of theorizing on metacommunication, meta-actions, and metapragmatics from multiple authors. A considerable amount of research referenced Bateson’s paper, and metacommunication has been the subject of serious scholarly debate. Improvisation and pretend play research often skirted between blending metacommunication and metaplay, but only a handful of papers followed through on the side of metaplay with differing approaches (see classroom play research by Stuart Reifel & June Yeatman, research by childhood play scholar G.G. Fein, and early childhood scholar Jeffery Trawick-Smith).

While reading different studies and takes on play, particularly those discussing communication or action in play, Robert Fagen’s Animal Play Behavior (1981) was often referenced. I am indebted to The Strong’s Dr. Jon-Paul Dyson for encouraging me to check this book, as I had not read Fagen’s work before. I was delighted to find Fagen put forward what he called an “aggregate” definition of play that also carried three components, so similar to my proposed definition of metaplay.

This was a highly important breakthrough for me, as it demonstrated the validity of proposing an aggregate definition that had multiple listed components. It also demonstrates, through research that references or draws on Fagen’s work, that utilizing part of the definition, or focusing on a particular component, does not invalidate the definition as a whole. Fagen stated that an element of vagueness remained, and through my own research I believe that vagueness is actually beneficial to play scholars. Similarly, I believe metaplay’s nebulous nature gives it strength to tie different play practices and phenomena across time and space. Throughout the different play studies I read while at The Strong, I could find trace elements to bring different pieces together to paint a broader picture of play.

One of the biggest strengths of the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and the Archives of Play was the ability to chain-link so many different studies and publications, no matter how small or slight. Being able to see a reference made to a particular article, conference paper, or book and then having access to that resource makes the archive truly invaluable. When I applied for a fellowship, I had a suspicion that I would quickly start branching out and going down rabbit holes outside of the list of resources I submitted, and naturally that did end up happening. Special thanks to David Sleasman and Stephanie Ball for entertaining my requests outside of my pre-arranged lists and for preparing the books and archival material for me. Coming from a background in Information Studies and Sociology, I had been unfamiliar with both Bateson and Sutton-Smith until I had started my qualifying exam studies. The Strong’s resources, including a variety of books with dedications, hand notes, and archived drafts and conference notes, demonstrated to me not only their importance in the field of play studies, but also the significance and impact they had on a number of scholars and their research.

In the end, I did not uncover a particular definition of metaplay that I found satisfactory. Bateson, Sutton-Smith, and others were content to let their description be nebulous and vague with room for interpretation. Older studies of children’s play mostly excluded external communications, instead focusing on direct communication as it happened in immediate play and play situations. R. Keith Sawyer came close in his book Pretend Play as Improvisation: Conversation in the Preschool Classroom (1997) but leaned more into metacommunication. This is understandable given the lack of telephones, smartphones, the internet, and instant communication platforms. The ability to continuously discuss, engage, consume, or interact with play or a game on a more fundamental level through these platforms has dramatically shifted from the immediate, face-to-face forms of play and game of the past, and continues accelerating, ever expanding into more domains of our everyday lives whether we choose to engage it or not. This expansion demands that play scholars take a hard look at all the different angles, components, and platforms that lead to moments and interpretations of active play.

I am grateful for the opportunity to dive into this and acknowledge the support of The Strong National Museum of Play’s Research Fellowship program, and Christopher Bensch and the committee for allowing me to study here.

By: Allen Kempton, G. Rollie Adams Research Fellow

The post Chasing Brian Sutton-Smith and Gregory Bateson: Retracing Metaplay appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

You might be wondering what IS all this stuff? And where did it come from? The curators and the library team work to identify materials for purchase, but the time and resources to find and purchase such collections are limited. The real gold frequently comes from donations both large and small. Through these donations, the enormous range and depth of play becomes apparent. One recent example of a large donation has been the corporate records of a video game company. Other recent examples include the product designs by creative professionals working on dolls and playground equipment, scholarly research on animal play, and interviews with video game creators and executives. Smaller collections commonly come from devoted collectors focused on a particular toy or game or form of play. Puzzles and puzzle-making, 19th-century kindergarten materials, competitive Scrabble, the logic of checkers, and 500 titles from one specific children’s book publisher are all topics of collections that have come to the museum through donations lately. In the process of answering reference questions, the library team sometimes discovers that we hold the only copy in any library in the United States or the world.

