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.

On September 16, film lovers mourned the loss Robert Redford, star of The Sting, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, and many other popular movies. For game show fans, the name Robert Redford is connected with one film where he never stepped in front of the camera: he directed 1994’s Quiz Show, a dramatic retelling of the 1950s quiz show scandal.

The scandal involved the producers of several game shows effectively rigging the outcomes, and claiming that the shows were not rigged. One of these shows was NBC’s Twenty One. Herb Stempel had been winning games and had become a champion, but Twenty One executive producer Dan Enright told him to lose to a handsome, charismatic newcomer named Charles Van Doren. Apparently, Enright promised Stempel a slot as a panelist on a new series in development, but Enright didn’t keep his promise, and Stempel blew the whistle. Unfortunately, nobody seemed to care. Not much happened until another contestant on another popular show called Dotto went public with a similar claim. This led to investigations, a Grand Jury, Congressional hearings, cancellation of many game shows, and federal regulations to prevent rigging in the future.

More than 30 years after the dust had settled from the scandal, Robert Redford made Quiz Show to explore what happened. In 1994, he told interviewer Bobbie Wygant, “[The quiz show scandal] has so much to do with where we are today…where we can be so numb, so cynical, and so…shoulder-shrugging about major moral violations in our lives. Falls from grace, from presidents to military people to political figures, religious leaders… leaves us with this eroded trust, which is sort of a big deal. [A] society without something to trust, a society awash in moral ambiguity is not a great place to be, so how did we get there?”

Robert Redford’s Quiz Show provided a behind-the-scenes look at NBC’s Twenty One, but it mostly ignored the complicated legal questions. It’s a motion picture with no documentary intentions. According to some critics, the movie’s storytelling was no more trustworthy than the producers and contestants who perpetrated the scandals. And, from our perhaps more accurate historical perspective, neither the scandals nor the movie nor the legal and journalistic frenzy surrounding the quiz scandals ought to be trusted.

As with many “based-on-a-true-story” films, Quiz Show used reality as a jumping-off point. In the movie, Charles Van Doren auditioned to be a contestant on Tic Tac Dough (another popular game show from the same production company). That never happened. In fact, Twenty One producer met Van Doren at a party and cast him — with none of the application or testing process common today on game shows. In the film, Stempel fails to answer a question and loses the game. That didn’t happen either. As with any fictionalized account of real events, the movie takes liberties to make the story more interesting. Congressional attorney Richard Goodwin is credited as a co-producer on the film. He told The Washington Post, “[Robert Redford’s team] is not trying to con anyone. They’re trying to make a good movie.”

And that’s reasonable, but as Twenty One co-executive producer Dan Enright’s son Don pointed out in his oral history interview for The Strong Museum’s National Archives of Game Show History, Redford conceded to altering the truth to make a more interesting entertainment product… and added, isn’t that what the quiz show producers were doing?

Apparently, the quiz show producers of the 1950s accomplished their goal. In 1987, film critics Siskel & Ebert enthusiastically reviewed a Shokus Video collection of big-money quiz show episodes from the 1950s. Gene Siskel freely admitted, “I couldn’t care if some of the contestants were briefed beforehand. It is great theater!”

Roger Ebert, reviewing Redford’s Quiz Show seven years later, printed a review that seemed to grieve for what had been lost from television’s past. Ebert admitted that he simply didn’t like modern game shows. Instead, he appreciated the challenging, if rigged, quiz shows of the 1950s.

Ebert also seemed to view the quiz show scandals in the same light that Redford saw them—as the end of something that a nation used to possess. “Now take stock of what we have lost in the four decades since Twenty One came crashing down. We have lost a respect for intelligence; we reward people for whatever they happen to have learned, instead of feeling they might learn more. We have forgotten that the end does not justify the means – especially when the end is a high TV rating or any other kind of popular success. And we have lost a certain innocent idealism.”

That may be true, but an idealist might also believe that it’s better for a game show to be a truly honest endeavor. Because of the scandal captured in Redford’s film, laws were enacted and measures were put into place to ensure exactly that. For over 65 years, game shows have been produced in accordance with these rules.

