 Did you? Uh... Remember how much joy you got out of your toys as a kid? You'd squeeze them and they'd make a funny noise. It was enough to put a big smile on your face. As simple as these toys might seem, their creation is actually a complicated blend of arts and science. Of dreaming big and then turning those dreams into reality. There's so many different parts to toy design. And I think it's probably one of the most complicated disciplines to learn. In the first semester, they don't actually really know what a toy is. Judy Ellis is the founder and head of the Fashion Institute of Technology's Toy Design Program. It was the first program of its kind in the U.S. when it was founded over 25 years ago. Its alumni probably had some material impact on your childhood. Many graduates have gone on to win the coveted Toy of the Year award, or TODI. Some of these pieces were actually made in the model making shop. That piece on the top, these are products that are on the market or were on the market and they're all designed by alumni. How would you, I guess, define a toy? A vehicle that's going to take that child on some kind of wonderful adventure. The moment that you realize that your toy has to enhance either the way they learn to touch or hold or speak or interact with people, that's when you have a toy. And the best toys, no matter what they are in the real world, are just a representation of something much bigger. This is Raul. He's a frog. He's really only about this big. But he thinks that he is the most important thing in the world. And it takes him a long time to learn to be humble. I came here thinking I was going to win every event and now I'm going home empty-handed. Raul gets on stage and says to the crowd, I don't have a talent like my Brazilian friend Mill, but I can do what I can do as Whistle. The crowd is on its feet cheering and clapping. None of them expected such a beautiful song or for it to be so loud and clear and come from such a little frog. This sort of original world-building feels less common these days. Toys and toys seem to be dominated by franchises featuring your favorite superheroes or TV characters. Which is to say, of course, licensing. One of the big changes that I've seen is that there was in the beginning what we called standalone product. That meant that you didn't have to have a movie behind you. You could just have something that was great for a child to play with. When this country started to experience some economic issues, licensing became much more prominent. Most toys that everyone runs to the store to have to have, you're running because your child has seen it. There's a movie, there's this. That doesn't have a lot to do with what makes a toy a success. That will have a lot to do with what makes you run to get that toy. Cardinal Industries is a family-owned business that's been making games and toys for about 70 years. Even if you don't know Cardinal's name, chances are you've seen their work. They make games for Minions, Marvel, Disney, and even less common tie-ins like Wikipedia and the ABC drama Scandal. For something like Scandal, I actually sat down with Shonda Rhimes. That was actually a really collaborative effort. We worked specifically with her and her team to bring a game to life that she would want to see on the shelves. We made some tweaks along the way to make sure gameplay worked, but classic play patterns never go away. No matter how old you are or how young, there's something very comfortable about classic play patterns. It's kind of like how even trends happen with TV shows or movies. What's old is new again. Right now I know Domino's are surging again. A few years ago, Mahjong had a really big resurgence. It comes in waves. It can work in reverse, too. Games can be turned into brands themselves. Any game with a hint of a larger world attached to it can be grown into an ecosystem of products. If you enjoy Angry Birds, for example, you might enjoy having new ways of getting those characters or the imagery. You can do that by extending that out into other products and mediums. A newer, increasingly popular trend is finding ways to blend the digital and physical world. Think Skylanders, Nintendo's amiibo characters, and Disney Infinity. They're calling it toys to life. They're taking the physical toy and having it be able to interact with the screen. The world, the story, can be much larger. And yes, kids definitely want that. But if you give your child everything that they want that has to do with technology only, they're not going to develop the skills to handle the challenges of where this world is going. We have a very big responsibility to still hold onto things that are real. If we don't, we'll lose the one thing that makes us really special. It's our humanity. Being human is about making connections. Between person and person, between person and idea. And if you spend even five minutes talking to Zach Gage, the artist and designer perhaps best known for iOS games like Spelltower, you start to think about games and interaction, these philosophical terms. One of the things that's weird about making interactive art is you're always designing an experience for people that they've never had anything like before. You have to think a lot about, like, what is it going to be like when someone walks up to this piece? How will they learn? People are so complex and interesting that often you can design mechanics that don't actually work, but when you add a human being into it, it becomes functional in a way that it wasn't functional as a pure system. Art is Against Humanity does a similar kind of thing that relies on this human element. I think my litany of toys and games growing up was kind of the standard set. I played Parcheesi and Mousetrap and Monopoly, a lot of bad board games. What made them bad games to you? Well, I mean the canonical example is Monopoly. It sets up an experience where somebody is going to have a miserable time and then makes that experience as long as is humanly possible. Mousetrap is like all glitz and no content. But now, when you've got Carcassonne, you've got Siler's Catan, you've got these European games, these German games you were talking about kind of coming over, why do you think these games do better now? One, mobile phones happened and created such a phenomenal shift. Everybody plays games now. When you have, like, groups of young people who want to get together and want to do something, they can't play multiplayer games on their console because those games barely exist outside of Nintendo. And everybody's primed to play a game, so they want to play a game. And what do you do? Well, you go play Settlers of Catan, which has just magically shown up at the right time. We're right smack in the middle of the golden age of board games. Kickstarters on board games are going crazy. Every couple of months, some new board game comes out that I'm really excited about playing. You know, everything's exploding outwards in every direction right now. We never lose the need to play, to create new worlds and assume new identities. Games and toys allow us to escape and connect with one another in a visceral way. Even as our lives are filled with more and more screens, the need to play still thrives. And now more than ever, we have so many amazing options for bringing out our inner child.