Appropriate for International Day of Play, the goal of each game is to travel across countries and oceans. In The Game of Travel, players draw tickets with a list of locations. On a player’s turn, they proceed to the next location on their ticket. Once they’ve visited each location on the card, they draw a new ticket that takes them on the next leg of the journey. Players win by visiting Constantinople (now Istanbul) and returning to the United States. Named after historian and children’s book author Hendrik Van Loon, the Wide World Game was released almost 40 years after The Game of Travel. Fittingly, given its title, the game features a wider world than its predecessor. While The Game of Travel restricts players to Europe and the Atlantic Ocean, the later game’s routes take players across every continent except Antarctica. Here, the goal is to be the first to travel from San Francisco to Manila. The Wide World Game follows the same basic flow of moving between cities according to one’s tickets.

Both games were influenced by the increasing availability of international travel around the turn of the 20th century. Alongside technological developments and Gilded Age economic changes, the number of issued U.S. passports increased significantly in the late 19th century. Steamships and trains made travel more accessible to a growing middle class. Such methods of travel are highlighted in the games through an unusual feature. The Game of Travel has players swap out their moving marker according to the method of travel: a train when traveling by land, a ship if by sea. Since the games are so similar, though, it’s interesting to see where they differ. The wide world changed between 1894 and 1933. By the 1930s, there were several commercial airlines in the U.S., and with new forms of travel come changes to the rules. The Game of Travel requires players to move one city at a time, but the airplane in the newer game lets players move through as many as six cities in a single turn!

Guests could appreciate many things about the games if we showcased them in a display. The Game of Travel is a beautiful production. Its cover features painterly illustrations of attractive destinations like the canals of Venice and England’s Windsor Castle. Its metal steamships shimmer in the light. The Wide World Game’s stylized world map appears hand-drawn with vibrant colors. I’m sure guests would be delighted to see them. With interpretive labels, we could provide some information about the games’ rules and historical context. But games are meant to be played.

To be clear, not even I get to play the games in our collection. This is for good reason, although I’m often dying to give the games a try. For one, many of them are fragile. The Game of Travel was printed more than 100 years ago, and it shows. The board is coming off in flakes, leaving holes in eastern Europe. We wear gloves when handling artifacts not just to protect the objects, but also to protect ourselves. The malleability of the steamship tokens hints that they are likely made of toxic metals, and paint used in the Wide World Game is probably also dangerous. So, how can we have guests engage with these historic games without putting them or the games at risk?

We chose to create our own versions of each game. Making the copies required collaboration between multiple teams at the museum. First, I scanned the games’ boards and cards and sent the scans off to Corinna, one of our public programs coordinators, to fabricate those components. They pasted the boards to a large piece of cardboard and printed out and laminated the cards. Meanwhile, Martin, our arcade game conservation technician, began 3D printing trains, planes, and ships using a resin printer. Martin’s trains are a real highlight, featuring little linked cars that follow behind the locomotive. After laminating the cards and sealing the boards, our more robust versions of the games were ready to be played with by childhood hands.

Our International Day of Play programming was a success. I delivered a small presentation showcasing the original games, along with some other travel-themed games and puzzles, while our associate curator Natalie gave a fascinating talk about postcards and souvenirs. The reproduced games were available to play all day. The preservation of board games is important. Researchers come from across the globe to study our collection. But there are probably very few living people who’ve actually played these games. I’m excited that we gave our visitors a chance to join that exclusive group.

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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.

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Margaret Woodbury Strong, the museum’s founder, was an avid collector of dollhouses. A ticket from 1958 invited guests to the “First Public Showing of Mrs. Homer Strong’s World-Famous Collection of Doll Houses” at her residence in Pittsford, New York. The nearly 100 dollhouses exhibited represented only a portion of her collection. In celebration of Margaret Woodbury Strong’s fascination with spectacular miniatures, The Strong National Museum of Play has opened Dollhouses Unveiled. The exhibit provides a unique opportunity to view dozens of rare dollhouses and miniatures from The Strong’s collections (many not seen on public view in decades along with others new to the museum).

