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Why Can't LEGO Click?
A reader writes "This article from FastCompany.com contains a fascinating history of Lego, from wooden toys and the basic eight-stud brick to Star Wars kits and Mindstorms. According to the article, changes in the way children play has made the Danish toymaker struggle to adapt, while holding on to the values that helped build it's reputation. 'Once, for a brief moment, Lego changed the way kids played as well as the way kids learned to think. Lego hasn't been that kind of leader in a long time.'" The article itself paints a sad picture - LEGOs were such an integral part of my growing up, I can't imagine growing up without them. My favorite thing was to construct vast cities, and then launch billiards balls at them, pretending it was meteors coming down. Hurm. I think that may disqualify me from ever being put in charge of heavy weapons ordnance.
It's sad when a child has no friends... :-)
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Leggo my LEGO.
.anacron
Just today the German news magazin Der Spiegel has a story about Lego cult and especially movies made with Lego characters. If yo don't speak German, just visit the box on the right of the page for the links.
At the beginning was at.
All of the intelligent, thoughtful, and creative people that i've met in my age group grew up with these toys, and they made all the difference in the world.
Big sack o' Legos - $25.00
100 count sleeve of BB's - $2.50
Battle testing lego spaceships from 20 ft. - Priceless
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
Given the LEGO I had to work with 30 years ago, is it any wonder that I envision all futuristic spacecraft as being all corners?
-Eldurbarn
My brother and I used to build Lego cars (sorry, build cars from Lego brand bricks). We'd then smash them into each other until one or the other was destroyed. Whoever's car lasted longest won.
My Mom stopped it because she was afraid we'd damage the bricks. A few months ago I saw in the store a kit where kids could build a couple cars and do a "demolition derby" with them.
We've still got my father's erector set, which was
a very cool toy. Legos are awesome, but times change, when I was a kid (1960's, early 70's) the idea of people having computers of their own and using them to play games was unthinkable. Next time you watch start trek, look at the communicators (and notice how remarkably similar to cell phones they are). I'm not sure what the next big toy revolution will be (my 2 year old loves to play with real cell phones and telephones, and barbie and vcr's and all kinds of stuff).
When I was much younger, my parents would actually get to sleep late on Saturdays thanks to Lego. I'd spend way too many hours playing with it. My brother and I spent many hours battling each other, both by playing (i.e. "my missle totally takes out everything you have - scrap 'em!") and by building cars and smashing them together.
I'm totally looking forward to my kids first experiences with Lego (they already like Duplo).
Computer geek for hire. Reasonable rates. Email me.
Every child should have legos! I remember when i was a kid, I got lego "technics" (i think the first set to have interlocking gears and such) its a great way for kids to learn machinery! (Heh, duct-taping a 9-volt and a motor ripped out of another toy to the gears was always fun)
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
"Almost every office and conference room at Lego contains a bowl of loose Lego bricks so that people can play during meetings." :)
:/
Seems like a precursor to the ad agency and dot-com concept for stimulating creativity while reducing stress. Wish my company did this.
On another note, Lincoln Logs were created much earlier than Legos and have also fallen out of the marketplace. What a shame.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
from house to house for almost 20 years so my kids can play with them and DAMMIT they WILL play with them when they are old enough! :)
I can't imagine growing up without them either. At first I had the Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs but I enjoyed the Legos much much more. I see the new sets available like the Star Wars sets and would think that sets like these could limit ones imagination. They still look cool, too bad my kid is only 4 weeks old (although I almost bought two sets last week, LOL). Now the Mindstorms are something I should already own for my own personal enjoyment. Those are just too damn cool.
'Same speed C but faster'
It takes a long time to put together a good Lego creation. Trial and error, following directions, and organization are all involved, and that can really take a lot of hours.
Today's kids don't have the attention span to handle this stuff. They are obsessed with TV, computer, video games, and other lame little things that don't require much time or energy.
Gee, I sound like an old man criticizing today's kids, but I'm only 22...
I've found that buying a set of just simple blocks is difficult if not impossible! When I say simple bricks, I mean the 2x4, 2x10, etc. not the 1x4, 1x8, etc that now come in the "buckets" that are available at .
I had the luck of growing up near a Lego plant (then manufactured by Samsonite here in the US) and employees could by large bags of the bricks that were swept up from the floor of the plant for a dollar a bag. The bricks were dirty, many were misshaped. We had a Christmas tradition of dumping the newly delivered bags in the sink and washing each brick and sorting out the melted ones. I didn't knwo 'sets' were available until I'd moved on to the next stage: girls.
Can't get a bag of bricks like that -- just those useless 1x pieces.
My fiancee and I still enjoy them to this day.
I can't see why they're not popular now. Maybe they can't compete with hi-tech toys like video games?
Legos take me back to a simpler time.
i think you mean ordnance
ordinance
n.
1. An authoritative command or order.
2. A custom or practice established by long usage.
3. A Christian rite, especially the Eucharist.
4. A statute or regulation, especially one enacted by a city government.
ordnance
n.
1. Military materiel, such as weapons, ammunition, combat vehicles, and equipment.
2. The branch of an armed force that procures, maintains, and issues weapons, ammunition, and combat vehicles.
3. Cannon; artillery.
(from dictionary.com)
Yes, lego was absolutely the best toy I had, even GI Joe and the vast armies of He-Man didn't give as much joy. :) (But it was close)
:)
Here's why.
It was durable. ONLY lego could take the stress of being hit with billard balls, trampled on by feet, and being swallowed by the rubber godzillas repeatedly.
It was reusable. I STILL have my lego today, my uncle's and aunt's have their buckets. and still my little nephews build cities, starships, and moon bases, tear them all down, and do it all over again.
It was limitless. Didn't like the guys face? Change it, even the damn tiny HOOKS for the arms were tough to break. You could snap weapons in and out all day long, and it wouldn't let you down. Try that with a batman figure from today, see how long it lasts....
I know that while lego may not be able to compete on a technical level with some of the newer toys, I still smile when I see my little relatives running around the basment with my LEGO, when just around the corner is the Playstation. I guess some things just don't die.
Lego, you GO!
3-Server OC-3 Linux Counter-Strike Cluster
www.rnp.ca
It's hard to imagine growing up without them. I was an only child till 13 and Lego's gave hundreds of hours of fun. I waited for the new space lego's like they where comments from Greenspan. Its no wonder they are not doing so well. They're up against Diablo2. Legos don't do it for the ADD generation.
Lego's will not stage a comback until you wrap them with LEP's and embedded chips. Imagine the possiblities! Could you use them to build a simple AI and then give it a face and play with it? The robot Lego's have a chance if they jump on the latest tech. Then the kids would be all over them, again. Sh*t, I might too.
I was never a fan of LEGOs (for whatever reason) but I really did like to build things w/Construx.
god only knows how many times I built myself into a box and had to have my mom come and try to get me out w/o breaking the new creation I made.
I am beginning to wonder if my children will play w/any sort of building toy or will they be forever glued to their computers?
Would you grow up differently not having the experiences that we did building things?
I used to build boats out of lego and place my gerbils in them. Lego don't float and gerbils can't swim.
Personally, I preferred erector sets and the ability to build real devices. It wasn't really until mindstorms that lego had similar abilities.