All these companies and individuals were motivated to donate their material by a very simple idea. Each wanted to ensure that their work, objects, and ideas would not be destroyed. Each wanted to share their passions and continue to be useful. Through the work of a dedicated team of professional historians, curators, archivists, and librarians, The Strong provides a haven to both preserve these essential resources and make them available for others to explore. This team is knowledgeable on the care of paper, digital, and recording media formats to protect the materials for future generations. Before any of that can happen, each donation started with a simple conversation or email to the library or one of museum’s curators asking the question, “Might the museum be interested in my materials?”

That simple question initiates a conversation about the volume of materials, physical condition, and subject(s) or topics covered. Central to this conversation for The Strong’s team is whether the collection might be helpful for researchers or exhibits, appropriate for the museum’s play-related mission, and whether any condition or storage issues may present a challenge. The Strong team askes potential donors to think about the collection. Questions might include:

– Are these materials about a particular topic or an organization?
– What is the general condition of the materials? Where have they been stored?
– What is the total amount of all the materials together?
– Could you send us a few pictures of the materials to help describe the collection?

The other side of this conservation from the potential donor perspective, frequently include:

– Is this the appropriate place to put my collection?
– Will my materials be used or simply sit on a shelf?
– Will you scan everything?
– How do I send it all to you?

This discussion is an important step—the museum does not accept unsolicited donations—and will be the difference between possible accepting the gift or politely declining it. Accepting the donation is a promise to the donor AND an obligation for the museum. That promise is not taken lightly and requires a good amount of thought for both sides of the conversation before further commitment.

If both the library team and the potential donor agree, the next step is the transfer of materials to the museum. Smaller collections arrive via FedEx or postal shipments while larger ones may involve whole tractor trailers. How donations arrive at the museum depends on the number of materials and how fragile they might be. Many donors pack and ship to the museum. Sometimes with larger and more fragile collections, a team from the museum may assist with the move or contract with a third party to pack and ship items to Rochester.

The library team then unpacks the materials and begins the process of documenting the collection in detail and formally transferring ownership to the museum. Accessioning is the museum term for the formal acceptance of ownership by The Strong. A critical part of the accessioning process is documenting exactly what we received. Since few collections arrive with a complete inventory, an initial sorting is invaluable. If the collection is large, a good amount of time (weeks, months, or even years) might be needed for this step. Then the detailed collection inventory is put forth for review and approval by the Strong’s Acquisitions team composed of representatives of the curatorial, interpretation, and administrative staff. After approval by the Acquisitions team, the donor will receive a Deed of Gift to sign. The Deed of Gift acknowledges what our initial sorting revealed and transfers legal ownership to the museum.

More detailed work for the museum team begins after accessioning. The library and archives staff begin to formalize descriptive detail about the collection and enter this detail in the appropriate collection database. The staff document the format, subject matter, and other details according to professional standards set by the American Library Association, Society of American Archivists, and by The Strong Museum staff itself. Part of this process might be to re-folder and re-box everything to make the items safe to move and handle. For digital data, the archives team follows a specific set of protocols as defined in The Strong’s Digital Preservation Manual to ensure the data is preserved and secure while being accessible for research.

For archives, the result of this work is something called a finding aid. A finding aid is a document that helps researchers understand what the materials are, what subjects are covered, who donated them, any potential restrictions, and then lists the files found in each container. For collections of books or published materials, the library team describes each volume in detail, including title, author, subject matter and shares that data with other libraries via a global resource for libraries called WorldCat, a special book-related database from tens of thousands of libraries. Anyone in the world can see if we have a particular book! Because of the type of materials The Strong collects, frequently we might be the only library in North America or the world to own it. It is common for library staff to receive emails or phone calls from all over the United States, Europe, or Asia about our unique holdings.