The dollhouses on display provide a sample of design and play patterns from the 1830s to present day. A few highlights include the Mystery House and Blue Roof Victorian Mansion, as they have been called. Around 1890, the famed FAO Schwarz toy store carried a line of dollhouses with delicately carved wood accents. Dollhouse expert Flora Gill Jacobs later named the series “Mystery Doll Houses,” because she couldn’t identify the maker, though some speculated that prisoners made them. The elaborate houses signaled luxury and were correspondingly expensive. One version sold for $80—nearly a half-month’s salary for a lawyer at the time. During the same decade, the Mortiz Gottschalk Company created an elaborate mansion with a blue roof. FAO Schwartz also featured this house as a Christmas exclusive. Its construction of lithographed paper on wood created a spectacular design with a wondrous concoction of gables, turrets, spindles, and balustrades.

Nearly 100 years later, Barbie moved into her Magical Mansion. Felix Burrichter, co-editor of Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey, said the pale walls and fluffy sofa reminded him of the suburban house in the 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction. Snobs might have scoffed, but kids loved ringing the functioning doorbell and phone. While thinking about life in plastic, one of the most striking objects on display is the Kaleidoscope House manufactured by Bozart Toys in 2001. Designed by artist Laurie Simmons and architect Peter Wheelwright, the Kaleidoscope House has sliding transparent walls, an arced-slab partial roof, and modern art pieces. The creators sought to update the conventional dollhouse with subtle touches, like sliding walls that allow for play with color, design, and light. The Kaleidoscope House provides just one example of how the history of dollhouses reveals shifting ideas about domestic life, innovative design, and imaginative play.

Aside from the dollhouses that include Margaret Strong’s childhood dollhouse and elaborate recent  residences marketed to grownups, guests to the exhibit can complete a scavenger hunt for teeny tiny miniatures that replicate everyday life, play with the lights and sounds we’ve added to the 1837 Amsterdam House, and view vintage dollhouse advertisements and photographs. Dollhouses Unveiled will be on display through January 4, 2026.

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As I catalogued a collection of these at-home escape room games at The Strong, labels began to fail me. While some were certainly legible as board games, others stretched the limits of the term. I’ve faced similar challenges before. In 2021, I published a paper about “escape games,” a broad genre label I applied to digital and analog games in which players solved puzzles to escape from a room. Some of the earliest live-action escape rooms were inspired by online “escape the room” adventure games, and the escape room has itself inspired virtual reality and at-home versions. I suggested the term “tabletop escape games” to refer to portable escape room games designed for play in the home or classroom rather than dedicated escape room facilities. I’ve since switched to the term “escape box” because I believe it better represents the breadth of approaches at play. As we’ll see, many of these games leave the table behind.

But what is it that escape box creators are trying to capture? Scholar and game designer Scott Nicholson provides the following definition of escape rooms: “players trapped in a space [have] to rely upon their wits and each other to find hidden objects, solve a series of puzzles, and accomplish tasks to get out in a certain amount of time.” The live-action escape room facilities counted in the Escape Room Industry Report are buildings players visit to play the games, but board game publishers and escape room companies have also endeavored to adapt the experience for the home. The key elements in Nicholson’s definition, including puzzles, cooperation, space, hidden objects, and time limits, manifest in various forms and to differing extents in each of these at-home games.

Some escape boxes attempt to emulate escape rooms while hewing close to board game conventions. Clue: The Midnight Hotel is a spin-off of the classic board game Clue that, like Clue, tasks its players with solving a three-part mystery by searching for clues in a series of rooms. After selecting a character and the matching plastic pawn, players take turns exploring the rooms of the Midnight Hotel. The game merges the classic board game with the collaboration and puzzle-solving emphasized in Nicholson’s definition. As players explore, they draw cards that introduce objects used in puzzles or provide clues necessary for solving the final mystery. Clue’s competitive race to deduce the culprit is replaced with a cooperative puzzle-solving experience. One might expect an escape box developed by an escape room company to depart more drastically from what we expect from a board game. The Escape Game, one of the largest escape room chains in the United States, released their own escape box, Escape from Iron Gate, in 2019. However, Escape from Iron Gate also draws primarily from board game conventions. While the game includes puzzles and ciphers, it also incorporates elements of classic party games like Pictionary and charades. Like many board games, but unlike most escape rooms, the game is competitive; only one player can escape the titular prison.

