Word: toying
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...stick to a general theme, such as hot and cold, near and far, big and little. "These are dimensions that eight-to twelve-year-olds use themselves in organizing their own experience," says Chen. For example, to demonstrate that sound consists of vibrations, Marc and Lisa play with a toy telephone made by stretching a string between two tin cans. Then the scene shifts to two cartoon characters who joke about dialing wrong numbers. To introduce gravity, 3-2-1 Contact skips the traditional account of Sir Isaac Newton and the falling apple and shows a Hollywood stunt man plummeting...
...integrated circuit nearly malfunctioned over the review of my worth as an electronic toy. My play value is for children and comes not from using my arms and legs "like a true robot," but from the science-fiction fantasy inspired by my electronic audio and visual effects...
...Older brothers and sisters are more nonchalant; they can be downright businesslike about it. A camera would be O.K., but how about a snowmobile? As the day approaches, the spirit settles over them, too, like fresh snow on a busy town. Parents come round last, rushing from toy stores to cocktail parties, muttering about the cost of evergreen trees, chilled by the cold glare of Christmas bills to come. By Christmas Eve, though, everybody is a willing conspirator...
...powerful element of fantasy in Space Invaders is the focus at which the computer technicians, the toy manufacturers and the games theorists seem likeliest to meet. Computer boffins at Manhattan's Rockefeller University play a game called Hunt the Wumpus, in which the Ph.D. devouring Wumpus is hunted through the perils of a 20-room cave. Computer language is flat and unresonant, and Hunt the Wumpus lacks a certain dash. But a toymaker may say, "Give me a way to display a Wumpus! Make him buzz and light up!" and next Christmas everyone may be going into debt...
...toy industry has always been secretive and hysterical, and the advent of memory chips and voice synthesizers has not calmed things down. The designers of Simon, Marvin Glass & Associates of Chicago, refuse categorically to deal with the press. At the design department of Mattel, in California, "you knock on the door and they look at you through a little hole," according to one industry executive who has visited there. Inside, "these guys are all sitting around, and they've got little computers, and'they're writing down figures and leafing through little books, and they scratch their...