To learn more about those laws, NAGSH has produced another oral history interview, this one focused entirely on “standards and practices.” These standards and practices are followed by every contemporary game show producer, staff member, network executive, advertising executive, contestant, and host.

The post Robert Redford…and Quiz Show appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

As CEO of OrangeOnions, I’ve built my career as part of a team designing toys that bring comfort, creativity, and connection across generations. But long before patents, plush characters, and partnerships, it all began with one beloved object: My blankie.

For nearly 50 years, my blankie traveled with me—from childhood bedrooms to red-eye flights, through family milestones and global meetings. It wasn’t just my comfort—it was my cape, my tent, my magic carpet. And recently, I made the bittersweet decision to donate it to The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY, where its story continues as part of a museum dedicated to the meaning of play.

The Red Wagon That Changed Everything

• A flying carpet
• A fort roof
• A ghost costume
• A cloak of invisibility
• And always, a source of comfort

It wasn’t just fabric. It was a blank canvas for imagination.

I was six years old. We were riding home after a joyful Passover celebration, my dad pulling my brother and me in our bright red Radio Flyer wagon, our blankies bundled on our laps. At some point, mine slipped out. It was run over in the street. I was devastated—until the next morning, when I picked it up, slipped my head through the hole, and transformed it into a superhero cape. From that day on, my blankie became whatever I needed it to be:

A Podcast, an Email, and a New Journey

Years later, I listened to an episode of The Playground Podcast, hosted by Christopher Byrne and the late Richard Gottlieb, both legends of the toy industry, where Christopher Bensch, VP of Collections at The Strong, shared that the museum had never acquired a real childhood blankie—despite its emotional legacy. That stuck with me. Three years later, I reached out to him:

“Chris, I’ve been contemplating this for a while, and now—three years since your podcast appearance—I’ve decided. I’m offering to donate my favorite childhood blankie to The Strong. It’s been my companion through every bedtime story, every journey, every dream.”

His response was warm and affirming:

“Reading your email this afternoon brought laughter and delight—the power of your blankie and its history made vividly present. You may have even given me the subject for an upcoming blog.”

“Wait… You’re Giving That Away?”—My Kids React

When I told my kids, their reaction was a mix of disbelief, affection, and bewilderment.

“You’re giving that away? To a museum? Who would even want your old, ripped-up blankie?”

I laughed, but deep down I knew: it wasn’t about the appearance—it was about the story. The joy. The transformation. That blankie was my sidekick, my safe place, and my creative launchpad. The chance to embarrass them was just the icing on the cake.

A Visit to The Strong I’ll Never Forget

When I arrived to deliver my blankie, I was welcomed by Christopher Bensch, who gave me and my son an unforgettable private tour of the museum’s vault. Inside were treasures from across toy history—prototype action figures, classic arcade machines, vintage dolls, and iconic board games.

But what stood out most was Chris’s storytelling. He didn’t just show us objects—he shared their emotional and cultural meaning. His warmth, insight, and passion left a lasting impression. I’ve spent decades in this industry, and I can say without hesitation: he’s one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met.

Afterward, my son and I spent hours exploring the museum. We laughed, built, raced, played—and then made our way to Hasbro Game Park, where we completely lost track of time. From the bright, bold play structures to the larger-than-life Hasbro characters we’ve long admired, it was a celebration of childhood brought to life. We climbed, spun, slid, and marveled at how the lines between toy and imagination could disappear so joyfully. It was, without question, one of the highlights of our visit.

The Psychology of Play, and a Quote That Stuck with Me

In one exhibit hall, I paused to read a quote from a museum sign:

“There are many ways of playing, and every time we pursue one, we experience six basic psychological elements of play: anticipation, surprise, pleasure, understanding, strength, and poise.”

That blankie gave me every single one of those. And nearby, a quote from Fred Rogers stopped me in my tracks:

“When children pretend, they’re using their imaginations to move beyond the bounds of reality. A stick can be a magic wand. A sock can be a puppet. A small child can be a superhero.”

That small child was me. And thanks to that blankie, I believed I could be anything.

