American Journal of Play
The American Journal of Play is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by The Strong National Museum of Play. It publishes articles on the history, science, and culture of play, including video games and learning.
Documents
Who Knows the Rules?: Variation in Traditional Board Games in Azerbaijan
This study examines traditional board games in Azerbaijan, including nərd (a backgammon-family game with şeş-beş, gülbəhar, and döymə variants), dama (checkers), and mancala-style games such as qığ mərə, mərə, and mereköçdü.
- Rule consistency tracks the social structure of a game's community: formalized games like chess and nərd show relatively uniform rules, reinforced by organized governance, public play, and social pressure in venues such as teahouses (çayxana), while dama and Nakhchivan's games show more regional variation because social enforcement is weaker.
- Mancala-style games such as qığ mərə, mərə, and mereköçdü show the most divergent rules, typically played ad hoc with improvised equipment; three qığ mərə informants gave three distinct rule sets, which the authors link to the absence of manufactured sets and informal transmission.
- Mancala-style traditions are highly vulnerable: they leave no permanent equipment, are tied to nomadic pastoral life, and are declining as younger generations leave that lifestyle and as electronic games compete for attention.
Feminist Pinball: How Women Are Changing Competitive Play and the Industry
Competitive pinball has long been shaped by a masculine culture, and this analysis argues that women's underrepresentation stems from hostile social environments and sexualized game design rather than any biological difference.
- Roughly 94 percent of the more than 125,000 listed IFPA pinball players are male, and only three women reached the top one hundred world rankings in 2023, up from a single woman, Helena Walter Higgins, who held a place until then.
- The report attributes women's underrepresentation in competitive pinball to hostile social environments, gatekeeping, and sexualized game design rather than any biological difference.
- Sexualized imagery runs through pinball history, from 1950s pin-up art to the 1970s, when many games from major manufacturers featured sexualized women, and the report cites Stern's Whoa Nellie! (2015) and a 2002 Playboy machine as recent examples drawing scrutiny.
Using Playable Fictions and Board Game Design to Teach Climate Change in a Middle School Science Classroom
This study examines how middle school students can learn climate science by designing their own analog board and card games, arguing that "playable fictions," narrative games that immerse players in speculative realities, make complex environmental topics more engaging and accessible.
- A three-week workshop with 149 eighth-grade students in 38 groups across five classes had students design their own analog board and card games to learn climate science, drawing on game-design elements like theme, goals, mechanics, components, and balance.
- Survey responses from 137 participants showed 94.2 percent found the design process helpful for learning science and 92.1 percent enjoyed making their games.
- A Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network survey found fewer than 3 percent of online climate materials met classroom standards, motivating the search for better classroom resources.
Teaching Systems Thinking Through Game Design Curricula: The Case of Hexacago Health Academy
The Hexacago Health Academy, a five-year game-based public health curriculum for mostly Black high school students in Chicago, is presented as a model for teaching systems thinking through game design.
- The Hexacago Health Academy is a five-year, game-based public health curriculum for mostly Black Chicago high school students that teaches systems thinking by having students analyze "wicked problems" like food insecurity and community violence and then prototype their own public health games.
- The 2022 iteration was a fifteen-day workshop at the University of Chicago's MADD center with 19 students (mean age 16.5, 63% Black, 58% female), progressing from socio-ecological modeling and research analysis to playing commercial and serious games and finally reskinning game mechanics into original prototypes.
- Participants reported heightened self-confidence, emotional engagement, and a sense of belonging, and all said they would recommend the program, based on semistructured interviews and workbook analysis.
Reflections on Video Games and Game History: An Interview with Jesper Juul
This interview with game theorist Jesper Juul traces his intellectual path from literary studies into the academic study of video games, and it reflects on the major themes of his influential books.
- Game theorist Jesper Juul identifies as a "ludologist" and argues that games deserve serious critical study as cultural forms whose rule systems are themselves expressive, a tension he captures in the idea that video games are "half real" by combining rules with fictional worlds.
- Juul characterizes the 2000s as a "casual revolution" in which design shifted toward short, interruptible play for a broader audience, a trend that accelerated as mobile phones became the dominant gaming platform.
- Juul frames failure as the distinctive subject of games, arguing that the personal stakes of losing depend on the consequences attached to it and the social meanings a player assigns.
The History of the Toy and Games Industries Seen through a Jewish Lens: An Interview with Stephen Jacobs
Stephen Jacobs, a game historian, traces the history of the toy and game industries through the contributions of Jewish designers, entrepreneurs, and inventors spanning more than two centuries.
- Roughly one-third of Toy Industry Hall of Fame inductees have Jewish backgrounds, and historian Stephen Jacobs has identified over one hundred Jewish figures contributing to the toy and game industries across more than two centuries.
- Germany's toy industry from the 1850s to the early 1930s saw prominent Jewish founders thrive during a period of relative tolerance and industrial growth, a era that ended with the rise of Nazism.
