Dinosaur Top Trumps!
About a year ago I picked up a pack of Dinosaur Top Trumps. The game invokes slight nostalgia for my youth, and I seemed to have collected a couple of sci-fi tie-in editions. I saw the dinosaur ones and thought it might have some relation to my research, as a vaguely scientific children's toy. If you're not familiar with Top Trumps, its basically a card game played in rounds, based on getting a high value card. Each set of cards is themed, and each card will have a set of values relating to that theme. For Dinosaurs it's height, weight, length, "killer rating", age and "intelligence rating". Players take it in turns to call out the category, and the one with the highest value wins.
When I got home I glanced at them and thought about the odd cultural economy of dinosaurs and equally bizarre facticity of many children's non-fiction media. At least I thought about it for about 30 seconds and then left them on a bookshelf and largely forgot about the things. I was reminded of them last month while re-reading Buckingham & Scanlon's discussion of dinosaur books, where they (rather cheekily, but darn accurately in my opinion) compared the cult of the dinosaur in non-fiction publishing with Pokémon. Its all about collecting and exchanging facts, with the odd semi-fantastic monster thrown in.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago some friends and I were bored, and I dug them out for a game. So, some observations based on our lazy Sunday evening game.