How It Inspired OrangeOnions

That belief is what led me to found OrangeOnions—a toy company built on the same spirit of creative transformation, emotional safety, and storytelling. Our first product lines were born from that same desire to combine comfort and character, just like my blankie once did.

• Blankie Besties are part plush, part blanket, and all heart—companions that provide emotional reassurance and spark imagination.
• Our patented Snugible are wearable plush friends that offer warmth, security, and a bit of whimsy—beloved by toddlers, seniors, and especially kidults, the growing audience of adults who embrace play for comfort and joy.

Through partnerships with legacy brands like Sesame Street, Hasbro, NASA, NASCAR, NCAA, and Monopoly, we create products that don’t just entertain—they connect. Across generations. Across cultures. Across memories.

The Most Rewarding Part

The most rewarding part of my job? It’s not the innovation or the retail milestones. It’s the moments when I see children truly enjoying the toys we’ve created—their faces lighting up, their hands gripping a character they instantly love. Many of those moments are captured in photos that grace the walls of our offices—reminders that our work has meaning. But nothing compares to seeing my own children and grandchildren find joy in the very products that were born from my blankie’s legacy. Watching them snuggle a Snugible, or imagine wild stories with a Blankie Bestie, brings it all full circle.

A Legacy of Play

Donating my blankie wasn’t saying goodbye—it was passing something forward. It was an invitation for others to dream, to play, and to believe in the quiet magic of ordinary things.

I grew up in a loving, warm home where imagination was encouraged, storytelling was second nature, and my blankie was as much a part of my family as any toy or tradition. That nurturing environment shaped who I became—and taught me that play isn’t just about fun. It’s about connection, creativity, and courage. To children building forts in the living room, to parents creating safe spaces for wonder, to grandparents reliving childhood through their grandchildren: never underestimate the power of play.

A torn blanket became my superhero cape. That cape inspired a company. That company became my life’s work. And through it all, I’ve learned that play has no expiration date. It transcends age, era, and background. It teaches us who we are—and who we can become.

This journey has been the joy of a lifetime. And my hope is that my blankie, now resting at The Strong, will continue to spark dreams, comfort hearts, and remind people of every generation: sometimes, the most powerful things in life begin with play. It all began with a blanket.

The post Why I Donated My Blankie to The Strong Museum of Play: From a Childhood Cape to a Legacy of Imagination appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

It’s back-to-school time, so this is a reminder to the parents and guardians out there to make sure your students are all stocked up on class supplies—pencils, notebooks, folders, buzzers, and bells. Wait, buzzers and bells?

That’s right. Game shows have gone back to school. In 2024, National Archives of Game Show History co-founder Bob Boden and longtime Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! executive producer Harry Friedman established a curriculum of academic courses about game shows for California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA).

Friedman explains, “I was at a TV Academy Foundation conference about three years ago. I was randomly seated next to Dr. Dina Ibrahim, who was heading up Cal State University’s entertainment alliance. We talked and she seemed intrigued by the work I did. We began discussing game shows, and how ubiquitous they are, and the effect they’ve had on pop culture.”

Friedman, half-jokingly, told Dr. Ibrahim, “I think you should have a course about game shows, how to produce them, and how to develop them.”

To Friedman’s surprise, she liked the idea. Dr. Kristiina Hackel, the head of the Department of TV, Film and Media Studies at Cal State LA, asked Friedman to draft a proposal for coursework. Friedman called Bob Boden and asked if he could help brainstorm some ideas for the course.

Friedman says, “90 minutes later, Bob [sent] me a fully formed 13-week production course schedule. It turned out that this was something that Bob had already tried to create for UCLA, and they didn’t move forward with it. We modified maybe 10 percent of Bob’s original idea, just because the entertainment business had changed enough in that time that the class had to reflect those changes, but everything we needed was already there.”

Students who are interested can take three classes over a series of semesters. They begin with a class called “Get in the Game,” an introduction to game and reality competition shows. The second semester is called “The Game Plan,” focusing on how to develop game show formats and sell them to production companies, networks, and media platforms. The third semester, “Hands on Buzzers,” explores the ins and outs of how to produce a game show.