Erector sets have had the same struggles to remain a presence in the household. They and their european counterpart Meccano are still somewhat alive though: www.meccano.com
(before erector sets, I played with Lincoln Logs)
-a.e.mossberg
One of the things i've always thought was cool was the way lego directions were worded - or rather, not worded. I'd always put together the set as it was supposed to be first, then after that was finished i'd make spaceships and tanks and cars and stuff.
The thing i liked about the directions was that they introduced a lot of spacial relationships - not just insert tab A into slot 1. On some of the more complex sets, you really had to take a minute to see, first of all what had changed from the previous picture, and second of all how did it get there.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
everyone knows that the single stud flat piece is the fundamental atom in the Lego universe.
that kids today don't enjoy legos like we used to. Video games are so fast paced and dynamic, they adapt to maintain kids infamously short attention spans. Legos were slow and took time and thought. An interesting socialogical study would be to examine careers/interests/thought processes (?) of kids who played with Legos vs. kids who played with only video games. I know there have been recent studies that linked gaming to "precision" (ie - skills/reaction times similar to those of pro athletes) but no one has looked at how older, more thought provoking/analytical toys affected kids. Either way, mom would still tell you to go outside and play...
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
Maskirovka
My poor grammer and lack of sentance fluency show a distinct caffine defficieny.
Lego was just ok in my book.
Until they came out with the space station sets with the 12' x 12' grey lego grids.
Life was never the same after that.
I just wonder why reporters have to do this all the time. Sometimes a reporter just saying "boy, things are going badly for this company" is enough to start a company on a downward spiral. If others jump on the bandwagon, it means certain disaster. Sometimes, I am sure, articles like this are done because the reporter has a grudge of some sort. A lot of time it's just because that particular reporter has no background to write about their subject (did YOU see the interview done by the Los Vegas TV station? see it for a great example).
You know.. everyone is doing badly now, so a lot of products are having some problems. A good amount of the blame for this is because of media "experts" saying "the bubble is going to burst in the next three months!" Look back... I think they said this every month for 3 years until it eventually came true!
Just because a toy or any product isn't following in the current mold doesn't mean they are going to disappear forever. There are always comapanies and people the jump the current trend and continue.
I doubt Lego is going anywhere soon. If I ever have kids (yuk) it will be on my toy list, because they're still one of the best creative toys ever. They're still one of the basic toys you think of when you think about childhood. They will always be around in some form. Look at the other classic lo-tek toys still around: the Etch-a-Sketch, dolls, bikes, roller skates, yo-yos, hobby horses, matchbox cars, etc.. etc... Lo-tek != bad.
"Yes.. no matter what the culture, folk dancing is stupid." -MST3K
But...
There are no names. No Barbie, no GI Joe, no Sonic, or Barney. The child creates everything. The problem is that there's no sense of community to share their creations with their friends. They say "Blascar blew Rennist to smithereens," And their friends say, "So?" Or "Who?"
...but every kid I've ever seen play with a Mindstorm has had their ideas of play changed. It's an awesome product that stretches the imaginations of kids and adults alike, in much the same way Lego Space did for me when I was younger. True, it hasn't had the commercial success of past Lego products. But I don't think post-MTV generation kids /want/ toys like that- so whether or not Lego builds products that do that is irrelevant to market success. What is relevant (at least to the thrust of the article) is that they are still building such products. People just aren't buying them.
IAAL,BIANLY
I loved lego. My brother and I used to make lego ships with "invincible shields". Then we'd start fighting over whose ships would win, and I'd throw hot wheels cars at his. I guess his shields weren't so invincible after all!
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
... the problem seems to be high prices and an overly consevative corporate culture.
When I was a kid, legos were always more pricy than the "cheap knockoffs" that the toy stores also carried. Although I loved them, any money I earned was more likely to put into other building activities (ie model rockets, erector sets, etc).
Mindstorms was probably the most innovative toy product to come around during the last 10 years, but it's always remained one of the most expensive. The problems the article detailed about getting the cost down seemed more like management problems than anything else.
I know the company has a good thing going, but you always have to exercise foresight, research your customer base and be ready to take chances - especially in the toy industry.
We used to build vehicles and smash them into eachother. The goal was to build a vehicle that would outlast everyone elses vehicles structuraly.
The world went on without Transformers, I think it'll do fine without LEGOs. I'm sure some genius will think up of a toy that is fun but still academically accels the child... just wait and see...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
To me, that was always the whole point of Lego. I don't like the special-purpose parts that come with the new "playsets", nor the sort of fixation with building "what's on the box" rather than building what you want from a collection of basically generic parts. The best thing about Lego was that if you imagined something, be it a giant fighting robot or a spaceship or a house, you could build it the way you wanted. The toys were intended to put you in the driver's seat and exercise your own imagination, not just to try and ape something designed by someone else. The newer stuff is designed with a "right" way to build it, and that just defeats the whole purpose.
I grew up with Legos. It's sad today to see these new fangled kits that only go together one way, have tons of specialized parts, and even attempt to have a "story" connected to them. That defeats the very purpose of Legos. My parents would buy me tons of Legos because they help with creativity, engineering, spatial reasoning, and imagination.
What we're seeing is the transition from back in the day when Legos let you run wild with your imagination to the new day where kids need to be told what to imagine.
Sad.
--- witty signature
When I played with LEGOs, I had to pretty much "make" everything (aside from wheels and doors). The LEGO sets of today come with preformed everything - they're more like snap together models. You buy a LEGO set for a space shuttle and you get pieces to build ---- a space shuttle. Sure, you can make mutations of a space shuttle, but try building a horse out of those pieces. This in itself wouldn;t be bad but it seems you can ONLY get these cheesy sets nowadays.
To me, most sets available in the last decade or so dont come with enough basic blocks. You can only make so many things by combining a pirate ship hull with a barrel and a palm tree.
The castle sets probably started this trend, with their preformed walls and ornate decor. They looked good on the box, so they sold well. The original castle sets were alot of fun though, and took a while to put together.
I forgot about the directions and how they where spacial and not text based. I think that MUST help develop spacial relationship from a 2D to a 3D environment. That is map reading. Which I might add, is one of those quiet little thorns in the side of so many adults. Its amazing how people love maps and can't use them if their life depended on it.
;)
Lego's and their directions help to bridge that gap. They relate a 2D illustration to the real 3D object. And its complext 3D sometimes! I remember my first Fire Station.
So where is the scientific lit that supports Lego children grow up with bigger brains?? I need all the advantage I can get
LEGOs were such an integral part of my growing up, I can't imagine growing up without them.
Lego was my favourite toy growing up, until I discovered computers. I would encourage all parents to supply their kids with Lego as a way to enhance their creativity and imaginations.
My favourite thing to do with Lego was to try to construct Lego versions of things I saw in the world around me. Since I grew up on a farm, made Lego tractors and farm implements and things. Since I only had the basic Lego sets, things were primitive, but they looked (to me) like an accurate representation.
Nowadays, it seems hard to find basic sets, everything is designed to build specific things for a theme. While the Star Wars lego is way cool, there is something to be said for the simplicity of the standard bricks.
