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When Danish carpenter Ole Christiansen sensed a demand for inexpensive, quality playthings in the 1930s, he crafted wooden blocks and other toys and soon founded LEGO. In 1949, the company produced a set of red and white interlocking plastic bricks entitled “Automatic Building Blocks.” For decades, LEGO sets have provided children and adults with hours of creative play. In 1997, electronic game developer and publisher Mindscape introduced the construction toy to virtual play with LEGO Island.

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November 12, 2014

Well, paint me blue and call me Grover—Sesame Street premiered 45 years ago today, on November 10, 1969. With more than 4,300 episodes to date, it is one of the longest-running shows in television history. My colleague Scott Eberle has written about the series’ cultural and educational impact. And as The Strong inducts three new playthings into its National Toy Hall of Fame, it’s worth mentioning that the Toy Hall’s honorees abound throughout Sesame Street’s run. (Big Bird alone offers […]

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November 10, 2014

Little green army men marched right into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong on November 6, 2014. The tiny figures, along with Rubik’s Cube and bubbles, took their place of honor among the other 53 classic toys that evidence the iconic status, longevity, and play value necessary for induction. The green army figures, especially, encourage the open-ended, imaginative play that fosters creativity, learning, and discovery.
For boys of several generations, deploying green army figures or blowing up a […]

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November 7, 2014

Autumn is upon us, replete with all things paranormal and pumpkin spice. Hollywood once again offers us an opportunity to be terrified for the cost of a movie ticket and large popcorn. Annabelle (2014) isn’t the first “playful” villain that has captured our collective attention: for a half a century, scary toys have come alive in books, on television, and on the big screen.
“Who Hates Ya, Baby?”
A 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone featured Telly Savalas and a doll […]

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October 30, 2014

A century ago, Max and Dave Fleischer, two brothers from Brooklyn, developed a device that allowed animators to capture live-action events frame by frame. They tested their system on the roof of Max’s apartment building, where Dave, wearing a black clown suit, cavorted in front of a white sheet. Max captured the movements on film and projected them onto a glass plate that he then used to trace out pictures of individual movements. The result was rotoscoping, an animation technique […]

Continue Reading about Jordan Mechner Collection Documents Revolution in Game Graphics Published on:
October 29, 2014

This season of make-believe and dressing up is a good time to think about pretending—one of the cornerstones of play. For kids, make-believe is partly aspirational. If you’re little and you dress as a crime fighter or superhero you take in the fantasy, feeling power surge in your imagination. You have nothing to fear, even fear itself. Bad guys beware. And so too the ghostly hosts that will roam our neighborhoods this Halloween, scary in themselves, scaring off fear. They’ll […]

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October 29, 2014

Seinfeld is not, as people often claim, a “show about nothing.” It is a television show about four narcissists whose seemingly petty dialogue and ripple-effect exploits produced a significant impact on the modern pop culture landscape.

I confess―I’m a Seinfeld devotee. In fact, I recently completed my own personal “Summer of George,” where I re-watched every episode from the pilot through the finale. While I frequently caught myself reciting the lines along with the characters, I realized the brilliance of the […]

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October 27, 2014

As a child who preferred playing outside with sticks and leaves, only a handful of dolls ever really captured my attention. In fact, I only recall true fondness for four dolls: Baby Tenderlove, Raggedy Ann, Darci cover girl, and my Cabbage Patch Kid—Kendall Walter Winner.
In 1983, at the age of 13, I wasn’t interested in Kendall as “just a doll,” I was more fascinated by the fact that he was “one-of-a-kind.” At the time I didn’t understand the mathematical algorithms […]

Continue Reading about Cabbage Patch Kids: A 1983 Phenomenon Published on:
October 20, 2014

Biologists who study the fossil record note that dramatic blooms in the number and diversity of species interrupt long periods of stasis or gradual change in animal forms. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould termed this phenomenon “punctuated equilibrium” and wrote a book, Wonderful Life, about the sudden efflorescence of fossils during the Cambrian period about 550 million years ago. Interestingly, despite the drastic difference in timescales, this phenomenon has a parallel in the history of games, for at certain times the […]

Continue Reading about A Second Revolution in Game Distribution Published on:
October 9, 2014