Ding. Ding. Ding. People of a certain age may remember the sound of cranking the elevator on the Fisher-Price parking garage, or the way the stop sign at each floor lowered when the lift reached that level. This ingenious plastic contrivance raised cars up and down the three-level garage, tipping them out when they reached the floor. I still recall not only the auditory experience, but also the tactile hitch as the wheel turned a gear and the momentary stutter as it completed a rotation. For a little kid, there was something deeply satisfying about raising and lowering cars in this elevator.

Elevators have been one of the great engineering accomplishments of the modern age. Since Otis introduced the safety elevator for people in 1857, the device has enabled builders to construct higher and higher buildings, in the process revolutionizing architecture and facilitating the growth of dense cities. It even became a commonplace reference in popular culture, including the 1912 song “Elevator Man” by Irving Berlin about Andy, a lift operator, who won the heart of his passenger Mandy, a cook in the building (alas, Andy couldn’t stay on the level after he started giving rides to a gal named Sal).

The design of the elevator itself has not changed radically—elevators are still largely mechanical contraptions, the product of pulleys, cables, winches, gears, and engines—and perhaps their simple elements explain why they have become so popular as toys. Our collection certainly holds plenty of examples. Early Meccano construction sets offered numerous opportunities for kids to make functioning, if miniature, elevators (Meccano toys were basically the European equivalent of the American Erector set, though they were invented earlier and tended to be more complex). Meccano’s 1915 guide for “How to Make Models and Toys with Meccano” includes plans for structures with elevators, including a “Warehouse with Elevator” that functioned in many ways like the real thing.

Construction toys are not the only ones that have included play elevators, for some doll houses have featured them as well. In The Strong’s collection is a magnificent dollhouse, made in Germany, from around 1900, simply titled “Elevator House” in our internal records because its most dramatic feature is a lift in the center that can bring guests up three stories.

Perhaps the most well-known doll house to feature an elevator is Barbie’s Dream House. When first introduced in 1962, Barbie’s fabulous digs didn’t come with an elevator, but as her living quarters got larger and more elaborate one was added in 1974, when Barbie moved into a townhouse. Of course, sometimes the elevator needed adapting. Barbie’s friend Share a Smile Becky, introduced in 1996, used a wheelchair that wouldn’t fit into the elevator in the existing Barbie Dream House, a problem Mattel later corrected.

Elevators are not the exclusive property of pretend play sets, for they are also a common feature in video games. In the arcade classic Donkey Kong (1982), they were a physical challenge—can you jump on the moving elevator without falling? The next year, Taito’s Elevator Action challenged players to assume the role of a spy using stairs and elevators to outmaneuver the guards.

In most video games, however, elevators are used mostly as scene shifters. When you get on the elevator you leave one room and enter someplace completely different, allowing for an easy change of setting. The early procedurally generated dungeon crawler Telengard (1982), for example, used elevators to move players up, unexpectedly, to higher levels. In graphical adventures like Sierra’s Police Quest or the puzzle game Myst, elevators allowed easy scene swaps. The surprise that always ensues when the door opens adds to the fun. In some games like Mass Effect (2007), elevator rides had the primary purpose of disguising the amount of time it was taking the game to load.

Given their ubiquity in everyday life, the power they bestow to move us up and down, and the surprise they produce when the door opens, it’s likely elevators will continue to be a common element of many playthings. And why not? They are fun little devices that can give us a lift when we play with them.

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Discrete collections here at The Strong will often document the history of these three pillars of video games differently. Will Wright’s notebooks record his work on titles such as The Sims (2000) and Spore (2008), offering tremendous insights into how play powers the mechanics of these games. Innovations in animation art appear in the papers of Jordan Mechner, who created masterpieces such as Karataka (1985) and Prince of Persia (1989). And the Michael and Muffy Berlyn Papers offer tremendous insights into the ways that storytelling and good game design can drive careers and push the medium in new directions.

Mike and Muffy donated this collection in 2020, and their dedication to story was immediately evident to me when I had time to go through the materials systematically after processing. The primacy of narrative in their work was evident from the beginning, starting with some of Mike’s handwritten stories in spiral bound notebooks from the late 1970s and early 1980s and continuing throughout their writing and design and production notes for a variety of games, including their hit console titles featuring the loveable bobcat Bubsy, who first debuted in 1993. But their interest in story in games began early in their careers when they tried to innovate on the story element of text-based adventures.

For those not familiar with them, text-based adventures were a style of game popular in the 1970s and 1980s in which players traversed fictional worlds by typing short written commands like “Go west” or “Get lamp.” Given that they are literary creations, it would be easy to assume that narrative plays an important role, but in the early years of text-based adventures it was the play that predominated, not the story. There was no story to Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), only a somewhat random world for players to explore and, to some extent, solve. Zork (1980), from the company Infocom, took a step forward by offering a more cohesive world that players were discovering—the Great Underground Empire—but there was no story in any meaningful sense. Mike and Muffy Berlyn by contrast were storytellers, so their first work, Oo-topos (1981), emphasized story. When Mike began working at Infocom, he brought that narratological instinct to his craft, exploring new ways that story could be wedded to games.

It’s evident in his pitch for the game Suspended (1983) created for Infocom. In it, a player assumes the role of “Talent,” a character cryogenically suspended aboard a colonized planet and dependent on a malfunctioning computer that he must fix even as he acts through it. What is particularly interesting about Mike’s work on Suspended is that he conveys not merely a novelistic approach but the “think different” approach of a science-fiction (and somewhat post-modernist) writer.

The pitch document to his bosses at Infocom makes this clear. In the game, the character is in a “limited cryonic suspension,” meaning that he can use his mind to control activities on a colonized planet but cannot physically move from the cube in which he is suspended. He interacts with the environment through robots, each of which have different capabilities (that primarily correspond to human senses). Unfortunately, not everything in the system is functioning correctly, so the player needs to use the robots with their varying abilities to solve a variety of problems and complete a multitude of tasks to return things to proper working order.

Mike Berlyn’s writer-first approach to game design is evident in the last paragraph of the pitch, where he wrote, “These are some basic ideas, none of which are fully developed.  I feel the specific situations and goals are not in what I have presented, but will become readily apparent as the writing of this progresses.” Writing would dictate game design. His literary tendencies also appeared in the inclusion of a sixth robot, Poet, who communicated through verse.