BTW what is it with the cost of Lego now? The stuff is really expensive. Was it always that way? Same thing with D&D books, how can kids afford this stuff?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Lego bricks were an essential part of my childhood. I liked the medieval and space stuff, but I didn't fancy the more mechanical stuff. Why? Because the way legos are connected. They don't hold together and tend to break up, unlike those Meccano and Brio's wooden blocks, that would tolerate even a bit more "experimental engineering" any 7-9 year old would with his skills do.
I wonder if there's a "lego generation" and what good has it done to justify it's existence.. And what comes after that, the "gameboy generation"?
__
Zarathustra.fi
Modern man has no goal, no aim, no ideals.
My brother and I used to have the original space lego. We had an old door in our parents appartment on stands and had it covered in a complete base of our own design. We even had the moon base plates. It would usually take us a couple of minutes to build what ever the picture on the box was--we didn't bother with instructions because who needs them (lego instructions are for whimps). Then we would go about creating our own stuff which was usually better. We found some ingenious uses for some of the legos. we even build a small monorail system on our moon base (before Lego decided to acutual make a part for a monorail).
I wish they would bring back the original space Lego's. They were fun to play with. My parents still have them. I think all kids should play with Legos--especially space Legos. It helps them in many ways. It stimulates imagination, creativity, and much more!
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
I grew up with legos, from the first sets I eyed jealusly in my friends' houses, to the first set I actually got for Christmas (1976, it was a launch pad with a rocket).
I kept collecting and playing with legos (space series first, tech series later) I think up until I was 14-15 years old, the last years were spent mostly trying to build funky stuff with the tech set.
IMHO the problem with legos nowadays is that they are trying to cater way too much to the average kid of this decade, the kid that is force fed advertising from the time they are two years old, the kid for whom 'imagination' is such an unfamiliar word it's not even funny, the kid that thinks books are 'boring' (yes, I grew up reading lots of books, I remember I never really liked books with pictures, because they limited my imagination).
Take a lego set produced in the seventies (or sixties) note how 'generic' the bricks are, even if you bought (like my parents did for me) the space series, the bricks for that series were just the same as the bricks for most other series: the colors were a bit different (the space bricks were mostly blue/black/grey, while, for example, the town bricks were more garishly coloured) but that was about it, you could build a castle with the space set if you felt like it.
Look at legos now, hyper-specialized, so full of parts that cannot be used for anything else: you just build the model shown on the cover, and that's it: if you buy a 'tie fighter' lego set, could you conceivably build anything resembling a rebel starship with the included pieces? No way, you have to buy the other set for that.
I see it as very unfortunate that today's kids don't seem to appreciate the freedom that the old sets gave you: yes, the finished product didn't look *exactly* like, say, the space shuttle (even if you could get very close) but they had a mindboggling flexibility.
If I wanted a 'realistic' model, why would I bother buying a lego, I would just buy a die-cast, that looks even better, costs less and has the same function, given that today's legos can be customized so little.
I would welcome a return of Lego to its roots, its roots without stupid commercial tie-ins (do we need a SW:TPM series of kits? I don't think so), its roots of giving you a box which contents could give you *months* of enjoyment (my parents were not very well to do, I got two sets of legos per year, one at Christmas and one for my birthday, but I've never ran out of stuff to do with them), letting kids have some original ideas, instead of, once again, force feeding them the finished product so that by the time they're adults any shred of creativity they might have will have long been destroyed.
-- the cake is a lie
Do not ever let your children play alone for hours. Those social skills will make their wohle life work better, no matter if they become hi-tech workers, potato-farmers or stay unemployed. I wasted my childhood with my Lego + commodore.
Lego killed itself when the pieces got so specialized around the mid-90s, that a set's pieces was tied inextricibly with what the set was supposed to build.
It seems to me that the earlier more generic pieces of the mid-80s Space and Technique sets were the perfect balance between your basic brick pieces and the more specialized connectors and decorative pieces.
With the pieces today, it's harder to build something completetly different than the actual model the set was built for.
"Old man yells at systemd"
It's ANAL.
Not anals
Not anal's
ANAL.
Give it a rest. If you're more bothered by someone saying "legos" (although I always thought it was LEGOes) than by the fact that they may be going away, you need a few deep breaths and a Prozac.
Virg
When I would get a new lego set (as a kid), I would build the set according to the instructions, play with it for a while, but before long (usually within an hour or two) I would disassemble the item and build something bigger and better using the new blocks along with the blocks I already owned.
One idea led to another, and my box of legos filled up with blocks of various colors and shapes. I would typically use blocks that came from the kid's legos (the big ones), sets to build space ships, sets to build road construction vehicles, and the medieval sets.
One look at the current lego product line shows a much heavier emphasis on the slick specialized components, and more emphasis on color-coordination. These factors lead a child to be afraid to innovate.
Amazing magic tricks
I grew up playing with Lego (used to have a Lego starbase covering a table that was made out of a door, full of fighters and freighters and androids and fun stuff =). It seems from reading /. that a lot of other geeks/hackers seem to have loved these toys as well.
The article indicates that Lego is falling behind the times and can't maintain the needed popularity. Also, it has very little presence in the online world. This gave me a small brainstorm and I'd like to run it past you folks.
Since lego is a good toy for children (in my opinion) and teaches creativity, how about we combine it with some ingenious coding to teach software programming? Now, I have no idea how this could be done. I'm no programmer, though I think I have a grasp of the basic concepts. What if a game (more correctly a "Software Toy" a la Maxis) could be made, whereby the kids have certain small prefab "bricks" which are chunks of code, which they can rearrange and recombine to create a piece of custom software? The software might be a game (think of the enjoyment we had as kids from playing games we devised with legos. Then think of kids enjoying playing computer games they feel they "built"). The company could maintain profits by selling expansion packs with new "bricks", and "expert" versions for young teens which have smaller "bricks" (smaller and more basic chunks of code which require more combination and understanding). Maybe there would be an interface for kids to write their own sections of code to interact with the others.
The reason I thought of this was, I was thinking of the parallels between building out of lego and programming. In both activities, you think of what you want to design, gather the neccessary tools and parts, and then enter Deep Hack Mode (or Deep Lego Mode) and build the thing. Does anyone think this idea is cool or is it just me? =) Could someone who can actually code tell me if this could work?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
...are two fold. First of all, there is the Great Dumbening of American children that has to be playing a part. I know the entire LEGO enterprise isn't based on selling to children in America, but there must be a large chunk of cashflow slowly being strangled to death as we teach out children that using your imagination and thinking too hard is a terrible thing to do. Lego, being a toy based nearly 100% on imagination is naturally a victim of this.
Of course, Lego has tried to keep up by creating more simplistic designs and using large, special use "blocks" to create less imagination-taxing objects, but it isn't nearly enough to combat our efforts.
The second problem comes from Lego's pricing. I have seen the recent prices on the more interesting sets, and they can't compete. The really huge sets, the ones that look like a full day of fun to build, and they sell for over $100 at Toys'r'us. That is more than most playstation games. And when you make a kid these days chose between the instant, never ending gratification of Quake III Arena for the PS2 and a rinky dinky Lego pirate ship, he is going to pick the former every time. Kids these days are a lost cause for Lego.