The professors are game show production veterans Stuart Krasnow, Shannon Perry, Sean Loughlin, and Joey Ortega. Ortega taught high school for three years prior to going into game show production, and that academic background was partly why he was asked to help teach these courses.

Ortega says, “Cal State LA is interesting because there’s such a mix of students. Some are later-in-life students who want to change careers, some are 22 and just about to step in the real world. For the game show curriculum specifically, a lot of our students are media majors; film and television production majors. Many of them hadn’t thought of game shows as a pathway to a career. They came here thinking of a media career in terms of ‘filmmaking’ and the game show classes have taught them that there’s this other route that they can take.”

At a time when the media landscape is in flux, and the way people consume entertainment has changed so drastically in only a single generation, Ortega has been fascinated by learning about what his students already know, and delighted by the opportunity to expand their horizons.

“A lot of my students tend to come into the class knowing Deal or No Deal, Wipeout, and Family Feud. These are the shows that they’ve grown up with. It’s so much fun to introduce them to classic games and get their reactions. I love showing my students Pyramid, particularly the Winner’s Circle round. You can see it in their faces—they are locked in when they see the Winner’s Circle; that game has their full attention every time.”

Harry Friedman says, “I observed classes a couple of times and was blown away. Not just by what the students were learning, but by their creativity, their teamwork, and their work ethic. There were so many transferrable skills being taught in these game show classes that they will be able to take with them no matter what they may end up doing.”

The game show curriculum is still quite new but has already shown the potential for creating careers and impacting the genre. In several weeks, a pilot will be recorded for a new game show format that was developed by a student in the Cal State LA classes.

Friedman explains, “Everybody in the class will be part of the team making the pilot. There will be schedules, deadlines, assigned roles and duties, budgets. Everything involved in making a pilot, and it’s going to involve these students.”

——————————————————————————————————————————

The author of this article majored in radio & television with a focus on journalism because it was the closest thing available to a game show curriculum. The author seethes with envy at a new generation of college students who have the chance to watch Let’s Make a Deal and The Price is Right because they’re doing homework.

The post Next Game Show Creators 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.

The post Researching Collectible Card Game History at The Strong appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

After its founding on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer Company had one of the fastest rises ever for an upstart company. Their first computer was named, simply, Apple I, but in June 1977, the company changed the world with the Apple II. With an external shell for containing the components, a built-in keyboard, game paddles, cassettes for saving data, and glorious full-color graphics, the Apple II was credited for expanding the market for computers beyond experts, business professionals, and hobbyists. For the first time, consumers saw a computer that seemed like it could be used by anybody.

The Apple II made such a quick impact after only a year on the market that Apple employees reported to CBS Television City in Hollywood to help get a game show off the ground.

Tic Tac Dough had originally aired on NBC in the late 1950s. Contestants faced a tic-tac-toe grid with a category in each of the nine squares. The champion (playing X) and the challenger (playing O) took turns picking squares and answering questions, earning a square with each correct answer. For a little added suspense and strategy, the nine categories were mounted on nine spinning drums that would rotate after each round of play. A contestant looking to capture their third box for the win could suddenly find themselves stuck with a category that stumped them.

Tic Tac Dough ended in 1959. In 1978, series creators Jack Barry & Dan Enright were riding a new wave of success with The Joker’s Wild, a quiz in which a giant slot machine determined the categories. Looking for another hit show, Barry & Enright reached to a show from their past and decided to launch The New Tic Tac Dough, selling a daytime version to CBS, with a nighttime version to air on local stations across the country in syndication.

Nine Apple computers were purchased to form the game board for the new version; one Apple II for each square on the game board; a tape cassette machine was also attached to each one for data storage. A 10th computer, the Altair 8800 manufactured by MITS, served as a brain of sorts for the entire collection. All nine Apple IIs were connected to the Altair, which would “tell” each Apple computer what it should display at different points in the game.