Interactive fiction like Suspended charmed players with its ability to conjure up imaginative worlds. For a while it was the hottest thing in the computer games market, but for several reasons, including the capacity of increasingly powerful computers to render better graphics, the boom in text adventures collapsed in the late 1980s. The Michael and Muffy Berlyn Papers bear tangible records of this. Mike and Muffy had gone out on their own and formed a company called Brainwave Creations, but they faced struggles getting their games published. As I turned through a two-inch thick folder of concepts, scripts, level designs, and other materials for a proposed game “Rager,” I came across a single-page letter from Robert Garriott, president of Origin System, letting Mike and Muffy know that “we have decided to cancel our Rager contract due to our belief that current market conditions will not allow us to profitably market text adventures.” For this game, the story was over.

And yet writerly elements like story and character persisted, even as graphics became a larger and larger part of the formula for successful video games. For their game Tass Times in Tonetown (1986), Mike and Muffy described how they developed the game after falling in love with a swaggering little dog Ennio. Their graphic adventure game Altered Destiny (1990) may have used illustrations, but the story was still central and, as sketches in the archive show, story potential was a paramount factor in driving game design.

This ability to blend story, art, and play coalesced best in the Berlyns’ most well-loved game, Bubsy. The collection contains a wealth of Bubsy materials ranging from level maps to concept sketches, but even as the Berlyns were designing this sidescrolling graphical game, they didn’t abandon their ear for key literary elements. The initial proposal sketches out the main environments, describes the general tone of the game (“light-hearted, with a strong, likeable main character”), and lays out the story:

“Bubsy is a bobcat who has been abducted by a Snorkle. He’s been taken via flying saucer out of his normal environment, the woods, and dropped off at the other end of a village. Bubsy’s goal is to get home to the woods.”

It’s a simple story—get back home—that is used in many contexts, but the fact that the Berlyns prioritized it in the initial description speaks to the extent to which narrative sat at the center of their approach to game design; it’s a leitmotif that goes through their long tenure in the games industry.

One of the most valuable things about the collection is how the Berlyns’ career spanned so many of the industry’s different epochs of gaming. Beginning in text-based gaming for microcomputers, they created graphic adventures for personal computers, platformers and 3D games for consoles, and even downloadable, internet-based games like the match-three downloadable PC game Triblettes. The collection’s vast scope documents their work on these titles and also contains a rich lode of material for unpublished games. One folder entitled “Adventure game as a book” explores the idea of an interactive text adventure that is an actual, physical book, complete with little pockets for cards that represent the inventory. Yet another way of telling a story!

Over the years, there has been considerable academic interest in the role of story in video games. Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997) and Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages (2003) were among the first academic works in game study to focus on the unique aspects of narratives in games, and in recent years there has been a host of titles such as Amy Green’s Storytelling in Video Games: The Art of the Digital Narrative (2018) and Johansen Quijano, The Composition of Video Games: Narrative, Aesthetics, Rhetoric and Play (2019). Given that story, along with art and play, is one of the three pillars of most video games, there seems little doubt that researchers will continue to be interested in this topic, and the rich resources of the Michael and Muffy Berlyn Papers will be a boon to scholars interested in these subjects for years to come.

Of course, collections have inherent worth aside from the uses to which scholars put them. To me, much of their value is the way they document people’s lived experiences. In this case, the story of Mike and Muffy Berlyn is not just a story about lives in game design, but a love story, one of two people bonded in life as well as work. That is why one of the most charming pieces in the collection was a simple doodle I came across entitled “Muffy and Me.”

Anyone who has been in love will recognize it instantly—replete with the infatuation and probably a little insecurity that comes with being in love—and after all, what better story can there be than a good, old-fashioned love story.

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This thought struck me recently when I was reading Hallfred the Troublesome Scald, a 14th-century Icelandic saga written about a mischievous poet and adventurer who lived around the year 1,000 A.D. Despite being 600 years old, it’s still a delightful text, full of life, fun, trouble, sorrow, and—of course—play.

The incident that first sent my mind wandering in this direction was its description of a simple ball game at an autumn harvest. Iceland was—and is—an inhospitable land, where people must work hard to provide a living. Therefore, when the harvest came in, people gathered to celebrate, as happens all over the world. Let’s look at the text:

In those days Thorstein Ingimundarson was chieftain in Vatnsdal. He lived at Hof and was considered the foremost man in that part of the country. He was popular and had many friends. His sons were Ingolf and Gudbrand. Ingolf was the most handsome man in the north, and it was of him that the following verse was made:

All the maids were eager

To walk out with Ingolf

—they that were of age;

All-Too-Small was wretched.

“I too,” quoth the carline, [an old woman]

“Will walk out with Ingolf,”

While I still have hanging two teeth in my gum.”

An autumn feast was held at Grimstungur with ball-games, and Ingolf went to the games, and many others with him from down the valley.

The weather was fine, and the women sat outside and watched the play. Valgerd Ottarsdottir was sitting apart on the slope, and some women with her. Ingolf was playing, and the ball flew that way; whereupon Valgerd caught it and hid it under her cloak, saying that the one who had thrown should fetch it. It was Ingolf who had thrown that time, and he told the others to play on, while he sat down besides Valgerd and talked with her the rest of the day.

So here, in this excerpt, we have two examples of play already. The first is obvious—there were ball games held in conjunction with the autumn festival. Anyone who has been to a picnic or a gathering can relate—games almost inevitably form, whether that’s a contest of ladder ball or corn hole or a spirited match of football or baseball. That sort of competitive sports play is universal across cultures, and so it is not surprising that it happens here. In this case it was probably knattleikr, the particularly violent stick-and-ball game loved by the Vikings, that most closely resembles the Irish sport of hurling.

And yet there’s a second moment of play that happens, an interchange of flirtatious play. Valgerd is sitting with other women to watch the play and when the ball rolls to her she grabs it, hides it under her cloak, and says she’ll only give it to the one who threw it. We can imagine the scene. She likely had her eyes on Ingolf—he was, after all, according to the text, supremely good looking—and she then seizes her chance to get him to talk to her by saying she’ll only give it to him. He comes over, decides he’d rather talk to her than play with the guys, and they spend the rest of the day in conversation, which leads to courtship. 

And yet can we say this is definitively play? On the one hand, one might argue that what Valgerd did is purely instrumental, a device to get Ingolf to talk to her. One of the characteristics of play is usually that it is done for its own sake, not to achieve something. Yet anyone who has ever dated or been in a relationship recognizes in that moment the playful act, the little element of mischievous fun, that sends sparks flying between potential partners. Studies, including one we published in our American Journal of Play, indicate that a spirit of playfulness is among the most desired characteristics for people looking for a mate, and so one can easily imagine the sparkle in Valgerd’s eye as she kept the ball, the mischievous teasing tone as she addressed the other ball players and then Ingolf, and Ingolf’s willingness to leave one form of play for another.