As this rigorous cataloging is completed, the results are searchable in the appropriate databases, also called catalogs. Researchers interested in using the library use these catalogs to discover what items might be helpful. The last step for especially exciting donations is The Strong issues press releases and social media posts to alert potential researchers about newly cataloged materials. If you are curious here a link to

• The book catalog and
• The archives catalog

On-site access to the full museum collection is available to scholars, students, collectors, and other researchers by appointment. Appointments may be made via an online form, by phone at 585-410-6349, or by sending an email to library@museumofplay.org. The library is open Monday-Friday, 9am-4pm (except holidays) and advance notice of at least two weeks is required. The relative quiet of the library, however, doesn’t easily reveal the importance of this collection beyond the museum building. The library team answered more than 500 requests for during 2024—in person and via email. These requests came from all over the United States and around the globe (Argentina, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, and the United Kingdom, for example).

If you have collections of books or papers related to play and are looking for a new home for them, please email or call to start a conversation!

By: David Sleasman, Senior Director of Libraries and Archives

The post A Research Library atop The Strong Museum—Powered by Donations appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

Contemporary travel is a special kind of pandemonium, an admixture of excitement, fear, consumerism, and intense security measures. It can be a rather playful experience too, particularly in the U.S. The stops that took me from Pullman, Washington, where currently I live and work, to The Strong National Museum of Play are a case in point. First it was Pullman to Spokane, then it was Spokane to Las Vegas, where I transferred to a flight to Rochester, New York. To get to the Spokane airport, I hitched a ride north with a Native colleague of mine and his son on their way home to the Confederated Tribes of Colville Reservation to do some hunting. Along the way we had lunch at the Northern Quest Casino & Resort owned and operated by the Kalispell Tribe on a day they happened to be hosting a contest powwow. The wispy jingle of women walking around wearing their jingle-dresses and the din of digital slot machines faded into the background as we joked and told stories over Fat Burgers. The Las Vegas airport was of course filled with similar slot machines, themed just as likely around the majestic buffalo as Netflix’s hit show Squid Game. However upon arrival at the Rochester airport, I couldn’t help but smile when noticing, along with glass display cases celebrating historic play objects, a different kind of playful sound. In this case it was of older arcade cabinets, with their distinctively nostalgic bleeps and bloops, set up by curators from The Strong.

My name is Tony Brave (Lakota and Chippewa-Cree) and I am a scholar of media, play, and games who’s in the throes of writing my dissertation titled United States of Play: A Critical Indigenous History of Play. It spans the late 18th to the 20th centuries, recounting Native/non-Native relations in the U.S. as told through and around historical play objects. With an archive of hundreds of thousands of play objects, what better place to do this research than The Strong? With seasoned advice from my dissertation chair, I applied for and was generously awarded the Valentine-Cosman fellowship through The Strong, which, along with funding from my workplace (Washington State University), afforded what was for me a rather special opportunity to travel from coast to coast and spend two precious weeks digging into archives, engaging with researchers, and playing through The Strong’s numerous exhibitions.

For someone whose life has been deeply touched by play and as a scholar with a keen interest in the subject with normally very little access to such archives, part of me admittedly felt like a Native Charlie Bucket winning the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory. The first day of my visit was on a national holiday and I took the opportunity to experience the museum alongside the hundreds if not thousands of others who made the pilgrimage to the museum on their day off. It was a cacophony of play, as well as labor. Over the course of my stay, I found joy in multiple ways such as sneaking more than a peek into the archives of Atari’s coin-op division, playing Warrior (1979) with the arcade technician (it turns out that buggy vector graphics make for incredible visuals) as well as in somewhat ironically playing as T. Hawk on the Super Street Fighter 2 cabinet. My favorite moment probably had to be hanging out and chatting with the archivist team over chocolate milkshakes. Indeed, play can certainly be joyful but, as scholar Dr. Aaron Trammell persuasively argues in Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology, experiences of play can and have often been physically or symbolically violent, particularly for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) folks. That is, throughout U.S. history we have often been either the objects of play or make up the labor and structures undergirding it.