Bob Bishop, an early Apple employee who designed many of the company’s earliest games (Space Maze and Bomber among other titles) was dispatched to CBS to bring the show to life. He shared his memories in a 2009 interview with Em Maginnis for Juiced.GS Magazine

Bishop remembered, “They needed to put up a giant ‘X’, a giant ‘O’, a dragon, the names of the categories, whatever it is they wanted—somebody had to do that. And so they elected me! It was a fun little thing. I’d never done anything in television before, so it was my first chance to actually go behind the scenes and see what goes on in a TV station. It was kind of a one-shot deal that lasted a few months. There wasn’t that much to do—it was just a matter of programming the computer to do what they wanted. But it was fun because, as you know, when you first write a program, it never quite works right the first time, and even when you think you’ve got it debugged, it doesn’t quite work. I remember we were doing the prototype and the emcee, Wink Martindale, would say, ‘Now, we’ll look at the categories,’ and nothing would happen. Who’s to blame? Everybody’s pointing the finger at somebody else. Usually, it turned out it wasn’t my fault, though!”

Bishop successfully debugged the system and The New Tic Tac Dough was a success. In time, Barry & Enright got more Apple II computers, offering them as prizes in their bonus round, with announcer Jay Stewart even making it a point to hype the computer by touting, “Just connect it to your TV set and you’re ready to program for recording family records, computer games, artwork, music, and it even helps the kids with their math…It’s the same computer that runs our Tic Tac Dough board!”

 Think of what a glowing endorsement that would have been in the late 1970s. A big-time television show in Hollywood used this computer as the central nervous system for their entire production—and you can use it in your own home!

Tic Tac Dough aired for the next eight years, intriguing young viewers who became part of that first generation to live with computers in the home. Two of those fans, Stephen Wylie and Kevin Trinkle, spent the past four months on a labor of love that they finally unveiled on June 20.

Vintage Computer Festival Southwest is an annual gathering of old-school techies displaying their personal collections of classic obsolete computers and other gear. Among the attractions at this year’s event: Nintendo’s Famicom System from the 1980s, with a selection of games sold only in Japan; decommissioned equipment used by the Weather Channel in the early 1990s; Hewlett-Packard’s Pen Plotter, a printer that drew pictures with two mounted pens; Tandy hardware and software sold at RadioShack; and several computer models playing the Oregon Trail on ordinary green-hued monitors.

In the lobby of the Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at University of Texas at Dallas, visitors were welcomed with an eye-popping array of authentic Apple IIs, strung together just like old times to form the game board for Tic Tac Dough.

Trinkle explains, “Knowing the history of Tic Tac Dough and the board being the first use of computer graphics in a TV game show, we thought it would be cool to recreate it on as close to the original hardware as we could. We’re both game show nerds.”

Surprisingly, rounding up nine 1978 computers in working condition was one of the easiest parts of the process! Trinkle says, “I own three of the Apple II machines, acquired over the past six years as part of my private collection. Stephen owns one of them.”

The other five came from local vintage tech enthusiasts. Three of the computers had been dug out of the dirt behind the former site of a computer store in Dallas.

 Without any actual instructions or guidelines from the real show to work with, Wylie & Trinkle studied numerous episodes of Tic Tac Dough, and used their own knowledge and expertise to work backward, figuring out what kind of coding would have to be programmed in order to produce the numbers, words, and graphics.

Trinkle says, “Quite a bit of my first code was thrown out as it was just too slow…[It] all had to be thrown out and rewritten.”

Wylie adds, “I didn’t expect to be writing Apple II code at this point in my life! I hadn’t written anything serious on the Apple II since junior high school over 30 years ago…I had to relearn quite a bit that I had long since forgotten and learn new things in the process.”

The recreation wasn’t 100% authentic; for lack of an Altair 8800, Wylie & Trinkle used a modern Raspberry Pi to do the thinking for the Apple IIs. The Raspberry Pi also supplied theme music and sound effects. To give some context about what visitors were seeing, Wylie also displayed a Tic Tac Dough press kit from 1978, with photos and information about the show.

Visitors tended to have one of two reactions: “I remember this show!” and “There was a game show that ran on Apple IIs? That’s awesome! I never knew that!”