(In the end, however, Ingolf is never willing to commit to marriage, and Valgerd’s father, undoubtedly feeling Ingolf was “playing” with her—another use of the word—moved the family away and made her marry someone else.)

That this ancient scene still resonates is evidence of the eternal relevance of play. It also is a good reminder to us as a museum that as we attempt to collect and preserve the history of play, we have to collect the story where possible, not just the artifact that remains. We might take the ball into the collection (like a 500 year-old ball we have in our collections that was recovered from the Thames River in England), but without the story to go with it, it would simply be a ball, nothing else. Accompanied by the story we can imagine it as truly a plaything, whether it was being tossed about on the field of play or used as a flirtatious prop in the game of love.

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At first, I reviewed pretty much every new item and collection that came in, but as the pace of acquisitions quickened and the size of our staff expanded to do all this work, I’ve found myself with fewer and fewer opportunities to dig deep into these collections. That’s why it was such a pleasure to spend time going through the Bruce C. Shelley Papers at The Strong as we developed an exhibit on Age of Empires as part of our major expansion project in the summer of 2023.

The materials Bruce Shelley donated to The Strong encompass both physical papers and digital files, and in totality they help trace key parts of his career. They are particularly important because his career parallels the development of computer gaming in general.

A fan of war, simulation, and role-playing games, Shelley helped found Iron Crown Enterprises, whose first role-playing tabletop games came out in 1980, and then he worked at other board game companies such as Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) and Avalon Hill. His early efforts often involved minding the fine-grained details necessary to produce high-quality games. For example, the archives are filled with Shelley’s handwritten notes for games like Titan specifying font size or type changes; subtle tweaks to game instructions to make them more understandable for the player; and decisions about components.

In addition to his personal notes and correspondence, the files also contain a wide variety of pamphlets, newsletters, catalogs, conference programs, and other ephemeral publications that provide insights into the nature of culture and communication of the board game world in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I particularly like the program for a softball game between the staff of the game publishers Avalon Hill and S.P.I. that was held at the 1978 Origins game conference.

Like many other board game designers of the period, Shelley made the transition to the world of computer games in the 1980s and early 1990s. Geographically he didn’t have to go far. Avalon Hill, the leading war game company, was based in Maryland, as was the up-and-coming computer game company Microprose where Shelley started working in the late 1980s. There he teamed with game developer Sid Meier on best-selling games such as Railroad Tycoon and Civilization. Both Shelley and Meier were firm believers in continually testing games, and the papers contain interesting records of “Questions regarding game play” for the game Colonization.

In 1995, after a move to Chicago, Bruce Shelley reconnected with two old friends, Tony and Rich Goodman, to work on a game that they were developing (they had originally met in the 1970s at a board game club at the University of Virginia). That game became Age of Empires, one of the most successful real-time strategy games of all time. Here’s where Shelley’s donation of materials is particularly rich. The paper materials he gave to the museum offer some documentation, but the electronic materials are especially valuable in offering crucial insights into the development of the game.

These digital materials contain a wide range of files, from meeting notes to outlines for technology trees for civilizations in the games to presentations about the game and the creators’ strategies and principles. I particularly enjoyed clicking through a folder from 1996 that contained the various proposed .WAV files of sounds in the game, from waving grass to taunting phrases. 

Video games are almost always a collaborative enterprise, so it’s not surprising that the papers reveal some key materials created by other people. I found a 1997 memo from Dave Pottinger that outlines an early version of the AI for the computer players (i.e., the opponents of the human player in a single player game). Pottinger’s document explains the mathematical basis for determining the decisions of the different active elements in the game, assigning each a strategic number (abbreviated as SN at the start of every variable name).  

Being able to care for these digital materials is the result of expertise that The Strong has built up over almost 20 years of work engaged in safeguarding the history of video games. When the collection first came in, our digital preservation team made sure to migrate the data off the original disks and onto more secure storage. In the process, The Strong’s digital games curator Andrew Borman discovered the earliest known prototype of Age of Empires called “Dawn of Man.”

By doing this work, we can preserve a record for researchers to understand how games were created, what decisions individuals and companies made, and why things developed as they did. Video games are a transformative industry, and it is a vital work of cultural heritage to preserve these sorts of materials. In this case, the materials Bruce Shelley donated helped us create an exhibit on Age of Empires that debuted in June of 2023. By using materials from the Bruce Shelley papers, as well as other donations such as those from Tony and Suzanne Goodman and Age of Empires art director Brad Crow, we’re able to unfold, for our guests, the rich, detailed work that goes into making important video games.

Bruce Shelley’s papers are of great value for anyone interested in understanding his career, the development of Age of Empires specifically, and the history of the craft more broadly. We are honored to preserve them.

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The result is that there are different databases storing and organizing these items, and there’s no one-stop shop to find everything in The Strong’s collections. It can all be bewildering for the poor researcher just trying to find the appropriate materials! So, I thought it would be useful to put together a quick primer on where to find things at the museum.

The core of the museum’s collection are hundreds of thousands of physical, three-dimensional objects like dolls, toys, board games, physical copies of video games, jigsaw puzzles, and other materials related to play. Museum staff members catalog every object individually, assign it a unique ID number, and then enter it into the museum’s internal database system called Argus. There are many fields of information for each item—what’s often called metadata—that denote things ranging from where the item was made to how the museum acquired it. Many of these objects and their associated information—but not all—are available for search through the collections search page on the website. This is the best place to start when searching for manufactured items, say a doll, toy, or game.

Yet the museum is interested not only in playthings, but also in documenting what has been said about them and how they were made. Here the museum’s Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play is especially important. This part of the museum is divided into two parts, as the name implies. The library houses primarily published materials, whether those are books, magazines, trade catalogs, or other materials (usually printed, but sometimes multimedia) and those items can be located here. 

By contrast the museum’s archives usually hold unpublished materials that document how playthings were designed, made, sold, or enjoyed, things like design documents, concept art, business records, correspondence, and focus group tests. Unlike with the collections or library catalogs, items are not individually cataloged but instead organized into specific sets of “papers,” each of which has a dedicated finding aid that allows researchers to home in on where to find relevant materials. These include both traditional physical copies of documents but also digital materials. The archives database provides access to these records, but researchers should be aware that the finding aids only describe general overview of the materials, organized in boxes and folders. They do not enumerate every specific memo or drawing. There’s no substitute for going through each folder and, following the advice of the great biographer Robert Caro, “turn every page.”