In my research, I try to capture both positive and negative valences of play, highlighting stories of Indigenous joy (i.e. survivance) along with the ways in which play has been used to reproduce settler-colonial ideologies and how these have gotten mixed up over the course of centuries. I was unable to find a great deal of historical evidence of survivance at The Strong. At least not in this visit. When survivance was present, however, it stood out. Being able to, for example, access Anishinaabe artist and game designer Beth LaPensée’s archival collection was a treat along with being able to play in arcade cabinet from another LaPensée creation, my all-time favorite video game When Rivers Were Trails. Standing next to a massive picture of Pascua Yaqui and Cherokee John Romero with the Apple II he used to teach himself how to make games was quite moving. Besides these notable exceptions, the vast majority of materials relating to Native Americans I uncovered at the Strong can be described as, at best, stereotypical, and at worst, well, pretty overtly racist.

This situation, of course, should be understood as more of a reflection of the U.S. than the archive and, despite such blatant racism, I am thankful such materials have been preserved. Still, when I sit down to recall my two-week visit to The Strong, it is not the play objects, trade journals, and the thoughtful exhibitions (rare and inspiring as they are) that first come to mind. It is the people—from the friendly (and surprisingly stylish) security office workers who handed me my visitor badge every morning, the custodial staff who patiently helped me find my way around the Strong’s labyrinth of backrooms when I got lost, the warm hospitality and tireless support of the archivist team (including volunteers and interns), the beautiful auntie at the food court who remembered my favorite order, the research specialists whose expertise and advice on all things play proved indispensable, the research specialist who took the time to walk the museum floor with me, the preservationist who with a wry smile and a few swift clicks of a mouse put in front of me id Software’s infamous Super Mario Bros. 3 clone, upper management staff who were just as eager as I was to put on the gloves and take a look at the objects and to think through settler-Indigenous relations together, to the cascade of excited museum-goers—some of whom felt compelled enough by the experience to randomly strike up conversations with me about their childhood memories of play, or challenge me to a match of Street Fighter 2!

For me, this trip was not just a journey; it was a ceremony. At the risk of essentializing myself, dare I say it was sacred. It was also playful (as if these terms are mutually exclusive). While I deploy classic archival research methods in my research, my approach to research is foremost about building and maintaining equitable, living relationships as best as I can within the scope of my research topic, the limit of my abilities, and my pre-established relations. In my case, in visiting, my goal was not just “intellectual,” but about embodying the ways play has played a role in the longstanding, often inequitable, but nonetheless complex Native/non-Native relations in the U.S. If the opposite of dispossession is connection, then research is much more than simply retrieving, synthesizing, and publishing information. This is because connection requires sustained effort, an acceptance of responsibility, as well as an openness to new experiences. So, when I find out there’s a Women in Games panel happening in the evening that week? Sign me up! Dinner with The Strong’s scholar-in-residence? I’m hungry just thinking about it. A brown bag lunch to chat further with Strong Museum staff? I wouldn’t miss it. An opportunity to give back through a blog post? Well, you’re reading it.

Archived in play spaces, objects, and material relations are histories in need of repair, and such work will not happen until we begin to take collective responsibility for said histories of play. I am happy to report my efforts were returned in kind. I was impressed by the willingness of those whose careers are dedicated to sharing the joy of play to not only confront play’s harsher side alongside me, a relative stranger, but to stand with me, joke with me, challenge me, and to support this research as I trudged through what was for the most part a centuries-long parade of bigotry (with a splash of romanticism) when it comes to Native Americans. Because of this, I can’t wait to make the journey all over again. There’s always more work (and play) to be done.

By: Tony Brave, 2024 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow

The post Relational Play appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

Historical images did appear occasionally during the first three decades of Playthings issues. They included several different types of cowboy and Indian outfits, a few ads for Lincoln Logs, the use of Ben Franklin to promote a stereopticon (a slide projector that created three-dimensional images using two-dimensional photos), and a Salem Witch fortune teller. But a much larger percentage of the advertisements promoted the novelty or modernity of their products.

The most common method toymakers used to emphasize their modernity was to focus on technology. Trains, cars, and airplanes appeared in almost every issue and, by the 1910s, many advertisements hailed products as “electric.” Erector sets helped children learn how to build, while microscopes and toy motors taught them to understand science and mechanics. Weapons were everywhere, beginning with “harmless” pistols and Little Daisy Guns for girls and expanding during World War I to include battleships and the “Big Dick Bradley Machine Gun.” Even traditional toys like kitchen utensils celebrated their cast-iron materials.