If Lego wants to stay competitive they will have to learn how to cut prices down to $20 for the large sets, which shouldn't be impossible (how much does Lego plastic cost to make?), and hope that all of us 20/30-something slashdotters will start buying them.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I made a robot, with a fellow student, in function of our thesis. The basic parts were made out of Lego Mindstorms. The system is great, but narrow in expansion. That is why we made our own electronic circuits. You can see some pictures of MADY, the robot here: http://www.menteb.org/robotics.
More stuff will come soon, like the electronic prints etc. The major part we used in our system is the Lego Mindstorms transmitter that connects to the serial port of your pc.
Anyway Lego is a wonderful thing!
42 + 1 = 42
Parents have to nurture the creativity in their child from a very young age. All children have it naturally, but if you plug them into a television or computer instead of books and blocks it is very difficult to get them back into the world of creativity later in life.
A few months ago there was a video of the 5-6 year old son of a hardware review site owner beating the final boss on some FPS. The overwhelming reaction to it was "What a cool little kid", while my reaction was "Good thing this kid isn't going to my son's school".
August 10, 1999 | For the past 30 years, it has been a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Fred Rogers steps up onto the porch, opens the door and beams a wide, welcoming smile, as if we light up his life. He changes from his suit jacket to his zippered cardigan sweater, from his leather slip-ons to his navy blue canvas boat shoes, and sings, "Would you be mine, could you be mine, won't you be my neighbor?"
Outside Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, there has been Vietnam and Watergate, Chernobyl and Challenger, Ethiopian famine and ethnic cleansing, Oklahoma City and Littleton, Polly Klaas and JonBenet Ramsey. But inside, there is peace and calm, familiarity and safety. Troubling feelings and fears are gently explored. Reassurance is given. "The whole idea," Fred Rogers recently told Jeff Greenfield in a CNN interview, "is to look at the television camera and present as much love as you possibly could to a person who might feel that he or she needs it." salon.com
This is one of the coolest LEGO projects I have ever seen. Neat integration between a PC and, basically, a toy. Lego should market this sort of thing - not to children but adults. They should run this in an ad.
Through my childhood I had this long-running space opera with my lego figures. Had the same heros and villains for years though the story changed. Initially it was a rebellion against evil robots, then it changed into a star trek thing. Later, I constructed a space colony on my city plates and had adventures at the bar on the colony.
I forget how it ended up but I still have some of the better things I constructed set aside. A couple of neat personal craft and an all-grey mech with a variety of weapons.
With my newfound obsession with Gundams, I should pull out my legos and try my hand at building some.
I find that apart from the mindstorms series, most lego today has too many specialized bricks that are only useful for building one type of design. Even the technics models of today are rather limited in their ability to redesign a new types of cars and spaceships. I think that Lego is making their products too much like video-games, build once and discard. They should start offering large amounts of generic bricks and connectors of all types (especially the 1*8 beams, they are the best for designing houses and wireframe cars)
Legos were great toys back in the old days (early to mid 80s) because they were actually building blocks from which you could create anything. Now, however, the company has sunk into the abyss of movie tie-ins and thus created an unfortunate market segmentation effect which has reduced their appeal.
Back in the old days I had a Lego Technic (model 1000) composed of gears, belts, shafts, motors, and various joints that allowed you to create an almost infinate variety of engieering marvels. There was in fact a segment of a physics curriculum built around the use of Legos to simulate simple machines (levers, planes, screws, etc.) as well as an introductory programming and robotics curriculum (geared tward middle schoolers) around lego LOGO (before the days of Mindstorms).
Now when you buy a Lego Technic kit, it is intended to build one specific thing, and has detailed instructions for building that one item, rather than leaving it to the creativity of the child to build unique devices. The same is true of Mindstorms. While it's neat that the lego device is no longer wired to the computer, the mechanism for programming the Mindstorms devices is dumbed down for todays youth. Thanks to Russ Nelson, who, aside from doing great things for Open Source over the years, has a detailed site about the Lego Mindstorms Internals. It's a shame though that Lego didn't do this sort of thing themselves, and fight harder to avoid descending to the level of selling lego models of movie-related toys, rather than continuing ot target their core audience.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
As someone with a simply enormous Lego brick collection, I wanted to step in and mention one market that Lego is doing better about hitting, but still largely ignoring - adults.
Lego has done better in the past few years with things like Mindstorms and some of the more expensive Star Wars models. To a large degree, however, Lego is missing out on some really devoted adult purchasers. A simple look at rec.toys.lego will show that there is a very strong Lego following among adults out there.
And, please, Lego - I have been to Legoland Winsor. I realize there is a Legoland here in the States. Please do not bring anymore. It is not that I did not completely enjoy Legoland, but I see a Legoland USA failing much the same way that EuroDisney failed. I would hate to see you lose that much money on something that foolish.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
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> Until they came out with the space station sets with the 12' x 12' grey lego grids.
Geez, I hope you mean "12x12"! A grey LEGO grid that's twelve feet on a side would be heaven for building a Moon war, but it would really smart to crawl around on it to build.
Virg
I LOVED getting the specialized space sets!!! I swear, I had built some of the best looking space ships ever! Of course they looked NOTHING like the things on the box, with a combanation of generic lego, and the space ship kind I could build things that would put Star Wars/Trek to shame!!! ;oD
Things that could with a simple flick of the wrist and a dead size C battery, could destroy nearly anything my sister could build!!!
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Video games are so fast paced and dynamic, they adapt to maintain kids infamously short attention spans.
:)
Are you kidding? Do you know how long you have to sit at a computer to beat even the first act of Diablo II?
In all seriousness, I don't think that video games are much of a problem. Firstly, kids won't be playing them until years after they start playing with more physical toys, and second of all, most of them _do_ require dedication and focus to play (or at least to do well in).
Add to this the fact that television, with its 10-second advertisements and other fast pacing, has been around for years, and you'll have difficulty convincing me that fast-paced video games are making a difference.
"They are in what you get out of the brick."
I remember buying (or making my parents buy) whole kits, like a bus or a race car, just for a particular piece. Now it seems the kits are all specialized pieces, and you have to buy the buckets to get a supply of regular blocks.
My son builds trains, cars and aeroplanes out of whatever pieces of Lego or his sister's Duplo/MegaBloks he can get his hands on. I think a large bucket of blocks is in his future, because he keeps running out of pieces to build with, and I don't want the fact that you only get so many 2x4 pieces with the Mickey Mouse house & Garden set to be the limiting factor on his imaginative play.
Yes, the nick is flamebait
I'm 22 years old and I spent my years from about the time I was 3 or so right up until I was 15 playing with legos. I would build vast armies of what I called "MechHawks". About 50 or so on each side, and essentially just throw them at one another.. they'd get injured losing a wing or 2, or maybe their feet or beak. Essentially the last one standing would "win" and get an automatic bi into the playoffs.
LOL. Sounds silly, but legos rule.
One day I came home from high school, must have beenn in 1980, to discover that my mom had given away my cherished collection of Legos. I had about a cubic foot of various pieces. She had also given away most of my Star Trek Stuff (the Blueprints, Concordance, some models, and some of the books).
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This place in San Francisco across the street from South Park has Legos at the bar!