Other escape boxes appear to be conventional board games before quickly subverting those expectations. While many make use of standard game components like cards, they often break with the way those components are typically employed. Nathan Altice’s article “The Playing Card Platform” identifies properties of playing cards that enable common forms of gameplay. The randomized shuffling that is core to so many card games is possible because the cards are uniformly shaped, and the card backs are indistinguishable from one another. Many escape boxes, however, intentionally abandon these properties. The cards in Space Cowboys’ Unlock! series, for instance, are not uniform; each has a unique number prominently featured on the back. This unusual characteristic enables an interesting item combination mechanic that harkens back to the digital adventure games that inspired early escape rooms. As the players accumulate items, they can use them with one another. To combine two items, players add the numbers of the two cards together and reveal the card matching the sum. Combining the tutorial mission’s card 11, a key, with card 35, a locked cabinet, reveals card 46: the cabinet, now unlocked. By abandoning a core element of card games, Unlock! introduces a novel puzzle-solving mechanism that brings to mind both the live-action escape room and its digital predecessors.

Rather than repurposing conventional game components, some other escape boxes introduce unusual game pieces. These games blur the boundaries between the players and the fictional world. Escape rooms are all-encompassing. When the door is closed behind the players, they are cut off from the outside world and surrounded by a fictional one. Escape Room in a Box: The Werewolf Experiment achieves a similar effect by foregoing the components of the usual tabletop game entirely. The game world’s objects are represented not with cards or tokens but with plastic petri dishes and locked metal tins. The use of bespoke physical objects is again reminiscent of adventure video games. Many classic adventure games came packaged with maps or other physical objects called “feelies.” In her article “The Treachery of Pixels,” scholar and historian Carly Kocurek argues that feelies operate as extensions of the game world. “Players can handle a feelie and by extension, at least in a small way, touch the world of the game—which in turn, via the feelie, extends into the players’ lived world.” Although escape boxes cannot physically envelop the players like live-action escape rooms, they have found their own ways to bring players into contact with fictional worlds.

Some games go as far as to abandon the table entirely, subsuming the surrounding playing space into the game’s fictional world. There are no plastic pawns on a board, here. Instead, both Escape Box: Pirates and Escape Your House: Spy Team require a game master to position the game’s cards throughout the room itself. Spy Team goes a step further by utilizing multiple rooms. The game includes one primary lock meant to be hung on the front door as well as several cardboard doorknob hangers that “lock” off other rooms. In the game’s fifth mission, the players’ home becomes the Hackers’ Hideout. An ordinary living room or bathroom transforms into the hideout’s server room or control room. In these games, the exploration of physical space is paramount to the escape room experience. These games differ, though, in their approach to objects hidden in that space. Escape Box: Pirates sees the search for hidden objects to be crucial to the escape room experience, instructing the game master to hide the cards for players to find. Spy Team asks the game master to make its cards clearly visible, focusing the players’ attention on using the cards rather than finding them.

Finally, escape boxes also vary in how they approach time limits. The almost ubiquitous one-hour time limit imposed by escape room facilities is a scheduling convenience that allows groups to sign up for hourly time slots. The pressure of the ticking clock is seemingly so integral to the genre, however, that it appears in many escape boxes, which do not have to adhere to scheduled time slots. The turn-based structures of The Midnight Hotel and Escape from Iron Gate stand out in comparison to the frantic real-time puzzle-solving of many of the other games. The Unlock! series requires a mobile app that counts down the players’ remaining time. The underwater adventure The Nautilus’s Trap makes clever use of the clock, utilizing it to represent the oxygen remaining in the players’ air supply. Starting with only 35 minutes, players can add to the timer by finding oxygen tanks hidden throughout the card art. But unlike the live-action escape room, you can keep playing these games even after clock runs down. I won’t tell.