- Of the twenty-nine Jewish-linked businesses identified in the research, Gebruder Bing went bankrupt in 1932 and J. W. Spear and Sons was Aryanized in 1938.
Games, Art, and Critical Play: An Interview with Mary Flanagan
This interview with Mary Flanagan, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College, explores the intersections of art, games, and critical play across her career as an artist, scholar, and game designer.
- Mary Flanagan defines "critical play" as the deliberate use of play environments to question aspects of human life, a practice she traces back through Alberto Giacometti's unwinnable game boards and the absurdist subversion of Dada.
- Tiltfactor, the social impact game lab Flanagan has directed for two decades, builds evidence-based games addressing pandemics, health care quality, gender bias, and inclusion in science.
- In Playing Oppression (2023), Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson argue that 4X strategy games, beginning with Stellar Conquest in 1975, embed colonial logics of exploration and extermination that designers and critics have long treated as neutral.
I Just Can't Commit to That Level Anymore: Players, Demands of Games, and Player Services
Elisa Wiik's study examines why Finnish players abandon or reduce their gaming, arguing that the demands games place on players, including time, dedication, cost, effort, and social expectations, act as thresholds that push people away.
- Players who quit or cut back on games cite a mix of material and immaterial resources, wellbeing, social circumstances, competing responsibilities, and a waning appeal of games, with the demands of time, dedication, cost, effort, and social expectations acting as thresholds that push people away.
- Play among the surveyed Finnish respondents was highly fluid and intermittent, a pattern accelerated by COVID-19, which shifted many activities toward remote digital tools.
- Many players, especially those who had moved to short casual mobile games, said they would play more if the time, concentration, and preparation required by longer or more complex games were reduced.
Learning from Children's Play and Folklore in South Louisiana
This interview with folklorist Jeanne Pitre Soileau explores how children's play and oral lore in South Louisiana are collected, transmitted, and changing over time.
- Children's folklore is treated as ephemeral artistic expression whose value lies in the act of playing rather than in the games as artifacts, and transmission depends on free, minimally supervised spaces like recess, camps, and sleepovers.
- Folklorist Jeanne Pitre Soileau's findings rest on roughly thirty-five years of collecting verbal play traditions (hand-clapping games, jump rope rhymes, taunts, camp songs, The Dozens) from children aged three to eighteen in South Louisiana, with audio and video transcription forming the basis of her publications.
- A rapid "children's network" carries rhymes across distant English-speaking regions, showing that play lore spreads far beyond local communities.
Inside the Games Black Girls Play: An Interview with Kyra D. Gaunt
This interview with ethnomusicologist Kyra D. Gaunt, published in the American Journal of Play in its winter and spring 2021 issue, traces her scholarly path from childhood play to her current research on music and online safety.
- Ethnomusicologist Kyra D. Gaunt's first book, The Games Black Girls Play, won the 2007 Alan Merriam Prize, and her research argues that Black girls' game songs have long been in dialogue with commercial male-voiced popular music, a "music between the sexes."
- Gaunt's current project examines more than 1,000 bedroom twerking videos featuring Black girls uploaded to YouTube between 2006 and 2014, arguing that chronic exposure to misogynoir in online play can harm developing girls.
- Gaunt introduces "context collapse" to describe how private bedroom play uploaded to platforms like YouTube and TikTok can be redirected to audiences who sexualize or stigmatize Black girls.
Play and Curation During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Interview with Christopher Bensch, Andrew Borman, Michelle Parnett-Dwyer, and Nicolas Ricketts
This interview with four curators from The Strong National Museum of Play examines how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped play, the toy and game industries, and the museum's collecting and preservation work during 2020.
- Sports toys rose 31 percent during the pandemic, while jigsaw puzzles and Eurogames saw sales surges as people turned to home-based play.
- Video game revenues in 2020 reportedly exceeded those of the movie and sports industries combined, underscoring games' central role in pandemic-era entertainment.
- Standout pandemic-era titles Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, Among Us, and Ring Fit Adventure drew players through social connection, daily routine, and streaming.
Pervasive Games Ten Years Later: A Roundtable Discussion
The roundtable revisits Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (2009), the first book-length treatment of pervasive games, which grew out of the EU-funded Integrated Project on Pervasive Games (IPerG) from 2005 to 2008.
- The authors judge several of the 2009 book Pervasive Games: Theory and Design's claims optimistic in hindsight, especially the prediction that commercially viable pervasive games would compete with pastimes rather than other games, while many of its analytical contributions on the design space have endured.
- The rise of smartphones and the free-to-play mobile business model were identified as the central changes of the decade since the book's publication.
- Montola argues that temporal expansion of play through timers, energy mechanics, and push notifications has become the most commercially significant dimension of pervasiveness, drawing investment away from location-based games.