Why was I unable to get the soccer stadium kit for my kids for Christmas last year?? Nobody had them... toy stores... on-line... They were sold out!
Maybe they have a management (mis-management) issue, since the demand is obviously there.
When the best play is when you exercise your imagination. They took it from a toy for all ages to a smaller market, a toy for adults who play with blocks and other stuff. a smaller market.
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The problem with TV and movies for kids is that they're passive entertainment. They give the audience everything and require no effort in return. When you read a book, you have to do some work - first digesting the words and turning the sentences into ideas, and then picturing those ideas and letting the story develop in your head.
But that process can be a little rough on kids who are used to passive entertainment, and can drive them away from books - a one-way ticket to academic problems throughout your education. It seems to me that the Bionicle toy the article talks about gives the kids the means to get "hands-on" experience with the story and characters, letting it play out on the living room floor as well as in their heads. Building the characters themselves can bring them even closer to the stories.
Of course, in step with the great Lego tradition, once the story's over, they can make up their own stories and characters - but maybe this system will inspire them to write the new stories down. That's another skill you need in school.
Just my $0.02.
grep -ri 'should work'
They finially put green bricks in the kits!! (:
I have a lego mindstorms but it dosen't work on my crappy windows box. Reinstalling windows would probably help, but having to reinstall all 100+ applications over again is NOT my idea of fun.
The problem with lego today is that the kits are so expensive. The great thing was when I was a child, that I would take the space lego kit and the medevil kit and put them together with my imagination and have fun with a it. Today people can only afford to by one $50 kit once in a while.
I have a child now and I would love for her to play with lego and she does enjoy it. But to buy $200 worth of lego and only get a small buck worth? Forget it.
Also, the other thing that I noticed is that lego is making things to easy. For example: Lego Pirate ship. The ship base consists of TWO very large lego pices that when put together make a ship! TWO pices! What ever happened to the 1000 pices you need just to make a decent looking stern.
------88-------- Sig? Sorry, I don't smoke.
I found that the cylinders on the female side of the Lego would attach firmly to a phonograph motor shaft as could be removed from most turntables. I'd then construct balanced assemblies - the bigger the better - although smaller ones would load the motor less and would therefore spin faster. At the slightest imbalance (of when centripetal force finally dislodged a block) the entire assembly would then catastrophically disintegrate, propelling Legos at high velocity throughout the room. Oh, to be young again.
Well, gee whiz, how did kids ever play togther before there was TV? Your argument is ludicrous... if anything I think the problem with Lego is that it's not Lego anymore, unless you stick with the very basic stuff. Lego was originally large quantities of very generic pieces that would as easilt build a house, spaceship, car or dinosaur. Nowaways, most Lego sets are essentially models. You build the model, there might be some variations possible, but with all the specific pieces they have now it doesn't require any imagination. Also, one of the strengths of Lego was its limitations. There weren't pieces to cover every possible thing you might want to build so you had to learn both creativity and compromise. In more recent days, they make models that look like the things they look like (to paraphrase Homer Simpson) in part by making one-off pieces specifically for the target model. Sure, the resulting model looks better, but to me it violates the basic principle of what makes Lego the best toy ever. My kids have a lot of Lego, some of it is 30+ years old from my early childhood. They received several of the Star Wars sets, which are very cool, and in each case, the sets were built once, and then cannibalized for the latest original creation. Now the Star Wars sets do seem to have fewer non-generic pieces than other sets I have seen, but in my family's case, being able to create your own toys out of Lego is the highest requirement.
I'm sorry if you feel the way you do, but in my book, if a child can't be creative without a TV show or something to draw from, he or she is going to grow up to be another boring person. My kids do watch their share of TV.. I'm not a purist in that regard, but their imaginative games, drawings, Lego models, etc, veer wildly into realms they create themselves. I think all children should have to drive and capacity to be like this. I have always steered them towards toys that lend themselves to creative play, which is what I myself was brought up on, and at the end of the day, with a toy box stuffed full of cool things, often times their favorite indoor toy is blank paper and something to color with.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I think they shot themselves in the foot when they made Lego so durable and indestructible.
I've still got mine and plan on passing them down when (if) I have children.
There is no need to keep buying new Lego if the old bricks still work!
You may be interested to know that, starting around the beginning of this year, Lego seems to have adopted a somewhat different attitude. Before, it seemed as though Lego was completely silent and indifferent to the wants or needs of the public. There seemed to be a decline in the quality of sets. They made a definite attempt to dumb down their sets so that they could be constructed faster in the hopes of catching the shorter attension spans of today's kids, which is why it's harder to get generic bricks in most sets. I think they shot themselves in the foot. Lego has always been about building, from instructions and your own creations.
Things are getting better now. There's a lot of direct invomement from lego now in the online lego user's community (www.lugnet.com). It was scary, they simply started posting one day. Lego has also started offering older sets as part of a new "legends" line. Consider this:
http://shop.lego.com/productinfo.asp?product_nu
There are also some larger models you can order now. There's a two foot tall dragon and a similarly sized lego person. This is the statue of liberty:
http://shop.lego.com/productinfo.asp?product_nu
They're also getting ready to offer large numbers of bulk bricks in flexible quanitites. So it's much easier to get those generic bricks now in the colors you want, just not in stores. And there are larger model sets like a sopwith camel.
Just have a look at the lego website. There's a lot of cool new stuff.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
I got this email back in 1999. When I posted it to the lego newsgroup, it started an extensive ranting (most towards lego, some to me - check out google) and lego soon backed off. It's sad to see companies have to resort to this silliness when it's their own managerial shortcomings. A few months prior to this, I was also sued by Etch-a-Sketch for my Web-a-Sketch website. 1999 was the year my childhood memories turned against me.
X-POP3-Rcpt: alan@www
From: Henrik Faurbye Jensen
To: "'alan@digitalstuff.com'"
Subject: www.digitalstuff.com/brainchild/legodeath.html
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 10:09:54 +0100
Jour. no.: 263-00427/hfj
Dear Mr Allan Watts,
Our attention has been drawn to the above sub-homepage, which, as you know,
consists of a picture with the title "Legodeath". The picture incorporates
the head of a LEGO* mini figure with a blood-like substance oozing from it,
thus giving the impression that the LEGO mini figure has been beheaded. For
this reason we hereby contact you.
As you probably know, the registered LEGO trademark and the LEGO mini figure
product configuration are two of the most important assets of the LEGO Group
of companies. The LEGO mini figure is protected by copyrights, solely and
exclusively owned by the LEGO Group.
The LEGO Group of companies is very concerned about the morbid context in
which our LEGO mini figure is used. Please do not understand this as if we
wish to restrict what you want to publish on the Internet. However, we do
wish to protect the wholesome, child-oriented reputation of the LEGO
trademark and product configurations and to prevent that they are associated
with destruction and violence.
We hope that you understand our position and that you will consider removing
the "Legodeath" picture from the homepage.
Yours sincerely
The LEGO Foundation
Henrik Faurbye Jensen
Legal Department
I don't know why the company is losing money, the product is still hugely popular with kids. My kids have a ton of it and all their friends do too. The new versions are excellent and match the times perfectly. Everytime the kids get a new Lego catalog, I look at the products and think "Here is a company that really gets it!".