The museum has also begun to make some of these materials available on the internet by scanning and uploading files. While these are sometimes findable at a macro level in other databases, the museum maintains a special section devoted to preserving digital materials and making them available on the web. That Preservica site, which holds items ranging from oral histories to scans of the diary of game designer George Parker, is available here. This is a great place to get direct access to primary sources.

Lastly, it sometimes pays to use the general search function on the museum website. This will often reveal more information, primarily through blogs composed by museum staff or outside researchers who have written about things they’ve discovered in the museum’s holdings. This can often provide important context for specific holdings and sometimes point out things that might not be easily identified any other way.

Those are the general ways that researchers can find relevant holdings in the museum, but it might be useful to show how this would work on a practical level with a specific example. So, let’s imagine there is a researcher who is interested in studying the hit toy-to-life Skylanders series, that debuted in 2011, and wants to explore the collections, many of which arrived at The Strong as a major donation from the game’s developer Toys for Bob. How would that researcher use these various databases?

First, to get a sense of the scope of The Strong’s collection in this subject, it would be useful to search the artifact catalog, and that would reveal that the museum has (at the time I was writing this, in early 2024), 443 objects that contain the keyword “Skylanders.” There may be others that a simple search misses, perhaps because of a typo in the cataloging record or some other factor, but there’s a good chance this covers the vast majority of the collection.

Looking in the museum’s library catalog shows that the museum also holds secondary source literature that mentions the game, guides to specific titles such as Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventures, and even some fiction set in the Skylanders universe, such as the children’s book Skylanders: The Trap Masters.

Exploring the archives catalog leads to other discoveries, including the fact that in the Toys for Bob Collection there are numerous records related to the games’ development, including concept sketches and production flow charts. Among the items listed in the collection are video oral histories that we conducted with Toys for Bob executives, designers, programmers, and artists when picking up the materials, and these are available for viewing in the Preservica collection. Finally, a quick search of the museum’s website uncovers two blogs related to Skylanders, one that describes how the museum obtained the Toys for Bob collection and the other that describes the collection donated by the company’s cofounder, Paul Reiche III. Both of these point out specific items and provide further context for the collection that might be of interest to researchers.

There used to be a popular saying that supposedly harkened back to the American gold rush (though I remember it more from Looney Tunes cartoons), “There’s gold in them thar hills.” Of course, knowing there was gold under the ground didn’t mean that it was easy to find. It took some digging. The same is true of The Strong’s collection. There’s historical gold in them there archives, and it’s a lot easier to find once you know where to look.

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There’s sound wisdom in this, as anyone knows who has felt better after laughing uproariously at a silly pet video. Play is not necessarily a panacea, but it is good medicine, a way of introducing fun into life and making it a little more bearable along the way. Because of these beneficial qualities of play, it is not surprising that over the years numerous people have invented toys, dolls, board games, and video games to help patients deal with illness better.

Perhaps the most famous—and successful—commercial product is Candy Land, created in 1948 by Eleanor Abbott to help children with polio. Abbott, who was recovering from polio herself, created the game to comfort children in polio wards. Fears about polio were rising throughout America at the time, in part because a baby boom had dramatically increased the number of children potentially susceptible to the disease. The game’s origin as a salve for children battling polio is reflected in its design elements, as Samira Kawash points out in an essay on its history. The game’s premise of children wandering through a forest without their parents harkens back not only to older tales like Hansel and Gretel but also to the fact that at the time most children battling polio were in institutions separated from their parents. The game’s early iconography also referenced the dread disease. In the first printing of the game the boy in the lower left hand corner seems to have a leg supported by a brace. Interestingly, as the scholar Cindy Dell Clark has noted in her book In Sickness and in Play, Candy Land has sometimes become a favorite of diabetic children, for whom sweets are often forbidden territory.

The desire to help children going through hospitalization has prompted the creation of other board games targeted not so much as distraction as explanation. An example of this is The Hospital Game, developed in the 1970s by Elizabeth Crocker who worked with designer James Johnson to make a Monopoly-style game that helped children prepare for a visit to the hospital by exposing them to the x-ray department, surgical unit, and other places in the hospital they would visit and undergo procedures, such as having a cast put on a broken leg. I learned about the game after consulting a 1986 book in our library, Medically-oriented Play for Children in Health Care: The Issues, and seeing a reference to the game. We didn’t have the game in our collection, so I reached out to Elizabeth Crocker and she very kindly donated a copy.

Administrators in hospitals recognized the palliative benefits of play, especially for children, so many institutions began introducing play-based programs for their patients. A search of play scholar Doris Bergen’s papers in our archives revealed, for example, that in the 1970s she had helped organize a play program in the pediatric ward of Pontiac General Hospital in Michigan with two main goals: child play and parent education. The program provided an array of resources, from a playroom to a toy cart that could be wheeled to patients’ bedsides.

The rise of video games introduced a new tool to entertain sick kids and help them pass the time, and perhaps no company has collaborated with health-care providers so consistently here in the United States as Nintendo. Nintendo initiated its efforts with its hands-free controller for the Nintendo Entertainment System. In this adaptive device, created in consultation with eight-year-old Todd Stabelfeldt, who was paralyzed from the neck down, Nintendo allowed users to control characters through chin motions up and down and by puffing and sipping on a tube. “Now everyone can play with power,” exclaimed the controller’s manual.

In the early 1990s, Nintendo rolled out a more institutional approach with its Nintendo Fun Centers. These entertainment stations came equipped with a VHS and a Super Nintendo Entertainment System that sat on a cantilevered arm that easily slid over a patient’s bed. Nintendo partnered with the Starlight Foundation, a charity focused on bringing joy to sick kids, to distribute them to hospitals around the country. Healthcare administrators, physicians, nurses, parents, and kids raved about them, and eventually the program spread to hospitals internationally.

In the 2000s, a variety of programs explored how computer games might help improve patient outcomes. Perhaps the most serious organization to do so was HopeLab, an organization founded by Pam Omidyar whose first product was Re-Mission, a game designed to help kids fight cancer, both metaphorically and literally. Cancer provided the inspiration for the villains in the game, malignant cells that players had to blast. But the purpose of the game was not merely cathartic, it was also designed to encourage patients to better stick with the arduous regimens that are often the byproduct of cancer therapy. By helping children understand how the chemotherapy chemicals in their body were helping them fight the disease, the game encouraged them to keep going. HopeLab did a variety of studies of the game’s effectiveness and found it helped patients stick with their treatments—follow up studies using fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machines demonstrated that the excited states of players while battling their enemies helped them better remember why the treatments were necessary.