From the components they use to the ways they handle space and time, escape boxes are indicative of varying understandings of the escape room genre. Are these games about immersion in a fictional world? About finding hidden clues? About teamwork? That escape boxes tackle the challenge of adaptation in such differing ways makes sense, given the myriad influences that shape live-action escape rooms themselves. Scott Nicholson’s 2015 survey of escape room facilities revealed that creators were inspired by video games, interactive theatre, live-action role-playing, movies, and TV shows, among others. Neither escape rooms nor the games inspired by them are monolithic. Even the goal of escape is not universal. Live-action escape room designers have refused to limit themselves to tales of escape—Nicholson’s survey also found that 30% of rooms did not require the players to escape a room at all.

By combining elements from board games and escape rooms, escape box creators make games that do not fit neatly into either category. Designers continue to explore the edges of these genres. Some are investigating ways in which other forms of play might intersect with escape rooms. The Toy Factory, a jigsaw puzzle in Ravensburger’s Escape Puzzle series, adds a short narrative hook to the puzzle-solving experience and hides riddles and clues in the completed image. Other creators are reversing the adaptation process, instead designing escape rooms based on board games. In 2024, live-action escape room company Breakout Games teamed up with Hasbro to create an escape room based on Monopoly. Working in this nebulous space between genres requires thinking outside the box.

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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.

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As I begin a new decade of my life, I’ve become more aware of the toys that model real-world “adulting.” Pretend play is a childhood staple, and often it involves kids performing what they see adults do. I’ve also realized, with a bit of my now developed adult cynicism, that it was a lot more fun to pretend to be an adult. The real thing doesn’t always measure up.

Take chores for example. Sweeping up with a fake broom or running a fake vacuum across the floor was way more fun than my now never-ending struggle to keep the cat hair out of my carpet. Cleaning the dishes is so much more fun when they don’t actually have food on them. I think it’s the lack of actual need to do the chores that makes the pretend chores more fun. I could flit around the house with my big fluffy duster as a kid, not properly cleaning anything, possibly making it worse, but there wasn’t any actual consequence. Dust is now my mortal enemy with its endless cycle of settling on surfaces.

Cooking is also way more fun when it’s fake. It’s so easy. You can “chop” up your food, stir it in a bowl, dump it on a plate—they’ll all say they love it because that’s their job as adults—and then you can just dump it all back in the basket. No recipes are needed because everything comes out perfect with just the right flavor. Who can beat that? The grocery shopping is so easy too. Super Kids Market is way more fun than the real Wegmans. I don’t have to spend real money, the food never goes bad, and nothing requires prep time. There’s no such thing as perishables in the world of fake food! And let’s be honest, even when we graduate to whipping up cookies in our Easy Bake Ovens, the simplicity, speed, and abundance of desserts means it’s always a good time.

I also held so many careers as a kid. Not to mention the work was so easy! Being a doctor required no medical degree, no actual understanding of the human body, and no charts. I was a super spy using totally real (definitely not toys) spy equipment without any risk of international crisis. I was the caretaker of dozens of animals that were miraculously healthy despite empty food bowls, inconsistent care, and multiple predator/prey combinations housed together. The work environment was great. I set my own hours, had unlimited time off, wasn’t subject to performance expectations, and could do all my work from home. I may have earned no money as well, but I had no bills so that was fine.

I have to say, I think the truest betrayal was the expectation set by the economy during childhood play. Every cash register was full, customers were always stopping by, and they never got to keep anything they bought, so it was pure profit. The board game Pay Day (the 2000 edition specifically) was popular in my house, but I’m beginning to think it established some false impressions about finances. I closed a lot more deals, won a lot more lotteries, and got a lot more bonuses in that game than I do in real life. My finances were way less complicated. Same thing with The Game of Life. The houses I bought and the sizes of the families I had in that game are completely unattainable.

The Game of Life in general needs some attention for its delivery of unrealistic expectations for life. I’ve ended my “life” winning a Nobel Prize, being elected mayor, writing a bestseller, and having six children, all while working as an artist and retiring to Countryside Acres. How was that supposed to prepare me for the expense-to-income ratio of late-stage capitalism? Why can’t I press CTRL + Shift + C and type the “motherlode” cheat code 300 times like in The Sims 2 and then live a life of luxury with my magically acquired wealth? Maybe Hasbro had it right when they released The Game of Life: Quarter Life Crisis (Now with Crippling Debt!).

