As soon as I saw the dollhouse known as Fantasy House (probably made in France in the mid-20th century), my curiosity was piqued, to say the least. In preparation for The Strong’s fall 2025 exhibit entitled Dollhouses Unveiled, I was able to spend time examining a number of dollhouses from our founder Margaret Strong’s original collection with curator Michelle Parnett-Dwyer. We both couldn’t help but linger on this piece, marveling over the extent of the details inside, which was a […]
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Would You Like a Toy with That?
What’s the Big Deal About Fast Food Toys?
As an oldest child with a busy lifestyle, a calendar full of homework, dance classes, theatre rehearsals, voice lessons, Girl Scouts, choir, and sometimes Model UN or Math League, convenience and time efficiency were key in my childhood. My 25-minute commute to dance made me a frequent flyer at the McDonald’s that allowed me sufficient time to finish my food before we reached the studio. My meal of choice never wavered: a hamburger […]
Filling in the Blanks: A Media Archaeology of Computational Humor
BY: Robert King, 2024 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: What can drive cars, write essays, diagnose diseases, and is bad at jokes? Answer: Artificial Intelligence. (With apologies for the crummy riddle.)
Ever since AI’s astonishing advances in recent years, news of its accomplishments has been accompanied by a sour note: it can’t do humor. A 2023 study gives the statistics. When asked to generate over a thousand “original” jokes, ChatGPT returned the same 25 jokes in some […]
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Exploring Japanese Games and their Paratexts
By: Zari Smith, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
During the summer of 2025, I had the opportunity to visit The Strong National Museum of Play for a research fellowship. For two weeks, I had access to the collections and the rich archives that the museum owns in addition to the museum exhibits available for the general public.
I decided to apply for a fellowship from The Strong in order to find source materials that could assist me in writing my master’s thesis. My […]
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Women’s History Month: Celebrating Five Women in Toys and Dolls
The Education Task Force of Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women held a “Women’s History Week” celebration to correspond with International Women’s Day in 1978. The movement spread and, in 1987, Congress passed Public Law 100-9, which designated March as Women’s National History Month. Despite these initiatives, I have no memory of special celebrations or lessons on women’s contributions to history while growing up in public schools in the 1980s and 1990s. In a note to her readers, […]
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Adventures in Collecting
As I prepare to leave The Strong after 37 years on the museum’s curatorial staff, I’ve been reflecting on highlights from my career. The museum has seen incredible changes over those decades and moved from a sleepy museum focused on how everyday Americans lived between 1820 and 1940 to a vibrant institution that draws more than 600,000 guests every year to explore the ways play has changed lives through American history and continues to transform all of us each day.
As […]
Sap, Smoke, and the Sticky Business of Play
Hello, and welcome. I’m new to blogging and only a few seasons into making maple syrup myself—but I’ve been around the process my entire life. What I didn’t realize until recently is that what keeps pulling me back to sugaring isn’t just the syrup. It’s the play.
I’ve always been a hands-on, take-it-apart, fix-it kind of person. Give me something mechanical, inefficient, or slightly broken, and my brain lights up. Sugaring fits right into that wheelhouse. The constant tinkering, the problem solving, the incremental improvements—it’s all part of the draw. But when I zoom out, I […]
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The Computer that Took on Jeopardy!
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
In a well-publicized 1997 showdown, world chess champion Gary Kasparov competed against Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer built by IBM. Deep Blue won. Kasparov vehemently complained that the computer hadn’t been programmed so much to play chess as it had to specifically compete against him, but it was a huge victory for IBM.
Still, IBM acknowledged that success in a game like chess wasn’t such an extraordinary achievement. Eric […]
Problems with Plastic Toys
By: Alexander Parry, 2025 Strong Research Fellow
In December 2021, TIME journalist Emily Barone published an editorial about the conflict between her and her children over plastic toys. Barone explained her misgivings about the sea of “eco-terrible plastic junk” available to kids and wondered how to reconcile her environmentalism with the shelf appeal of colorful, heavily-advertised, and often battery-powered toys. These cheap and flimsy items, Barone observed, were nearly impossible to recycle, contributing to air and water pollution and to the […]