Games, of course, are not the only playthings that have helped kids endure medical treatments or taught them to understand what is happening in a scary place like a hospital. Plush animals and dolls, for example, have been consistent comforts to children for decades. Clowns like Dr. Patch Adams (made famous in a Robin Williams movie) operate in the grim halls of hospitals to bring a little joy to the patients who are enduring the worst moments of their lives. Why do they do it? Because play is vitally important, in sickness and in health.

Dr. Bowen White many years ago began dressing and acting as a clown: Dr. Jerko. In an interview with The Strong’s American Journal of Play, White offered some sound advice for helping people who are sick:

There’s another way to be with people who are suffering. Be light, buoyant, and playful. Play is a way of connecting with people where they are. It’s a way to be both spontaneous and vulnerable at the same time. Without knowing what’s the perfect thing to say or do is, one enters into a psychological space with another person or group of people where the reality of their situation is confronted.

Be light, buoyant, and playful as a way to connect with others who are hurting—that’s a prescription that we could all probably benefit from taking.

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For those not familiar with the term, NPC stands for Non-Player Character. It refers to some living, sentient being in a game that players interact with in a way that’s not purely hostile. A monster you encounter and fight in a game, with little or no conversation outside the moment of combat, could perhaps be considered an NPC, but in practice monsters seem to fall into a different category. On the other hand, a computer-generated tavern keeper in a fantasy game might be an NPC, as might a space pilot who you hire in a tabletop sci-fi role-playing game.

Unlike characters that are controlled by other players, NPCs are enacted and acted by some sort of dungeon or game master in tabletop games and by software in computer games. Especially in the latter case, this has often meant that the non-player characters exhibit routinized or predictable behavior. In a tavern set in a fantasy roleplaying game, for example, the character might mechanically wash crockery and offer formulaic sayings to the player that are repeated with each interaction. Some comments might be useful: “I’d watch out for the bandits in Templar Woods” could be a helpful piece of advice. Other times the conversation might be banal. “Nice weather we’ve been having lately!”

The inherent silliness of the dialogue and actions of many computer NPCs has prompted people to play act NPCs in real life. I first became aware of the trend a few years ago when my kids pointed me to videos of people pretending to be NPCs in grocery stores, approaching strangers and uttering random sentences such as, “I see three cloaked men going by here recently. Who knows what they could be up to?” In a game, this speech could be an invitation to a side quest, but seeing it applied to some bewildered shopper in real life highlights the unreal absurdity of it. More recently, TikTok stars such as Pinkydoll have made playing NPCs (or uttering nonsensical phrases like “ice cream so good” that sound like NPC dialogue) a serious moneymaker, as well as a social phenomenon. It’s a curious case of life imitating games imitating life.

But where do NPCs come from? Think about it. In traditional games like chess, Monopoly, or parcheesi, there is no such thing as an NPC as we might think of it today. Players might be characters, but the elements of the game do not interact in any independent way apart from the commands of the player or the mechanics of the game. The history of NPCs truly begins with a revolution in game playing, the creation of role-playing games in the 1970s.

Key to this evolution was Dungeons & Dragons. The first edition of D&D came out in 1974, so I decided to go back and look at one of the copies we have in our collection at The Strong. In this case, I pulled one donated by Bill Hoyt, who had gamed with D&D creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. That first edition (Hoyt used a woodgrain version that looked a little different from the usual “white box” set), consisted of three small booklets. In volume 1, Gygax and Arneson laid out a category of participants in the campaign that they called “Non-player characters,” though in this initial version the NPC’s role usually consisted of being fellow adventurers who were hired for the express purpose of joining the player’s party. Their ongoing loyalty was measured via secret dice rolls by the game’s referee (later known as the “dungeon master”).

Volume 3 (“The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures”) of this original version of Dungeons & Dragons expanded the scope of NPCs, especially as players ventured through wilderness territories. As players passed castles, they would be challenged to joust. If they had their own towns, they could hire specialists, ranging from alchemists to animal trainers. Most importantly, the game began to develop opportunities for non-players to shape the game, not through combat, but as conduits of quests and information. In the section on “RUMORS, INFORMATION, AND LEGENDS,” Gygax and Arneson wrote:

Obtaining such news is usually merely a matter of making the rounds of the local taverns and inns, buying a round of drinks (10-60 Gold Pieces), slipping the barman a few coins (1-10 Gold Pieces) and learning what is going on. Misinformation is up to the referee. Legends will be devised by the referee as the need arises, but they are generally insinuated in order to lead players into some form of activity or warn them of a coming event.

NPCs remained a vital part of Dungeons & Dragons as the game evolved, especially with the introduction of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game system in the late 1970s. Gary Gygax, author of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, spent many pages talking about NPCs, their role in the game, how their characteristics and personalities could be generated, and how the dungeon master should bring them to life to move the story along in a way that felt genuine and real, by “assuming the station and vocation of the NPC and creating characteristics—formally or informally according to the importance of the non-player character.” World makers could create their own NPCs, or the Dungeon Master’s Guide offered up tables that allowed the quick generation of NPCs with the roll of a few dice.

With the migration of role-playing games from tabletops to computers, the use of NPCs became more vital than ever, even as programmers and game designers struggled to breathe genuine life into them. Sometimes players would engage with characters who were placed in the game merely to do one thing, like set players off on a quest, the role of Lord British in Richard Garriott’s first published game Akalabeth (1979) or in the point-and-click adventure King’s Quest (1980). Gradually, games began to introduce more fully realized (though still limited) characters, such as in the successful titles Ultima (1981), Bard’s Tale (1985), and Ultima IV (1985).

In role-playing games, NPCs have generally served four key roles: instrumental, oppositional, allied, or atmospheric. Their most important role is usually the instrumental one, in which the NPC plays some necessary role in moving the story or game along, often by imparting information. Sometimes, however, NPCs are placed in the story to frustrate or slow the player character’s progress. In this way they act like monsters the player might encounter. On the other hand, they sometimes will aid the player, perhaps by offering healing or even joining a party of adventurers to help fight. And sometimes, they are simply there for atmosphere. This is especially prevalent in the large open-world games popular today, where harried game designers need filler material to populate the massive mythical realms they’ve created, and so they sprinkle the world with NPCs.