Companies also sought to emphasize the novelty of their products by linking them to contemporary American culture. The exploding popularity of sports across the nation was reflected in the prevalence of toys featuring horse racing, basketball, tennis, golf, and especially baseball. Early products featured current comic strip characters such as Buster Brown and Foxy Grandpa (I had never heard of this latter character, but I made sure to send a copy of one of these ads to my dad), and later ones celebrated athletes such as pitcher Christy Mathewson and movie stars such as Charlie Chaplin and his costar in The Kid, Jackie Coogan. Playthings issues from the 1920s also offered dolls reflecting contemporary celebrity roles and fashions for women, including The Vamp, Flo-Flo of the Follies, and Nettie the Greenwich Village Bob.

Another product tied to current events was the teddy bear, which became wildly popular after the press promoted a story of President Theodore Roosevelt sparing a bear cub during a 1902 hunting trip. I knew about this origin story before coming to The Strong, but I had no idea that toymakers sought to perpetuate this success by creating stuffed animals connected to President William Howard Taft (“Billy Possum”) and Woodrow Wilson (“Woody Tiger”). This practice ended with President Warren Harding, when toymakers shifted to producing replicas of his pet dog, Laddie Boy.

Publishers of children’s books and magazines also emphasized the modern features of their products. The Youth’s Companion and St. Nicholas, the nation’s two most successful children’s magazines during this era, were filled with sports stories and tales of young people learning how to thrive in contemporary American cities. Edward Stratemeyer, the preeminent publisher of series books between 1900 and 1930, featured series about college athletes, Motor Girls, Racing Boys, and Motion Picture Comrades. Yet these publications additionally looked back to the past of the United States and other nations. Stratemeyer published series about colonial and pioneer boys. C.A. Stephens, one of The Youth’s Companion’s most popular writers, set most of his stories on a farm in 19th-century Maine. During its first decade recognizing outstanding children’s books published in the U.S., the Newbery Medal was awarded to five books of historical fiction and nonfiction and two books of folklore.

The most prominent tradition that the toy industry carried over from the 19th century was its racial and ethnic intolerance. Children’s books and magazines of the era mostly marginalized people who were not white and Protestant, and such characters as did appear were almost always presented as unattractive, unintelligent, and cowardly. Toy advertisements promoted cultural prejudices more directly, and in more specifically racialized stereotypes such as a Watermelon Sam figurine, a ring toss game featuring Aunt Sally “an old Virginia darkey,” and an “Alabama Coon Jigger” dancing toy. Other racial caricatures such as Chinese coolies and shrunken head Indian masks appeared in the magazine, but with less frequency than those targeting African Americans.

A few advertisements in Playthings even displayed the propensity toward racial violence characteristic of this early 20th-century period when lynchings in the United States reached their peak. “Coontown Shooting Gallery” presented a white boy taking target practice on a series of Black heads, and the ad for American Soldier Military Game combined violence with Jim Crow humor. It shows a white boy aiming his rifle at a Black boy’s backside. The text of the latter ad reads “Little Ebony (anxiously): “Say l’il white boy, am you goin’ to shoot whar you am aimin’ at? Little White Boy: You bet your sweet life I am. Little Ebony: Ah reckon you better hol’ dese here sojers your own self.”

The divergence of these toy advertisements, with their disinterest in history and more explicit racial animus, has me rethinking the structure of my book project. To a certain extent, the comparison between children’s publications and toy ads is flawed because the former are directed toward young consumers and the latter toward adults. Unfortunately, in the absence of a trade publication for children’s publishers or of toy ads directly targeting children (which did not appear until several decades later) this pairing represents the best historical evidence I have found thus far. So what are the possible explanations behind these two mediums’ contrasting approaches to the nation’s past? One might be a difference in the education level between audiences for children’s literature and those for a trade magazine. Another could be gender, since “bookwomen” working as authors, editors, and librarians were becoming increasingly prominent in the early 20th century children’s publishing industry, and I have found little evidence of female salespeople within the toy industry.