By the way, the plural of Lego is Lego, not Legos!
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Take a look at this story about governments requiring open source.
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Studies have shown over & over again the constructive force of Meccano, while in comparisom Lego's just been shown to numb the brain.
Actually Lego's nothing compared to Meccano as far as stimulating learning in kids is concerned.
Gez all those pomie boffins in WWII like Barnes Wallace, Syd Camms, Frank Whittle & Bailey of Bailey Bridge fame all grew up on Meccano.
I don't really like legos, I prefer playing with my erector set. I really like it when people suck on my erector set.
That's all that can save Lego now. lots and lots of pr0n.
It's what is saving all the other struggling companies out there. Never underestimate the saving power of pr0n.
made an automated masturbatory device with my LEGO set. Mainly just a giant shaft of 8 by 8 plate blocks which I jammed up my wet hole. Nowadays, I have to worry about my pussy-juice shorting out the mindstorms. Then again, I can program them to pump faster when they reach the temperature of my hot fuckhole.
Anyone remember how the Tyco bricks would fit onto Legos? I'd have like 4:6 ratio of lego brick kits to Tyco brick kits as a child.
Sometimes I used to mix the kits together. Legos were much more frail, but very nice. Tyco bricks had stong dependability and low, next to nothing cost. Say...I bet Bill Gates played the same way..
I'm actually fairly disappointed in what lego puts out these days. Lots of the parts in the kits are complex pieces that only work as one thing - the arm on a given robot or something. The joy I remember of legos was having TONS of simple blocks (2's and 4's and 8's), a mismash of castle and space and regular legos, and building towns, cars, boats, or whatever out of this collection. Even the space and castle legos were pretty simple, usually (except for castle walls) just a color change and the addition of a few parts. My projects always ended up looking like some 70's disco, since the colors never matched, but the simple block gave so much more freedom. Seems to me that the new kits aim at a much older audience than the original lego did (or maybe I'm just seeing older people play with them).
Seems like the simple block would be better business too. The manufacturing is much simpler. When you have only a few parts, most of which are just variations in size of each other, its not that hard (or expensive) to make. Now, lego has complex pieces that are far less useful in general, and each new kit requires a new mold.
Maybe the problem is marketting such a simple concept as clickable blocks in the age of computer games and FPS's.
It would be a damn shame to see lego go down. Maybe I should stock up on some classic legos.
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
Check out the register story or just use google. Or, better yet, go to Drew's lego porn page. Somehow, I don't think my set was missing a few pieces...
When I grew up I couldn't have the real LEGOs, because they were not sold in Brazil and my parents couldn't afford the price of imported toys. I had to do with cheap local imitations that never worked like they were supposed to.
When, in my teens, I discovered the real thing, I was amazed by the sheer quality a LEGO piece irradiates.
Shortly after my son was born we started giving him LEGOs. Now he is 10 and has buckets upon crates of all different lines. They are all interoperable. They are all backward compatible. The 0-3 years old set can be used seamlessly with the Mindstorms set.
And I don't know if it is just chance or upbringing, but while my son has all the modern toys the article blames for LEGOs recent problems (GBA, Nintendo 64, a K6 II etc), he still spends many hours with LEGO, and he is not alone. He has some friends who will come to visit or stay overnight and they will cover the bedroom floor with all different kinds of pieces and build things for hours.
So I can not agree with the article from personal experience. I do not think the kids are to blame for not being interested in free form play anymore. More likely the parents are to blame for not giving their kids the right toys. A two-year old that gets started with LEGO will probably be interested in LEGO forever.
Lego actually did things right. They made (relatively) cheap toys out of durable plastic that kids couldn't easily destroy. Now, that's come back to haunt them. When I was about 8, I got my first set of Legos. Every birthday and Christmas I would get more. And more.
Now, don't get me wrong--the new Lego toys are schweet. I think they are far more awesome than the ones I played with. But they are more complex, and 8-year-olds don't have to use their imaginations nearly as much.
My kids (once I have some) will certainly play with Legos. But they aren't going to be the new fancy ones--oh no. Instead, they will grow up on my Legos, thanks to my mum for storing them. Of course I'll buy some new sets for my kids; but since my old Legos are still "cool" and look great it seems silly to toss them or buy lots of new sets. In effect, building great, durable plastic toys is what go Lego into this problem. Kindda sad when you think about it.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
I think a few people have pointed out some problems that LEGO may be having. It is all well and good that the kits that they come out with are interesting, but they are also pretty pricey. I remember a friend of mine coming home from his trip to Europe, with a set that was really quite amazing. But, it was also very expensive. I think he paid over $300CDN for it. You could build lots with it, but smaller sets are so specific that you can't.
I remeber having an apple box full of lego blocks. We would build towers up to the roof, and then topple them over. Spend an hour finding all of the pieces, and build it again. We also had great fun with our imagination. I wish them luck.
Maybe if they didn't have all these specialized pieces in the sets there would be more of a fun factor. I remember when building a wing for something took a zillion pieces. Now the wing pops out of the box!
Judging from the unbridled enthusiasm my 11-year-old son and his buddies have for Legos,
I'd say Lego is doing just fine. He's been getting Lego kits ever since he was five, and now his collection fills three bins. He and his friends have been working on a BattleMech base out of Legos all summer, and many of the 'Mechs look like the machines (i.e. Thor, Madcat, etc.) of the video games.
He's been warming up to Mindstorms in the past year or so: he builds 'em,
and I handle the programming part (at least for now!)
Reports of Lego's demise are greatly exaggerated.
I always thought lego's snapped together, not click :)
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I had LEGOs too....I loved them. Building space stations and such. At the time I had 3 pet anole lizards (Spike, Sasha, Chamiliea), so they would often inhabit the space stations I would build.
Probably the best engineering toy I played with as a kid was capcella....the modular toy combined gears, motors, pullys, belts.....it was great. My friends dad had a woodshop, so there would always be piles of sawdust around.....we would gather it all up into a big pile and then design cars that would chew through the sawdust....
As I recall, once I figured out that a propeller in the front of the car tore up the sawdust, the competition was never the same......it turned into how fast you could get your blades to spin etc. THe toy was fantastic.....it taught mechainical as well as electrical skills (you had to wire up the motors, batteries, switches etc.).....looking at the toys of today, I wonder if kids have the skills necessary to construct the same things we did at their age.....sure, they can probably kick my butt at most video games, or use some prefab program to launch massive DDoS attacks, but what about real life skills? Also, if you are always being told how something "should" be....like as someone else mentioned the stories that go along with the new lego sets, what happens to imagination?
They did more than teach spatial orientation. I had a forklift. It taught about gearboxes, rack and pinion steering and a bunch of other stuff.
IIRC, I _couldn't_ _build_ the forklift the first time. It just had too much going on. When I actually DID sucessfully build it (without glossing over or simplifying any) it brought a GREAT sence of achievement.
(And you could build a boxer egine out of the kit. (at least the crank shaft and the pistons) Verra Verra cool.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
It's all relative, I guess. When I was young, I had this plan for a Meccano/Lego interfacing kit. Perhaps that's why I ended up doing software.