One can see how NPCs have been used in the history of computer game development by looking at the game development notes of Brian Fargo, founder of the pioneering game company Interplay, that are housed at The Strong.

Interplay published many early computer role-playing games, and Fargo took special interest in integrating NPCs as part of his attempts to create well-rounded stories. This shows up even in his early games like The Bard’s Tale (1985), in which one part of the game involves players interacting with an innkeeper at the Scarlet Bard; when players ask for wine, he sends them down into the cellar. One play tester for the Amiga version noticed that the game was buggy and the NPC wasn’t doing his job to keep the game going:

When an inn is entered, it is possible to carry on a conversation with the barkeep, but there is no interior picture. It is possible to order wine in the one inn, but the barkeep does not say to go down into the cellar.

In another game, Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate, the initial design document lays out how an NPC will advance the story. In the ruined remains of Skara Brae, the main town of the series, “the players will discover, in the location of the old Review Board, a place with a tired old man in it. He will welcome them and explain they have a mission they alone can perform. He’ll mention, in passing, that the other he has sent has yet to succeed, but he’s confident the adventurers will surpass him. He’ll note that one of the magickers will have to change class to become a (Prophet/Pathfinder/Herald) to facilitate the journeying the characters must do to succeed at their mission. This old man will function as a review board as well, so beginning players will be able to build characters up if they’ve not played a Bard’s game before and have no characters to transfer over.”

The same game (Bard’s Tale 3) also offers examples of oppositional and allied NPCs. One character, Young Hawkslayer, agrees to join the player’s adventuring party and help them if they answer a riddle correctly. Another, Urmech, variously helps or opposes the party. In general, early role-playing games had fewer NPCs who were purely atmospheric, since computer memory was so limited that every encounter had to matter. 

As computers became more powerful and memory more available, the use of NPCs became more prevalent and, at times, more sophisticated. Richard Garriott’s Ultima V (1988) featured NPCs that moved to the rhythm of the real world, rising to do business in the morning and closing city gates at night. BioWare’s 1998 roleplaying game Baldur’s Gate used NPCs to make it feel like the player had entered a world that lived and breathed on its own and did not exist solely to serve or impede the interests of the player. As Ray Muzyka, co-founder of BioWare stated in an interview, “We wanted to make [the inhabitants of Baldur’s Gate] feel like real people, not NPCs who were AI-controlled. They really felt like they had personalities and came to life.”

When creating NPCs at massive scale, it will always be a challenge to make them feel real. Back in 1950, in the early days of computing, Alan Turing proposed a test of artificial intelligence which postulated that if a human observer, communicating unseen via typing with a conversational partner, was unable to differentiate whether that partner was a human or a computer, then it would be possible to say, at some level, that computers could think.

We’re not there yet, but with AI and natural language processing improving at a rapid scale, we might, at some point, reach a place where interacting with NPCs feels as real as talking to the people in our everyday life.

The post The History of NPCs appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

There was something particularly playful about Muhammad Ali, the boxer who rivaled Pele as the most famous worldwide sports celebrity of the 20th century. But whereas Pele was known for his quiet dignity and his sheer enthusiasm for the beautiful game of soccer, Ali was not only the greatest boxer of his era, he was also a genius of repartee, someone who played with the media like he played with his (usually) helpless opponents in the ring, a fighter who dispensed one-liners and quips with the skill of his lightning-fast left jab. 

Ali had a charismatic, magnetic personality. Norman Mailer began his book The Fight about the boxer’s famous 1974 bout with defending world champion George Foreman in Zaire (the so-called “The Rumble in the Jungle”), with this description of Ali:

There is always a shock in seeing him again. Not live as in television but standing before you, looking his best. Then the World’s Greatest Athlete is in danger of being our most beautiful man, and the vocabulary of Camp is doomed to appear. Women draw an audible breath. Men look down. They are reminded again of their lack of worth. If Ali never opened his mouth to quiver the jellies of public opinion, he would still inspire love and hate. For he is the Prince of Heaven—so says the silence around his body when he is luminous.”

Part of Ali’s appeal was his sheer playfulness, a key attribute of charisma. Ali began playing with Foreman, his opponent, even before the match, launching verbal jabs intended to keep his opponent off-balance, mocking him as a “mummy.” There was play here, but also calculation and perhaps a little cruelty (something that was even more apparent in his mean-spirited jibes at his great rival Joe Frazier, someone who never forgave him for the insults).

Once the bout with Foreman began, the play continued, both physically and verbally. Ali danced early, leaning on the ropes when he realized it was an effective way to tire out Foreman. And the whole time, Mailer and others recorded, he taunted Foreman. “Can you hit?” he asked Foreman as his opponent tried to land blows on him. “You can’t hit. You push.” He belittled, hurling jibes in response to his opponent’s jabs. He was like a boy playing a game of the dozens with schoolmates. The verbal volleys played with Foreman’s head, the ridicules as rapid as the punches.

Ali brought the same gift of the gab to his interactions with the press. “I’m the greatest,” he bragged. When Time magazine did a cover story on him in 1963 (when he then went by his birth name of Cassius Clay, which he later rejected as his “slave name”), the publication printed a rhyme he had reeled off about himself:

This is the story about a man

With iron fists and a beautiful tan,

He talks a lot and boasts indeed

Of a powerful punch and blinding speed.

He refused to be pigeon-holed by reporters, telling them, “I don’t have to be what you want me to be, I’m free to be who I want.” He knew their game and played it better than they did.

The Strong’s collection highlights how Ali’s celebrity status gave plenty of opportunities for playthings themed around his likeness and image. A Rope-A-Dope jump rope came out in 1977, autographed and endorsed by the champion himself. The Mego Corporation that same year released a line of Ali action figures, complete with fierce but ultimately doomed opponents and a boxing ring to stage a pretend fight. But my favorite Ali item in our collection is probably Stern’s 1980 Ali pinball machine, the second pinball machine to be based on Black celebrities (after the Harlem Globetrotters pinball from the previous year).

There is something appropriate about a Muhammad Ali pinball machine. The way the ball bounces off the electric bumpers feels like the ways that Ali deflected the force of his opponents’ punches back at them. When the game’s not being played, the attract mode sends an audible shiver through the game and when the lights flicker you almost feel like the champion has touched you with a light punch, daring you to take him on. 