Dozens of games were played over the weekend, transporting people to television’s past for just a few minutes at a time, and celebrating how far their favorite technology, and our favorite genre of television, have come in the decades since. Wylie & Trinkle are not unique among the fandom either. There are fans who have built their own Showcase Showdowns and Wheels of Fortune in their workshops, fans who have wired their own Jeopardy! buzzers, printed their own giant decks of cards, constructed Match Game question machines and host lecterns. Game shows have inspired hundreds of labors of love from devoted fans.

The post Apple II Powered Game Show appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

Teamwork itself is always very useful no matter what you’re trying to accomplish, be it at work, school, home or in a particular hobby. Having the help and insights of others can make an immense positive difference in achieving one’s goals. What, then, does teamwork look like at The Strong, when staff are working to convey a sense of “playfulness” in collections items? For one thing, no single individual, team or department ever works alone when developing an exhibition or preparing an item for display. While museums may sometimes appear to be quiet, static, and sedentary places, the reality behind the scenes is far more engaging and dynamic. Just as a wind-up toy needs many different gears and mechanisms to waddle around, so too do museums need many different professionals and perspectives to best preserve the personality of their collection items. This is especially true at The Strong, whose collection consists not merely of toys, games, and dolls, but also the myriad memories of countless people who have enjoyed playing with them in the past. Infusing these items with the life given to them by previous owners, as well as the vitality provided by present-day guests, is an all-hands on deck assignment: curators, conservators, exhibit designers, graphic designers, fabricators, and more all have an indispensable role to play in making displayed artifacts “playful” again, and every aspect of a given exhibit reflects this collaborative process.

The careful preservation and safe storage of an on-display Barbie doll, for instance, is dependent on the diligent work of the collections manager and the museum conservator, who themselves work hand in hand with curators in selecting the doll for exhibition, staging her display case for view, and thoughtfully writing her label text for visitors to read. The display case itself, having had its dimensions established by the exhibit designer and the collections team, is constructed by museum fabricators. Those skillful craftspeople then go on to build from scratch the entire surrounding exhibition environment: the Barbie dolls mount, interactive signs and stands, extra-big video game screens and controllers. These creations themselves are further dependent on the imaginative preparation of exhibition designers, who collaborate with all of the aforementioned team members, along with museum graphic designers, to forge from nothing a gallery space worthy of a playthings cherished memories. The pathways, lighting, sounds, colors, and sensations of the entire space are visualized and carefully planned in unison with a wide range of museum professionals to create a truly unique and intimately engaging experience, within which even the oldest items take on a life of their own once more.

Even when considering all this inter-team collaboration, however, the collection items of The Strong still require a bit more creativity to truly shine as intended, and in achieving this extra bit of authenticity, one must always think outside the box. Indeed, when attempting to capture, preserve, and celebrate a playful object’s life, play itself as both a personal and universal experience must always take center stage. For some objects in the collection, this means actually being played with, despite still being museum artifacts. The classic games of Infinity Arcade and the intricate machines of Pinball Playfields are all examples of collections items which have taken on a new, active life at play within the museum. For the items which can’t be as seamlessly or safely interacted with by our guests, one must get creative. In my experience, even the smallest of details can help infuse a game, doll, or toy with an entirely unique sense of playful vitality. Sometimes, that means something as simple as leaving a promotional tag or sticker on the box of a video game; those who remember purchasing or interacting with their own copies can be taken back in time by those minor details and rediscover that exhilarating sense of excitement only a new game release can inspire. Other times, it means leaving the scribbled name of a previous owner on a displayed action figure. Although new generations may not have had their own versions of this figure to connect with, being able to witness firsthand the wear and tear of a much beloved toy imparts a fundamentally humanizing sensation to visitors, elevating this item beyond that of some stuffy and inaccessible museum artifact, and into one which relates directly to the sentiments and experiences of one’s own life. In each of these ways, the collection items of The Strong do not merely survive but thrive in a dynamic new setting for all—museum staff and guests alike—to enjoy.

