Blog

Jana Rosinski
2018 Strong Research Fellow
Syracuse University, NY

I came to The Strong to explore the design of early computer and video games for girls, looking to account for how female designers and games create different play experiences and player representations, along with the spaces, voices, and ways of playing they have made available. I pored over the collections of Dani Bunten Berry (for her conception of the social potential in multiplayer games), Carol Shaw (widely recognized as the first female game […]

Continue Reading about A ROM of One’s Own: Snapshots from the Games-for-Girls Movement Published on:
October 25, 2019

Alec S. Hurley, 2018 Strong Research Fellow
PhD Student, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX

 
 
Despite growing up in Rochester and routinely passing The Strong museum en route to the family business on Oregon Street, I failed to take advantage of the museum’s wonderful exhibits and its abundant collections until late June of 2018. Then, over the course of five days leading up to the July 4th holiday, I was fortunate enough to take a break from my doctoral studies at the […]

Continue Reading about My Week with Brian: A Conversation with the Collected Works of Brian Sutton-Smith Published on:
October 18, 2019

In 2006, when we began our efforts at The Strong to preserve the history of video games, we knew we were onto an important subject, but we did not truly foresee the vast array of challenges that we would face in preserving video games. Over the years as we founded the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) and grew our collection to more than 60,000 video games and related objects we’ve learned quite a bit about how […]

Continue Reading about A Laboratory for Video Game Preservation Published on:
October 11, 2019

Video games have become increasingly popular over the last few years. In fact, a recent survey suggests that approximately 2/3rds of American adults partake in the pursuit. But even with this emerging success, gaming continues to be dogged by decades-old accusations. Many of the medium’s most ardent critics argue that games offer only vacuous experiences. Lying beyond the pixels, polygons, and interactive scenes is just empty entertainment. Or, even worse, they argue that games are only a vehicle for mindless […]

Continue Reading about “Serious” Fun: Social, Moral, and Political Content in Video Games Published on:
October 4, 2019

In September 2018, I got to spend two weeks engaging with the Stuart Brown and Brian Sutton-Smith papers located in The Strong’s Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play. These archival collections encompass the manuscripts, correspondence, unpublished drafts, and personal papers of two prominent play scholars and advocates, Stuart Brown and Brian Sutton-Smith. 

I first became interested in play scholarship and advocacy while working as a playworker in San Diego. While doing this work, I began wondering: What behaviors, actions, […]

Continue Reading about Play Advocacy: Stuart Brown & Brian Sutton-Smith’s Collaboration Published on:
September 27, 2019

By Gleb Albert, 2018 Strong Research Fellow
In September 2018, I had the chance to go to Rochester and work at The Strong, thanks to its generous research fellowship program.  My postdoctoral research project deals with the history of computer games piracy in the 1980s and early 1990s as a subculture phenomenon. I look at the so-called “crackers”—amateur computer users who removed copy protection routines from games and circulated the modified versions to gain fame and beat the competition—their […]

Continue Reading about Piracy and the Computer Games Industry Published on:
September 23, 2019

Just after Thanksgiving of 2018, I had the opportunity to spend two weeks at The Strong museum on a Valentine-Cosman fellowship. I wanted to know how board games mirror our understanding of ourselves, and how that understanding has changed over the last half-century or so.
I arrived on a chilly morning in Rochester to what the newscasters were calling “nuisance snow”—just enough to make driving annoying but not enough to shut anything down for these hardy Upstate New York folks—and was […]

Continue Reading about Out of the Kitchen: Board Games and Our Complicated Identities Published on:
September 13, 2019

 Birthdays. Love them or hate them, we all have one.

I realized the other day that I’ve surpassed the sixth month mark since my last birthday and can now see that next number creeping up on the horizon. As a kid, that half mark is pretty significant, as most like to tack on the appropriate fraction to their age for added clout. For instance, my nephew delights in telling people he is not just seven, he is seven and a half. […]

Continue Reading about Birthday Fun Published on:
September 6, 2019

Every year in early January close to 200,000 people descend on Las Vegas to attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and I joined the throng this year. That may seem out of place at first glance—there are many other large-scale events that might seem more in line with a visit from a representative of The Strong museum.
For instance, there are toy industry conventions, such as Toy Fair in New York City or Spielwarenmesse, its European […]

Continue Reading about “Playing” at the Consumer Electronics Show Published on:
August 23, 2019