Many posts have pointed out how limiting the kits have become. Perhaps Lego might be successful by marketing non-specialized pieces and publishing designs using the piecse online. Or perhaps providing a way for users to submit designs.
- Sig this!
I'm just barely old enough (okay, I'm old) to have missed LEGO's for the most part. I got to play with Erector Sets! Now those were Real Toys (TM). We were too poor to buy the one with the motor, but I got the one just below it for Christmas. Started out building the stuff in the pictures in the instruction book, but ended up making spinning fan-like objects that could cut fingers in a flash. Oh, and guns, of course...
OMG, it looks like it's coming back!
This page brings back memories... oh yeah...
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What I have always wanted is Lego CAD...I have seen a few attempt here and there, but nothing that was ever totally there or truely usuable. Can you Imagine what something like this well realized could teach a kid to do. Hell, the expirence in working 3D space on the computer would be amazing for a kid to learn(or me to play with) I have always found the 3D CAD/Modeling stuff clunky and hard to wrap my head around. If I could go to my computer and assemble the thing I wanted in 3D space as lego Pieces, then use a rendering function in the software to give it a real world look(take all those sharp corners off) WOW! And imagine something like this as a Level editing tool in Quake or Unreal!
Just my over excited toughts.
BTW anyone ever seen stuff like this I might have overlooked?
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Same here. But, then, the legos didn't have to compete with Nintendo64 or PlayStation 2.
I had legos, lincoln logs, *and* tinker toys. And I had the original Nintendo. About the time SuperNintendo came out, I realized that women were pretty interesting creatures.
Speaking of favorite toys -- the old die-cast metal Transformer simply can't be beat. I wish my little brother hadn't broken my SkyFire toy - a full foot tall Macross Valkrie. Awesome. Have you seen what those are going for on ebay now? WOW!
Software Wars
The problem I have with the new kits is they're rediculously small. Of course you don't have to follow directions, but still, the variety of parts in most of thenew kits is so limited that you don't really have the flexibility to build all those neat things we used to build as kids. I don't know if it's a function of Lego just wanting to make more money (charging more for a less flexible product) or an underlying assumption that today's youth isn't creative enough to build something original, and so they don't bother to provide enough flexibility in terms of variety and quantity of parts to make that possible...
I assume the larger more generic Technic kits are still available someware, but I havn't seen them in stores in many years. All I ever see are those rediculous movie tie-in kits with just enough parts to build the Jurasic Park Dinosour Pen, or the Star Wars Drag Racer, or whatever..
--CTH
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I loved legos growing up. . .my siblings and I would spend days constructing spaceships, submarines, and houses only to destroy them and start over. While I wasn't the sadist that Hemo apparently is, stretching our limited supply of blocks made us creative people.
.I only see all this high-tech mindstorm sets, movie-flavored stuff, and other themed sets. And they're all VERY expensive!
Now, whenever I stop by my local FAO Shwartz, I don't see many basic blocks sets. .
Young kids--at least, myself, my friends, and my siblings when we were in gradeschool--could care less about following complicated instructions to build what the Lego creators think looks good! Lego needs to get back to the basics and let young kids create their own solutions using the the materials at hand.
So, in a sense, I guess Lego has lost a bit of focus. Their mindstorm sets, etc are very cool ideas but really have a limited market segment. As a company, maybe they should hire some child psychologists and take stock of what they're offering.
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Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
I can't believe kids will ever stop playing with Legos. My sons started out in infancy with the great big ones and graduated to the smaller ones. They're grown now, but there are still thousands of Legos in this house, patiently awaiting the next generation.
OTOH, I knew my son was going to be an engineer when at age two, he picked up a wooden car that had lost its back wheels and constructed wheels and axle for it out of Tinker Toys. Those have probably long since been banned as unsafe.
From now on I'm going to give Lego sets any time there's an occasion requiring a gift for a youngster. Now, what's the prognosis for Tonka Trucks and Hotwheels??
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Kids have been taught to be lazy in their play by TV and a toy industry that is all too willing to do all the imagination for them. LEGO made the mistake of making sets that catered to this kind of nonsense, instead of giving us nifty parts that we could make into whatever we wanted to.
LEGO lost that and they lost a lot of business from people who wanted to share LEGO with their kids. :) It's a bit better now, being able to buy bulk bricks and stuff, so maybe we still can.
The evil here is really marketing and what marketers will do to manage your experiences so that they can make money. The only real way to beat that it to buy things that don't let them do it. 'Convenience' and 'toys' probably don't mix as well as they want it to.
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So, I have this handful of sites I'm searching for Linux, just in case they'll catch it.
LEGO's site is one of them...
Everybody, join in!
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I think Legos lost the "creativity" edge when they started the LegoLand series. Each model could only build one thing. A House. A Car. A Helicopter. Goodbye Childhood Creativity. Lets have everybody do everything the same way.
When I was a kid, I adored Transformers robots. I mean, I was infatuated with those things. My brother and I would sometimes pretend we were transformable robots ourselves, contorting ourselves into mock-cars and mock-trucks and driving around the basement smashing into each other.
I got as many of the "cool" Transformers toys as I could, but there was a limit to how many of them I could afford. But my mom bought me LEGO space sets as well, which I assembled dutifully according to the instructions whenever I got a large one for my birthday or Christmas and then disassembled to make other stuff. Eventually, I figured out that if I couldn't collect all the Transformers I wanted, I could make them myself.
And I was good. Two "Autobot Clones" which looked the same as robots but turned into different vehicles were my favorite early effort. My last was a larger-than-the-toy Fortress Maximus, built out of every last black and grey LEGO brick I could find. It couldn't stand under its own weight, so I propped it against a wall to admire it. I never made a serious effort with the LEGO Transformers again, but they'd served their purpose.
If only those LEGO sets didn't cost as much, I would have bought them instead of the TF toys. Why buy one action figure when you can get a hundred?
I was also one of the kids building giant castles and blowing them up as a kid. I agree, Legos were a great part of my childhood, and helped shape the way that I think of all kinds of problems now that I am grown up.
This November, I will be a dad, and that has me thinking about a lot of things. I still have a giant box of all the legos I had as a kid, and I plan on letting my child play with them as soon as he/she is old enough. I would like to think that others from my generation will do the same. I would love to see the old school legos make a comeback...the creativity that they inspire is second to none.
Just my little rant, my bad if it's boring
It's hard to tell the cool to chill, my favorite hotel room has a view to an ill.
I would love it if I could pick and choose the lego parts I want, like a lego hardware store. I guess we would never convince them to have serve yourself bins in the toy store, but that would be cool. Then it would be possible to go there, pick the parts you want for your next lego project, and maybe pay for them buy the pound like screws at the hardware store. This would totally open the market up, at least in my opinion. I wouldn't even mind if I had a web site to do this at, I need 20 of these, 4 of those, 80 of these...!
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I just recently entered a robotic combat competition, in a 1lb antweight class, and decided the perfect thing to build the chassis drivetrain and steering was legos. Much to my dismay my previous vault of them had vanished inexplicably from my parents house. I went to all of the local toy stores looking for some technic sets like the good old days when they actully had some gears in em....no luck. Seems they are more interested in holding their creations together with axles and rubber bands. I shudder to think what my kids are gonna wind up with...before you had to use your brain to make anything, now you put together two pieces and you have a boat, what kind of fun and challenge is that?
koko76
My brother and I used to construct cars that were to be indestructable, at least by one another. We placed a Lego puppet somewhere inside it and then the object was to ram each others cars into one another repeatedly and at great speed. The one who's car lost its Lego puppet, lost the match (and gained the everlasting sneering of the other, obviously)....