Perhaps the last six paragraphs of complaining are also a cover for a certain melancholy that comes with thinking about a time in my life with fewer worries and more imagination. Maybe there’s a kid inside me begging to set aside the have-to-do for more of the want-to-do. Maybe it’s the rose-colored glasses that come with nostalgia. Maybe it’s a symptom of millennial burnout, pressure, and anxiety. Or maybe it’s just easier to yell into the abyss, “What gives?!”

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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.

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One rabbit that I recall from my childhood is Uncle Wiggily. Not familiar with him? He started back in 1910 in stories that Howard Garis wrote for the Newark News and he and his fellow characters went on to help Garis publish almost 80 children’s books in his lifetime. I’m not certain that I inherited any copies of those books from my mom, but my sister and I played an Uncle Wiggily board game that pitted the elderly rabbit with his candy-striped cane against various adversaries and obstacles as he hobbled down the path to Dr. Possum’s office to get his rheumatism medication. At least in the game version, Uncle Wiggily was on the innocuous side (a bit like Mickey Mouse in that regard), but I was much more amused by the names of his foes such as Skeezicks and the Bad Pipsisewah.

While Uncle Wiggily ranks as a senior rabbit, the younger end of the spectrum is represented by the little bunny in Margaret Wise Brown’s 1947 picture book Goodnight Moon. Reportedly Brown gave illustrator Clement Hurd minimal instructions as to what she was looking for and Hurd adapted to the assignment by making the characters rabbits—he felt more confident drawing bunnies than people. Despite sluggish initial sales, the book went on to become a children’s classic and a favorite bedtime story to wind down the day and send kids peacefully off to dreamland. Naturally, some of those kids wanted to snuggle into bed with their own plush version of the rabbit from the story.

Another storybook rabbit, this time from 1921’s The Velveteen Rabbit, has also made the leap into The Strong’s collection. Margery Williams’s tale about a stuffed animal who yearns to become real through the love of his owner has endured in the hearts of children and adults for more than a century now. Certainly, looking around the plush animals and dolls in the museum’s holdings, I can see signs of the deep affection that has been lavished upon them over the years as they were clutched for comfort. Their repaired stitching and threadbare fur make tangible some of the meaning they held for their little owners. Some may find The Velveteen Rabbit too sentimental for their tastes, but the story holds powerful emotions for some of us (including yours truly). It therefore feels fitting that a 3-D version of that rabbit makes its permanent home at The Strong.

But to end on a lighter note, let’s turn to the movies and the wisecracking hare of countless Warner Brothers cartoon shorts—none other than Bugs Bunny. A direct descendant of classic trickster characters from folk tales and literature around the world, Bugs holds a special place in the hearts of his many fans, although his nemesis Elmer Fudd and even Daffy Duck undoubtedly feel less cordial toward him. Bugs and Elmer faced off for the first time in the 1940 short A Wild Hare in which Bugs uttered his timeless catchphrase, “What’s up, Doc?” The player of innumerable pranks, Bugs Bunny has seen toys and other products bearing his likeness proliferate over the years, almost breeding like, well, rabbits. At The Strong, our collection includes products far beyond the anticipated Bugs Bunny plush figures, encompassing everything from jigsaw puzzles to PEZ dispensers to video games and yo-yos.

I have no doubt that the rabbits in The Strong’s collection will continue to thrive and multiply. Even as I write this, I’m visualizing more examples on shelves and in cases throughout the museum. Roger Rabbit. Peter Rabbit. Babs Bunny. The Runaway Bunny. The list goes on and on. I guess you can’t keep a good bunny down.