The disparity between my expectations and findings in The Strong’s archives was disconcerting, but discovering an absence of evidence is also a crucial step in developing historical interpretations. Since The Strong has the only complete run of Playthings magazine from this era east of the Mississippi (and one of only two in the nation), it was an essential stop in my research process. The staff was also incredibly knowledgeable and kind, so I hope to return to the museum soon to continue developing my understanding of the cultures that shaped toy manufacturing, promotion, and consumption during this period.

Written by Paul Ringel, 2024 G. Rollie Adams Research Fellow

The post Toys and U.S. History in Playthings Magazine appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

As part of my doctoral research, I’m working mainly on video games designed for the domestic space, i.e. home consoles and personal computers. I’m interested in how users learn to play with such devices, focusing on paper manuals (the instruction booklets sold in the same box as the cartridge/CD, which almost entirely disappeared in the mid-2010s) and tutorials (the instruction transmission phases integrated directly within the games). I would argue that there is a historical connection between these two instructional forms, with the reduction and disappearance of one linked to the generalization and complexification of the other. This history is far from linear: there was a long period of coexistence between the manual and the tutorial and, in fact, there are multiple in-game helping systems. These changes nonetheless point to a notable evolution in players’ practices.

The operation of instructions in arcade games is typically different. Indeed, a recurring trend employed by developers is to inscribe instructions, as well as game hints and information about the fictional world and the narrative, directly on the arcade terminal. These textual and iconic indications then become an integral part of the design of these objects, in the same way as drawings and engravings.

My stay at The Strong National Museum of Play gave me the opportunity to study almost a hundred arcade terminals spanning the history of video games, from the first electronic games like Pong (Atari, 1972) to the most contemporary and experimental productions like Hair Nah (Momo Pixel, 2021), not forgetting the many adaptations of comic strips (Popeye, Nintendo, 1982), comic books (X-Men, Konami, 1992), cartoons (Road Runner, Atari, 1985), films (Aliens, Konami, 1990), or video games from other devices (Temple Run, Coastal Amusement, 2012) released throughout the history of arcade gaming.

The history of the integration of instructions into arcade terminals has yet to be written. Interviews would be worthwhile, to understand players’ practices. For example, was it customary to read the instructions before or while playing? However, some observations that I made on site are already worth sharing.

The first, and perhaps most important, relates to the integration of instructions directly into the software. Indeed, arcade game instructions exist not only in printed form, but also as textual or visual indications on the screen, so, within the games themselves. Instructions can appear on home screens, alternating with legal information, high score tables, non-interactive demos, and more. Or they can be in-game, immediately after inserting a coin, or as the game progresses, automatically or at the player’s request via a dedicated button.

My first hypothesis was that this phenomenon was marginal—in other words, that printout largely dominated instructional transmission in arcade gaming. This was only half true. In fact, while the vast majority of arcade terminals do have printed instructions, whether in the form of a textual association of buttons with certain actions, a list of guidelines formulated in the imperative or infinitive, or an enumeration of tips, almost two-thirds of arcade terminals I’ve tested contain in their computer code what might be considered as instructions. Far from being a minor option, this transmission of instructions within the arcade game remains a frequent choice, sometimes existing for its own sake, sometimes duplicating the printed instructions.

My second hypothesis was that the appearance of instructions in the software of arcade games did not occur until the 1990s, when such helping systems were implemented in home consoles and computers. The history of the home and arcade markets are intertwined, constantly borrowing aesthetics, genres, and franchises from each other. Tutorials would have emerged alongside the development of more complex gameplay requiring, as it were, a more guided learning phase. This is the case with arcade games such as Gauntlet Legends (Atari/Midway, 1998) which, in addition to several tutorials, adds a password-based save system. The programming of these checkpoints and backup systems is extremely rare for arcade gaming, compared to home devices.

Furthermore, if my hypothesis was correct, my observations could have followed in the footsteps of the historical and theoretical findings made by Mathieu Triclot (Philosophie des jeux vidéo) and Carl Therrien (From the Deceptively Simple to the Pleasurably Complex) regarding the evolution of design, in the case of the former, and of helping systems, in the case of the latter, in the history of video games.