Ali’s image is everywhere, appearing six times on the back glass and more on the board, including right in the center where his right forefinger jabs towards you, taunting you, “I am the Greatest.” In the game, the kickers are labeled left jab, right cross, and uppercut, and “rope-a-dope” is the upper target that takes the force of your shot and sends it hurtling back at you. Across the bottom, the player is reminded he is “3 Time Champ” and winner of the “Triple Crown.” Players magnify their points when they light up the letters A-L-I and earn an extra ball when they spell out G-R-E-A-T-E-S-T, right below the words “I AM THE”—there’s no shortage of playful braggadocio here.

But I couldn’t just look at the game, I had to play it. My game didn’t start well, as my first ball drained almost immediately (this was back in the unforgiving days of pinball when you didn’t restart your ball if you died too soon). In the end, I scored 106,850, not earning an extra ball or lighting up all the letters for GREATEST. My second game was better, 371,250. And as I played, I almost began to personalize my experience. Imagining my shots at the center bumpers as body blows against my opponent, racking up points (like in a boxing match) but always setting myself up for the possibility that the ball would careening back at me while I was fighting up close and my fists were down, landing like an unobstructed right hook to my jaw. 

Like most of Ali’s hapless opponents, I was doomed to lose. And yet when I played, I felt myself absorbing some of his magic and grace. I was playing against him, but also playing with him. And, of course, anyone who dropped in a coin was being played by him (and Stern and the establishment that owned the pinball machine). It didn’t matter. The opportunity to go toe-to-toe with the champ was worth the money, for rarely have there been people in American history who so embodied the spirit of play as Muhammad Ali.

He was the greatest.

The post Muhammad Ali, Champion of Play appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

As a man, President Theodore Roosevelt preached and lived a muscular gospel of action. T.R. commanded the bully pulpit, busted corporate trusts, hunted big game, and willingly took on—both metaphorically and literally—anyone in a match of fisticuffs, even as President. But as a boy, Teedy (as he was known to his family) was weak and sickly, prone to bouts of serious, even life-threatening illness. How he remade himself is a story that has been often told but is worth looking at again from the perspective of play.

Asthma was at the root of many of Roosevelt’s childhood illnesses. Asthma today is still a disease that plagues millions of Americans, including 5-10% of children. It’s a disease which affects the airways causing them to swell and narrow, leaving it hard for the person to breathe. Its symptoms vary widely from person to person and aren’t predictable, even for each individual. It might manifest itself as a shortness of breath or even an inability to draw a breath at all, sometimes with deadly consequences. In Theodore Roosevelt, its effects were profound, and his parents often worried that he might die. In his Autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt wrote that “one of my memories is of my father walking up and down the room with me in his arms at night when I was a very small person, and of sitting up in bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me.” At night, when attacks were particularly severe, his father would sometimes bundle him into a horse-drawn carriage and ride him through the streets so the wind could fill his lungs.

Asthma is a constant, haunting presence in the lives of children who suffer from it, as well as for their parents. Cindy Dell Clark, in her sensitive book In Sickness and in Play: Children Coping with Chronic Illness, describes its effects on the sufferer and his or her family: 

The maxim that necessity is the mother of invention has its proof in the impressive imaginative strategies among children and parents who continually deal with asthma. Asthma is a formidable reality for a family; its symptoms can provoke life-and-death anxiety. An attack of asthma can bring nearly paralyzing fear, but play provides a way for the parent, the child, or both to escape or lighten the situation, if only through fantasy.

During the late 19th-century, at a time of increasing industrialization and urbanization in America, many people began to encourage physical exercise and time in nature as an antidote to the ways that modern life seemed to enervate and sap people’s health and well-being. Theodore Roosevelt’s parents encouraged him to pursue a vigorous life of outdoor exercise, and Roosevelt himself embraced it, not only, I would argue, as an act of filial piety—his father at the age of 12 had said of him, “Theodore, you have the mind but not the body. You must make the body”—but also as a profound, lifelong embrace of the power of the imagination to change one’s conception of oneself.

Imagination is the foundation of play. It inspires us, impels us to reorder the world around us in ways that only we can see. As Vivian Paley notes in her book The Boy Who Would be a Helicopter, “‘Pretend’ often confuses the adult, but it is the child’s real and serious world, the stage upon which any identity is possible and secret thoughts can be safely revealed.” If you are feeling weak or scared, pretending to be someone else or somehow different can embolden you. Through play, we can become strong.

So it was with Theodore Roosevelt. An inveterate reader as a child, he absorbed himself in tales of adventure and derring-do. “Having been a sickly boy, with no natural bodily prowess, and having lived much at home, I was at first quite unable to hold my own when thrown into contact with other boys of rougher antecedents. I was nervous and timid. Yet from reading of the people I admired—ranging from the soldiers of Valley Forge, and Morgan’s riflemen, to the heroes of my favorite stories—and from hearing of the feats performed by my Southern forefathers and kinsfolk, and from knowing my father, I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world, and I had a great desire to be like them.” His imagination spurred him to action, and T.R. translated this imaginative impulse into a rigorous regimen of strength training and tackling physical challenges. In time he became physically fit, with a vigor that few of his contemporaries could surpass.

Research in recent years has confirmed the power of imagination to inspire us. For example, a 2016 study in the journal Child Development by Rachel White and others found that when children imagined themselves to be hard-working fictional heroes (like Batman, Dora the Explorer, or Bob the Builder) they performed significantly better on boring tasks than if they just pretended to be hard-working versions of themselves. In these cases, as was true of Theodore Roosevelt, pretending turned out to be a spur to real-life effort and success.

Even as he grew up, Theodore Roosevelt never lost his zest for play. One sees it in his politics, the gleeful eagerness with which he entered the lists to joust with his opponents, trash talking as he went, crowing he was “as strong as a bull moose” and that wealthy businessmen were “malefactors of great wealth.” As governor of New York, he wrestled literally and frequently in the executive mansion with middleweight champion Mike Dwyer. Smashed furniture be damned! When President, he brought legendary zest to life in the White House, encouraging hard-hitting games of football, playing tennis with gleeful abandon on a court he created or dragging diplomats on strenuous off-trail hikes through Rock Creek Park. The British ambassador to the United States Cecil Spring-Rice commented, “You must always remember the President is about six”—as one of T.R.’s best friends, he knew of what he spoke.

And perhaps there’s a lesson here for us. Perhaps we’d all be a little better if we thought and acted as if we were about six. Sometimes we need the power of pretend to help us see beyond our limitations, embrace life with full-bodied vigor, and become who our imagination tells us we are. Theodore Roosevelt is a pretty good model in this respect.

And, oh yeah, if you want a companion for a little pretend time, why not get a Teddy Bear. It is named after Theodore Roosevelt after all.