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I loved playing with dolls, specifically Barbies, Bratz, and American Girl Dolls. Like many kids, I would create imaginary worlds and interpersonal drama between the dolls. I remember one Barbie in particular that my mom despised. It was the controversial “Teen Talk Barbie,” and I was given it as a gag gift by one of her prank-loving friends. This particular Barbie was unpopular with many feminists of the 1990s (like my mother) because she had a voice box that was programmed with a random assortment of four phrases out of 270 possibilities, including “Let’s plan our dream wedding!,” ”Math class is tough,” “Wouldn’t you love to be a lifeguard?,” and “Want to go shopping?” The math class comment caused the most outrage, with groups like the American Association of University Women and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics objecting to the phrase, stating that it was detrimental to the efforts to encourage girls to study math and science. It was especially damaging because, in many cases, it was programmed to play right before the phrase about shopping, so Barbie was saying “Math class is hard. Want to go shopping?” Many felt that this perpetuated harmful stereotypes about women being uneducated and only wanting to shop.

The brouhaha revealed that the American public recognized that dolls like Barbie and toys in general can shape a child’s sense of individuality and self-confidence. That’s why Teen Talk Barbie proved so controversial, and why my mom wouldn’t let me play with the one we owned. Dolls like Barbie have a continuous effect on how young girls and women create a sense of identity and are a powerful tool to perpetuate gender norms and stereotypes. As a femme lesbian (a lesbian who exhibits a more feminine gender presentation) who grew up in suburban America, it took me a little longer than many of my queer peers to come to terms with my identity. Everywhere I looked, I saw representations of feminine women as heterosexuals and in heterosexual relationships—including in my toys, and in particular my dolls. These heteronormative representations impacted the way I shaped my own identity at a young age. Reflecting on my childhood, I wish I had had more representation of lesbian and queer dolls, so I could’ve seen my current life as a real possibility at a young age.

I’m not the first person to realize that there’s a need for queer representation in dolls. A handful of queer dolls had been created since the 1970s to fill this gap: Gay Bob, DykeDolls, and Billy. It’s important to note that these dolls were manufactured for adults, not for children, and all were short-lived products that never reached most mainstream audiences. However, early LGBTQ dolls paved the way for the queer dolls of today. In 2022, the Barbie line added a doll of trans actress and activist, Laverne Cox; Integrity Dolls created a Trixie Mattel doll; and Bratz made history when they released the first-ever set of fashion dolls sold as a same-sex couple. For their 2022 Pride Collection, Bratz partnered with fashion designer Jimmy Paul, who designed bright, playful, rainbow-filled outfits for the couple, Roxxi and Nevra. Nevra and Roxxi had been part of the Bratz Universe since 2003 and 2004, respectively, and they “came out” as a couple via Bratz’s official social media in 2020. Positive representations like Roxxi and Nevra demonstrate to children that lesbian love is a valid part of the world around them.

Creating opportunities for children to make their own choices is important to helping them shape their authentic identities. There’s a long history in which children adapt toys—dolls included—to suit their own purposes and play patterns, regardless of what the toymakers may have intended. Mattel recognized that reality and provided children with the opportunity to reimagine dolls for themselves with their gender-inclusive doll line, Creatable Worlds, in 2019. The Creatable World Dolls are designed to be versatile, come in kits with various wigs and clothing, and their bodies do not include features that display an obvious gender. While Creatable World Dolls are not explicitly queer, they allow children the freedom of choice in a way that can reflect who they want to be, who they want to love, and what they want their world to look like.

“It doesn’t take much to chop Barbie’s hair off, switch Barbie’s clothes, pronouns, partners, voice, or story,” says Erica Rand, the author of Barbie’s Queer Accessories and professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College. “I think that’s partly why some people fondly remember what they did with Barbie as an early hint of their own queerness, and why adults gravitate to Barbie as a vehicle for play, protest, and parody… However, some people remember being pressured to demonstrate proper gender and sexual tendencies by playing or not playing with her.” Dolls like Bratz and Barbie can have an enormous effect on young people and how we learn to view ourselves within society. I can’t help but think that maybe I would’ve realized my identity earlier in life if I was given a Nevra and Roxxi doll set for my birthday instead of a Barbie that encouraged me to plan my wedding (presumably to Ken). Representation is important and I eagerly await the day when lesbian, gay, and genderfluid dolls are abundant and noncontroversial.

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