However, as you may have guessed, this hypothesis was completely wrong. From 1981 onwards, with arcade games like Frogger (Konami), I was able to observe the presence of instructions in the software. It is not an isolated case, since many arcade games from the early to late 1980s incorporate a form of instructional transmission within the games themselves, including famous ones like Joust (William Electronics, 1982) or Tetris (Atari, 1988). Although some of these tutorials may appear “primitive,” the fact remains that the desire to make the screen instructionally self-sufficient was already well and truly present.

The case of Nintendo is particularly interesting in this respect. The first Super Mario Bros. (1985) and The Legend of Zelda (1986) released on the NES had almost no helping system inside the games (almost everything was in the manual). It wasn’t until The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991) on SNES that a regular instructional system was introduced. Meanwhile, on the arcade market, Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1983) already included a video sequence at the start of the game, teaching the player how to fight the Koopas Troopas.

The second general observation I’d like to make concerns the highly diversified nature of arcade terminals. Firstly, hybrid devices exist. One example is Baby Pac-Man (Bally Midway, 1982), which combines a computer system—the one of an arcade game—with a pinball machine. Therefore, the game alternates between a mechanical and an electronic game, testifying to the proximity between these two types of objects, not only in ludic terms (in both cases, the aim is to survive as long as possible and score as many points as possible), but also in terms of their economic model (it costs 25 cents to start a game, with a certain number of balls/lives) and spatial location (public places dedicating to entertainment). Perhaps the creation of such a distinctive intermedial device was Bally Midway’s strategy to attract pinball fans to the arcade game based on a well-known license, or vice versa?

Of course, Baby Pac-Man is also very interesting from the point of view of learning. Indeed, there are no instruction on the printout, only certain buttons associated, either textually (starting the game and launching the ball) or iconographically (choosing the number of players) with a specific ludic action. All instructions are on the screen, but they don’t relate to the arcade game: they involve exclusively the pinball machine, allowing the developers to spell out the specific rules of this device when intertwined with a video game. The only instruction regarding the electronic game appears just after inserting a token (“Player 1: Use joystick to play maze”), as a brief reminder of the Pac-Man core principle. But it’s still a fascinating inversion: here, the new digital game is self-sufficient, compared to the much older mechanical game, which requires, almost paradoxically, instructions via digital technologies.

Secondly, most of the time, an arcade terminal corresponds to one game, unlike the domestic market where many games exist for a single type of computer/console and can be purchased independently. My explorations of The Strong Museum’s collections led me to discover that there are some devices that don’t fit into this paradigm. Typically, PlayChoice-10 (Nintendo, 1986) allows the user to play 10 different games. The money inserted into the machine no longer corresponds to a number of lives, but to a time: each token equals to 5 minutes of play. These terminals attest to the existence of alternative practices in arcade gaming, where the player can enjoy navigating between several games on a same device, and where not everything is centered on the challenge. Indeed, for the same amount of money, all players spend the same amount of time playing, unlike the traditional model where the best players can usually stay longer.

Once again, the case of instructions is relevant to study here. In fact, with this type of device, it’s impossible to inscribe all the instructional information on the arcade terminal. New solutions must be found. If I stay on the example of PlayChoice-10, the “A” and “B” buttons are explicitly specified on the printout, so that the player can associate all the guidelines with the controllers in front of him/her. There’s a clear separation between the instructions for navigating the menus between games and those for the games themselves: the former appear on the terminal, while the latter are coded into the software and accessed via a button. One of the device’s two screens is specifically dedicated to displaying these tutorials. Therefore, depending on the game in progress, the instructions will change, allowing dynamic updating of the tutorials. Here, instructions are inscribed into the software to compensate for a lack of physical space.

These various cases testify to the richness of arcade terminals with respect to the transmission of instructions, but also to the creativity demonstrated by game designers in seeking and finding alternative solutions. They also show that a history of learning in arcade rooms is a necessary and complementary study to the one currently in progress for the domestic space.

Written by Michael Wagnières, 2024 Strong Research Fellow

The post Game Instructions: How Do You Learn to Play in an Arcade Room? appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.