The post Theodore Roosevelt and the Redemptive Powers of Play appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

Let’s consider this historically. For most of human history, living quarters were nasty, brutish, and cramped. There was little room for interior play in a dark, dirty hovel, unless that play was fairly confined. In a northern climate like Iceland in the Middle Ages, that might mean playing a game such as chess or, more often, telling stories and sagas (storytelling that would one day shape many forms of modern fantasy play). More often, people just played outside, often in conjunction with the rhythms of agricultural work that made space for seasonal and religious festivals that became sites of revelry.

With the onset of the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries—first in Great Britain, then elsewhere in Europe and the United States and eventually other places in the world—greater prosperity allowed many people to build bigger, more comfortable dwellings. These homes were not apportioned equally. In the United States, large houses were more common in the north and in all areas such larger homes were almost exclusively owned by white Americans. Black people—both free and enslaved—generally only had small houses that probably differed little in size from those of European people in the Middle Ages. Play—in forms like sports, singing, storytelling, dancing, and genial conversation that required the purchase of few if any manufactured items—remained largely an outdoor pastime, whether on the porch, in the street, or in the fields.

But among more privileged families, new spaces emerged that facilitated different types of play. Indeed, in the first half of the 19th century there arose a moral imperative to use spaces to train children up in the way they should go, to practice what Horace Bushnell termed “Christian Nurture” (in a book of the same name from 1847). Catherine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy (1843) was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, and in it she argued that homes needed interior places to host socializing and improving amusements. The parlor was primarily for company, but the sitting room was for family, and here people could indulge in less-active pastimes like reading or game playing. Beecher thought highly of games, noting:

“Another resource, for family diversion, is to be found in the various games played by children, and in which the joining of older members of the family is always a great advantage to both parties. All medical men unite, in declaring that nothing is more beneficial to health, than hearty laughter; and surely our benevolent Creator would not have provided risibles, and made it a source of health and enjoyment to use them, if it were a sin so to do.”

It is no coincidence that the American board game industry arose at this time, with games such as the Mansion of Happiness and Checkered Game of Life appealing to the moralizing imperatives of middle-class parenting. Playing a board game was far better inside than outside.

This use of specific interior spaces for play is evident when we study architectural plans of the time. Often called “pattern books,” these became popular in the 1840s, with authors like Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux offering advice and plans on how to lay out houses that accommodated scenes for sociability. Whereas in urban centers like London or New York in the 18th century people would often go out for (often raucous) entertainment in taverns and coffee houses, middle-class people in the 19th century increasingly sought more decorous retreats in the home where they gathered in the family circle, perhaps admitting only a few choice friends. Play that took place in such domestic settings was likely to be more tranquil and “improving” than the rowdier playstyles of the past.

And yet for many Americans, those robust, romping forms of outdoor play continued, though increasingly it was in the city street, rather than in meadows or fields, where they took place. As America became more and more urban towards the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the play habits of the rich and poor became even more divided. For an immigrant living in a working-class tenement building, there was little room, so children claimed the stoops and streets. There was often a gender division, with girls staying closer to home under the more watchful eyes of parents and boys engaging in more active play farther afield (or farther “astreet” to be more precise). Our images of stickball games for boys and jump rope skipping for girls have some truth in them. Yet at the same time middle- and upper-class children often found their lives becoming more restricted socially, as prejudice, fear, and a desire to inculcate certain habits and behaviors led many well-off parents to keep their children closer to home. The toy, doll, and game industries blossomed during these years, with more and more beautiful and well-made playthings to charm and entertain children safely ensconced in the nursery or playroom.

And yet as the 20th century progressed there emerged, to some extent, a democratization of play, as overall prosperity spread and more Americans gained sufficient space for children to be entertained indoors. Meanwhile, with the rise of suburbia, many more families gained access to their own yards with the concomitant recreational activities that proliferated there—from lawn games to hula hoops. Bicycles brought freedom and mobility to many children, and a great baby boom after World War II supplied plenty of playmates. A comic strip like Peanuts, for example, captures this atmosphere of a world of children engaged in a wide range of (mostly) outdoor activities. Not that there weren’t plenty of games and toys for indoor play; the introduction of plastic made toys more affordable, and the introduction of television advertising made them more desirable. A new space, “the family room,” provided a spot where families could retreat and play with some of these playthings when they were not outside. Or gather to watch TV.

When video games first entered the home in the 1970s, they took advantage of existing spaces that had already been created. The living or family room, with its central television, provided a spot for family entertainment of a new kind that was interactive, not merely passive. Seating arranged to facilitate television watching, provided ready-made seating for playing video games (much better than for playing board games or with toys). Couch co-op mode was born, as friends gathered side-by-side to engage in boisterous matches of Super Smash Bros. or Mario Cart.

Today many of our rooms reflect these patterns, though shifts are happening as play and sociability occurs more often in the palms of our hands on our smart phones than across a table or in front of a television. Open concept rooms allow greater space for lounging where people can be together, even if they are playing by themselves (or with someone else in a different part of the world in a multiplayer game).

These ways spaces for play have changed and evolved have implications for our work as a museum in preserving the history of play. To be blunt, some forms of play are easier to document than others. The Strong’s collection has an abundance of toys, games, and dolls of the late 19th and 20th centuries that were meant for the middle and upper classes. Those playthings survived because they were often meant to look valuable and therefore people valued them. While we have a surfeit of these sorts of artifacts, the museum finds itself with a shortage of things used for play by people of lesser means. If a plaything of a poor child might be a ball or oddments collected from the natural world, it is very unlikely those things survive. To tell the story of that sort of play, we often have to look to other sources than the things of play themselves—documentary evidence like written accounts, photographs, and art can help tell some of the story of play past that the artifactual evidence omits. We have to be creative to overcome the biases inherent in our collections.

Even today we face new types of challenges when it comes to collecting video games. If we ask where most play takes place in our present-day world, we would have to admit that much of it is interior to our minds, taking place in virtual worlds on digital platforms that have no physical form. How does a museum collect those virtual experiences when so much of the pattern of collecting is built around amassing and cataloging physical things? That is a challenge we’re tackling in a host of ways—from digital downloads to video capture—but it’s one we will always do imperfectly. When play has migrated from the parlor to the palm of your hand and when its form has gone from paper and ink to bits on a screen, there will be inherent challenges in preserving play of today.

Still, we’re gonna keep trying. A record of play—even ephemeral, fleeting play—is important to preserve, no matter where it took place.

The post A Place for Play appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.