Wednesday, March 31, 2010

The Games Keep Changing

The games keep changing. This is something that has been boiling in the back of my head for the past few weeks, ever since receiving a mass amount of game donations for the toy library. It's the pieces, the boards, the colors. Something changes each time a new edition is put out.

It started with game pawns with Chutes & Ladders and Candy Land. They have changed back and forth from plastic to cardboard, and each time the picture/shape changes. The way the game board folds and the box shape changed for Sorry, Monopoly and Scrabble Junior. Also, Scrabble Junior changed the color of the back of all their letters.

Monopoly Junior, the lemonade stands and game pawns have changed since the last edition I had... and they have the same copy write year.
 


It was Hi-Hi Cheerio that put me over the edge. It used to be, well, cherries and now it's all sorts of different fruits.
      

And then to make matters worse I bought a new Connect Four and the colors of the checkers changed.


Here is my "on the other hand". It is interesting to see the changes in games over time as society changes. Monopoly is a great example of that. The interesting thing about Monopoly is that with all the different versions and editions there are, the most drastic change happened only recently after almost 75 years of being in production.
Here is Monopoly in 1933, 1934 and then the Electronic Banking Edition in 2008. 



Two things can be said about this. One of which is really, who cares? Who the hell notices this stuff (except for toy librarians and archivists.) Adults buy these games for kids once usually. And then they have them until the kids are done. They don't have to replace them within a year or two (usually) so they don't see the changes happen.

The second is to mention why it matters to me. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to keep games functional when the pieces keep changing? I have 4 game boards for Candy Land but only 2 in circulation. This probably means that over the course of the years, there have been 5-6 in the collection. Pieces get lost, broken or stolen, it happens all the time. But the great part about having a 25 year old collection of toys is when that happens, if we are lucky enough to get another copy of the game, we have back-up pieces. UNLESS THEY KEEP CHANGING THEM! Because, and this is the point. It isn't that they change them at all. It's that they change them often.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Monday, March 8, 2010

Blog Crush

I found a new blog crush... Margot Magowan. She writes a lot about girl-empowerment books, toys, movies and other media.

SF Gate Blog

ReelGirl

Monday, March 1, 2010

Boy Toys-Girl Toys

I was going to do this whole well researched blog entry with statistics and quotes from scholarly journals. And then I realized that just wasn't my style. I figure I had no early education-toy-children training when I began this job. I learned as I went, from experience and observation. I will never claim to be an expert on anything, but this is something that I know.

Let me begin this by saying that one of my biggest pet peeves in here is when a mother or father says to a boy: "Don't play with that, it's a girl toy". The other pet peeve is when someone asks where the "learning toys" are. THEY'RE ALL LEARNING TOYS. Children play pretend. They create their own little world. It is one way in which they learn about the world around them. They look around their life and repeat what they see in play. If they see Mom cook, they pretend to cook. They see Mom with baby, they find a doll and pretend they have a baby. This is how they originally learn how to do things.

This is my hypothesis. What boys and girls choose to play with depends on who is around them and how they genderize toys. Let me preface what I am about to say with I know I am going to the extreme here. When a mother/father/provider, etc. tells a boy not to play with the kitchen, you're telling him not to cook. When you tell him a baby doll is a girl toy, you're telling him not to be a father. And I fear they keep these lessons throughout childhood, what to play with and what not to play with, more than anything else.

Here is another tidbit, just an learned observation of mine, and by the way it's kid of an AH-DUH. Boys and girls play differently. For the most part, I can leave a group of girls in the toy library without hesitation. They are just going to continue playing dress-up, or kitchen, or games, whatever. They won't even notice I'm gone. On the other hand, unless it's a select few guys, I can't leave them alone. They get all wacky and crazy like. Between the basketball hoop, bikes and scooters, they won't stop moving. And while they may or may not notice if I am gone or not... they are just more volatile than the girls. They show their "appreciation" for their friends differently. They will probably wrestle before talking. And they get so mad at me when I tell them to stop.

All of this is just about the energy the kids have and how they need to express it. I have noticed more and more (especially around this time of year) that there is an abundance of energy in these kids. I want to bottle it up and sell it. I can't, but we still need to do something with it.