Satisfy Your Wanderlust with These Video Games
I have wanderlust. In college, I found like-minded companions in Dean and Sal from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. In one passage, Sal recognized why he felt compelled to travel and explained that he had...
View ArticleFour Horsemen: 3DO’s Apocalypse That Never Was
“And so, the Four Horsemen were unleashed as foretold, and their names are Famine, Pestilence, War and Death. I am the line that separates life from death, war from peace and good from evil. I am known...
View ArticleSelling Electronic Play in Video Game Television Commercials
A few years ago, I asked my students in an American cultural history course to identify logos and slogans from their lifetime. Not surprisingly, since advertising bombards us through print, radio,...
View ArticleVideo Game Museum Tour
On a recent trip to France, I saw the beautiful Romanesque basilica of St. Sernin in Toulouse, a stop on the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Martin Sheen and Emilio Estavez...
View ArticleVideo Games in the Humanities Classroom
Before I came to The Strong, I taught writing and literature courses at the Rochester Institute of Technology and elsewhere, which fits right in with writing electronic games blogs. As video games...
View ArticleVideo Games in a Museum?
Most everyone is some sort of a gamer, whether that means you play Call of Duty to strategically advance and complete missions or you simply log onto your iPhone for a quick game of Words with Friends....
View ArticleWarrior and the Video Arcade Fighting Game
On a recent stroll through the arcade in The Strong’s eGameRevolution exhibit, I recalled a favorite childhood memory of my hometown arcade. During the early to middle 1990s, even as arcades declined,...
View ArticleFrom Battlezone to World of Tanks
In 1970, the movie Patton became a top-grossing film of the year, earned eight Academy Awards, and starred George C. Scott as the brilliant, eccentric World War II tank commander General George S....
View ArticleAltering Classic Video Games
I recently watched independent animation film director and designer Léo Verrier’s short film, Dripped. The 8-minute film presented a fictional story of a burglar who stole famous paintings from museums...
View ArticleICHEG Collects More Than Video Games
When someone mentions the “video game industry,” what’s the first image that comes to mind? I’m betting it’s your favorite game, or perhaps a console or handheld device. But the industry is made up of...
View ArticleAssembling The Avengers: From Comic Book to Pinball Machine
When George Gomez, Vice President of Game Development for Stern Pinball, found out he’d be designing The Avengers (2013) pinball machine, he was truly excited. The 2012 film of the same name was a box...
View ArticleFrom Board Games to Video Games
The roots of video gaming go deep into the longer history of games, puzzles, and play. Backyard games of cops and robbers predated first-person shooters. Puzzles existed long before designers...
View ArticlePoe, Thoreau, and Dickinson as Video Game Avatars
Henry David Thoreau advised his peers, “Let us first be simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores.” Thoreau’s...
View ArticleFrom Paper to Pixels: Magic: The Gathering Video Game
Earlier this month, The Strong opened its newest permanent exhibit, Game Time!, which traces the history of non-electronic games. The exhibit includes an artifact-rich timeline of games from the 1800s...
View ArticleA Short History of Mobile Games
I’m writing this blog while carrying a phone with the potential to play tens of thousands of games like Angry Birds, Temple Run, and Words with Friends. The incredible diversity of game options...
View ArticleCoin-Op Century: A Brief History of the American Arcade
For those of us who grew up during the so-called “golden age” of arcade games (late 1970s through the middle 1980s), the word “arcade” conjures up images of carpeted walls, smoke-filled rooms, black...
View ArticlePretend Play in Video Game Worlds
Pretend play often helps us cope. When we’re sad, scared, or depressed, pretend play lets us escape our hurts and gather strength to face our fears and trials. As psychologists Dorothy and Jerome...
View ArticleElectronic Baseball and the Nostalgia of Video Game Sounds
Video game music is catchy and memorable. Iconic tunes such as the Super Mario Bros. theme, composed by Koji Kondo, and Tetris’ fast-paced background music, based on the Russian folk song...
View ArticleGauntlet by Design: Creating the Four-Player-at-Once Arcade Game Experience
During the 1970s and 1980s, Atari programmers and designers crafted hundreds of new video game play experiences for millions of people. This summer The Strong will open Atari by Design, a temporary...
View ArticleVideo Games for Cats
Recently, I discovered a game, created by a two-man development team at Hiccup, that made me realize that to be a gamer, one need not be human. In December 2010, Game for Cats debuted on the Apple...
View Article