By: Mark Walsh, 2025 Strong Intern

The post How Play Is Preserved appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

The two-part documentary Pee-Wee as Himself, now available for streaming on HBO Max, chronicles actor Paul Reubens’ unexpected rise to fame as the character Pee-Wee Herman. As the documentary explains, game shows had a small role in the rise of Reubens and his bizarre alter ego.

Reubens’ earliest shots at the big time came from The Gong Show. He and actress Charlotte McGinnis appeared on the daytime show as contestants, calling themselves “Betty and Eddie’s Sensational Sound Effects,” in which they acted out an old-time radio show and performed all the necessary sound effects with their mouths. They won the grand prize of $516.32 and were invited by the show’s staff to appear on the nighttime version of The Gong Show; they performed the act again and won the grand prize again.

While many game shows have rules prohibiting contestants from returning, The Gong Show creator/producer Chuck Barris ran his show very differently. There was no limit to how often a person could be a contestant. The only restrictions were that returning contestants had to audition just like anybody else, and that returnees had to do a different act for every audition that they attended. Reubens would perform on The Gong Show, then devise a new act, and call the show to make an appointment for the next audition. By his own count, Reubens appeared on the show 14 times.

Reubens credited the show with giving him unexpected financial security at an unstable time in his life. Chuck Barris courted members of SAG and AFTRA, two performers’ unions (they have since merged) with the promise that he would pay union members “scale”—an established minimum guaranteed payment for a television performance. At the time it was about $250 for each of those 14 performances. Barris also promised royalty payments and delivered when he sold Gong Show reruns to local stations. Reubens received a windfall check for royalties covering the next several years’ worth of Gong Show reruns. Reubens later said that he called off his search for a day job, living off Gong Show money while he was developing material for his theater show.

Reubens created the character of Pee-Wee Herman for a Groundlings performance. Originally, the premise was that Herman was a bad stand-up comic who had trouble remembering the punch lines of his jokes. But Reubens kept adding extra details—playing with toys, throwing candy at the audience, doing bizarre things with his voice—until the character became completely different.

America first met Pee-Wee Herman on another Chuck Barris game show, The Dating Game. Shortly after Reubens developed the character, he was looking through classified ads; Chuck Barris’ staff had placed a large ad seeking people to be contestants on their shows, and Reubens had the inspired idea to audition for The Dating Game, fully in character as Pee-Wee. Reubens, sporting the now-iconic gray suit and red bowtie, walked into the room among 200 dashing young studs and immediately realized that all the attention was on him.

Herman, introduced by host Jim Lange as a comedian whose interests included bird watching, trapeze, and tightrope walking, is still in something of a “beta testing” stage as a character. Watching The Dating Game now, a Pee-Wee Herman fan would notice that the voice isn’t quite right, and that he has thick hair pressed tightly against his head with a gob of grease, as opposed to the short haircut he sported later.

 Reubens actually successfully made a date on his first appearance. As with The Gong Show, he was encouraged to return to The Dating Game a few more times. Unlike The Gong Show, he was not asked to change a thing for The Dating Game. He returned as Pee-Wee Herman. Even if it is not quite the character you know, it’s easy to see why Chuck Barris’ staff was enamored with him. The bachelorette flirtatiously asked, “What do you think of when you hear the word ‘go’”? Pee-Wee responded with an awkward story about driving his Volkswagen Bus to traffic school, and even the other two bachelors get caught on camera chuckling at his odd behavior.

As a follow-up, she said she didn’t like it when a date made things “too easy” for her and asked Pee-Wee how he’d make things a little tough for her. He pledged to wear a tight-fitting bodysuit under his clothes during their date. Jim Lange audibly lost it, guffawing and taking a second to collect himself.

In the seven years following his last shot at The Dating Game, Reubens as Pee-Wee Herman had launched a successful theatre show, adapted that into an HBO special, made 11 show-stealing appearances as a guest on Late Night with David Letterman, starred in a feature film, and launched his own Saturday morning network kids’ show. As Pee-Wee fans and keepers of game show history, we take a little pride in the role that Chuck Barris and the game show genre played in his rise to stardom.

The post Pee-Wee Herman…the Game Show Star? 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.