The novel I’m writing involves, in part, a group of friends who reunite after 25 years to restart their old game of Dungeons & Dragons. That game has been close to my heart since 1978 or so when I received my first boxed set as a gift. I’ll never forget the sense of wonder I felt rolling those exotic polyhedral dice and creating my first character. During my amazing week as a Mary Valentine and Andrew Cosman Research […]
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America’s Favorite Game and Success Story: Uno!
Have you played Uno? An estimated 80 percent of game-playing households have. Since its introduction in 1971, the game has sold increasingly well. Inexpensive to buy and easy to learn, Uno appeals to a wide age range. Unlike most card games aimed at either children or adults, Uno is one of the few games that can truly be enjoyed by both—without the child feeling overpowered. But while nearly everyone has played or at least seen a version of Uno, few […]
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Pinball Flips, Thumps, and Pops into the National Toy Hall of Fame
Pinheads (or pinball enthusiasts, to the uninformed) rejoice! On November 8, 2018, pinball joined the 67 other iconic toys and games inducted into The Strong’s National Toy Hall of Fame. At its most basic level, pinball challenges players to use plastic flippers to control, aim, and fire a 1 1/16-inch stainless steel ball around a wooden playfield covered with objects and obstacles. It’s no surprise then, that pinball descended from centuries-old bowling, marble, billiard, and bagatelle games that all required […]
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Switches and Screens: Researching Video Game Interface Design
In Will Wright’s game design documents for SimCity (1989), he wrote on his graph paper pad, “Interface?” Around the word, Wright drew a box, as if to highlight it. On the rest of the page, there are a random assortment of notes: “Fixed / Mobile Cursor,” “Navigate / Edit / Tool Select.” On the page, Wright also drew a series of arrows that show early design possibilities for the buttons used in SimCity to rotate buildings or move […]
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Not Just Fan Fiction: The Allen Hammack D&D Collection
My first library card was a small rectangle made of royal blue cardstock, with the handwritten number “9555” in the top right corner. This very valuable document allowed me to check out up to six items at a time from my town’s library. Ever the opportunist, I always checked out the first six books that I picked up, knowing that I could come back anytime (!) and swap them for a new batch. This method of binge-reading let me plow […]
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Documenting the Skylanders Story
It began with a phone call from Paul Reiche III last summer.
I’ve known Paul since hearing him at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2012 tell the story of the creation of the Skylanders line of toy-to-life video games. I loved his enthusiasm for video games, tabletop games, and toys, a passion that fueled pioneering work in those fields from his time at TSR in the 1970s working on Dungeons & Dragons to his many years in the video game business; […]
An Expansion Pack for A History of Video Games in 64 Objects
In our new book from the World Video Game Hall of Fame, A History of Video Games in 64 Objects, we faced a challenge. Which objects should we include? The Strong museum, home of the World Video Game Hall of Fame, has hundreds of thousands of objects related to video games in its collections, and so we needed to include just the right mix of artifacts that were important, helped tell the broader history of video games, and would engage […]
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The First Mobile Game Goes Viral: Pigs in Clover
In the 1880s the toymaker Charles Crandall invented a dexterity game a player could hold in one hand. People had likely crafted similar games, often called “ball-in-a-maze” puzzles, for many years. But Crandall’s creation, titled Pigs in Clover, was the first to become popular, sell thousands of units, and cause enough of a stir to be written about and imitated. How did this happen?
Pigs in Clover consists of three concentric cardboard rings fixed to a wood base. The puzzle challenges […]
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Oral Histories in the Archives
In this age of sharing every idle thought online, younger generations might find it hard to believe that publicly documenting one’s own life wasn’t always the norm. The most ancient forms of memory were kept in the oral tradition, and the keepers of records were individuals entrusted with the task of memorizing details and transmitting them through recitation to others. As writing systems developed and literacy rose across the globe, the written record became the rule (and oftentimes, entire groups […]