:-)
I'm not sure, but I think it's things like this, that just make me the type of person, to post comments like this one, on sites like these
But then again. There is no other toy in the world that could have provided me the same fun, and insight in technology at the same time..
Ask ANY software developer... he (or she) played with LEGOs, and learned how easily things fall apart when not put together properly. If it wasn;t for LEGO, would we have LINUX?
isn't more specialised sets. What they need (and would probably sell like hotcakes) is lots of cheap instruction books. Instead of an R2-D2 kit, with specialised parts to make the "real" R2-D2, sell a 40-page booklet that shows how to build R2 out of standard parts. The books could sell cheap, compared to a LEGO set, and would stir up interest in buying more of the basic sets.
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.Duty is a debt you owe to yourself.
I dunno, but it seems to me that one of the main things holding Lego back is the ridiculous price of the kits. I mean, for any kit consisting of more than about 6 pieces, the price is over $10. Mindstorms are generally over $100! Maybe halve prices and a lot of that market share will come back.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
ARRRRGGHH!!! The plural of LEGO is LEGO. NOT LEGOS!!!
There weren't pieces to cover every possible thing you might want to build so you had to learn both creativity and compromise.
I know I can't be the only person who used figurine legs as joints. They work especially well for hatches.
OTOH, the specialized pieces are nice when they're done properly. There's a difference between creating a specialized piece for a castle corner that's used about 20 times in the castle with other pieces and creating a single piece castle. The former gives you new options, the latter gives none.
Lego hit a nice median in the early nineties I think and it's gone downhill from there.
Giving LEGO to a child today will most probably cause the child to seize up and just stare at a single eight-studded red piece of if for a few hours before haemorrhaging..
Pokemon will do that to your mind..
kinda like the bootloader thing.
Some of my childhoods best hours were spent with LEGO, and i was stunned when i got a pneumatics set for christmas one year. In retrospect i believe that's were they (LEGO, not my parents) went wrong. They made it more complex and brittle, and suddenly people are displaying LEGO racecars and other sets they built right out of the box in displaycases! And that's just sad...
-By attempting the impossible we can achieve the absurd..
My favorite thing was to construct vast cities, and then launch billiards balls at them, pretending it was meteors coming down.
I understand you. A friend of mine had these fancies also. But he was more in the asteroids business, specially those big asteroids in the shape of his little brother.
Marcelo Vanzin
Learn to spell.
About a year later they started coming out with these pirate sets which contained basically a preconstructed hull and sails ... where's the fun in that?
Granted that specialized piece can be a pain... they can also be a bonus. One of the reasons I bought a lot of Town sets was so I'd have properly shaped windows and skylights that would look good on my buildings, rather than just leaving a gaping hole where a window should be. Fire hydrants and other small tools that were suitably sized for minifigs also helped, since you can't replicate those out of basic blocks.
As for the pirate ships, remember that the hulls were unique in that they could actually FLOAT on water. They were hollow and sealed so the air would keep them boyant! I built plenty of custom ships using the hull as a base, including a few luxury cruise ships and a Lucitania that I could detonate from my grey U-Boat. ^_^
I know the trend is to bash specialized parts, but in some situations, they helped cover the spots that imagination alone couldn't cover in a practical sense. At the same time, they expanded the ability to creatively construct beyond the limits of rectangles.
I preferred Erector sets to Lego...
I preferred the little wrench to knawing a 1x4 from a 2x4 (did all of your Legos have teeth marks too?), and I liked building giant towers and such to little cars and boats.
If you want a good toy set for the young neice or nephew, or even to keep on your coffee table for a diversion, you need to try the Kapla blocks. They are a set of identical wood planks that you can build almost anything with. Because they're machined carefully, you can stack them pretty high before the natural defects dump them over. I first saw them at Miner's Toy Store.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
The article mentioned that bricks from 1971 still can be used with those from today. I still have a few pieces from my first Lego set (circa 1971) mixed in with my son's vast collection that continues to grow. Some of the colors have faded a bit, but they still work.
I have watched the evolution of the Lego sets over these last 30 years and have mixed feelings about these new Star Wars and Harry Potter lines. While my kids are excited about playing with them, they don't want to build other things from those sets, thus limiting the play. My son has finally seen the light and has started building bigger and better things.
As far as those specialized pieces, a few of the sets have ones that are made for that set in particular. However, most of the specialized pieces are ones that have been around before, usually in a different color. I think Lego has tried it best to keep new special pieces to an absolute minimum.
When I was growing up, those specialized pieces were essential, hinges especially. How else could you make spaceships with doors to open for the rovers to get out, legs that retract, etc?
Now that my son has so many sets (and spends hours in his room building/playing), I bought some plastic drawer units and sorted all the peices into various groupings. Am I crazy?
Just last month I visited the town of Billund in Denmark and the Legoland situated on the edge of the town.
It was very cool there, although a bit smaller than I expected and packed with tourists, especially Germans.
But the minature towns and buildings and other models all made from Lego blocks were amazing. An entire airport recreated with aircraft that rolled around the runways. A minature of Copenhagen and Amsterdam with working canal boats. And so many other things such as an oil rig, working canal systems (locks and all). Some of the models used over 2 million blocks!
But quite a few of the kids there didn't really seem to appreciate it. I overheard one kid, about 10, say (in English) that this was the second most boring place in Denmark after his home!
Maybe you were a rich punk as a kid and could build cities with them, but legos were always a little pricier than the average toy, especially the cool sets like the lunar lander or the helicoptor. Yeah you know what im talking about. That medieval castle setup or highway police station set parents back big time. Look at the prices nowdays, they are ten times worst. FUCK LEGO
They've been doing ad trailers in the movie theatres for months for it. I don't know if that's going to work for them, but it's an interesting premise. Honestly speaking, they need to revisit the whole thing and get back to their roots- cheaply.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I never had LEGOs. I did use Erector sets rather religously. If Lego is suffering, I would have to assume similar toys are suffering as well. This really stinks. I was looking forward, assuming I have kids, to playing with Lego, Erector, and Lincoln Log toys with my children.
Anyone else use the other toys?
I think that Lego's biggest problem is that by having so many themed sets, they have introduced many very specialized pieces that cannot be used except to build that set. Mind you I have no problem with certain specialized sets, but the pirate themes really stand out as having too many specialized pieces. I think that after the Lego Town sets, they went downhill. Town was good because it made use of normal pieces (albeit sometimes off from the regular colors) and the town blocks could be used to build other things. I guess it helps that lego blocks are rectangular, and go really well with making buildings :)
So basically what Lego needs to do is to get away from all the custom pieces like boat hulls, and make sets from pieces that can be used for other projects as well. I always liked the sets myself, often building what was on the box, and using my general bucket of pieces to make enhancements on the set, or else another town building or something of that nature.
My love has been and always will be the "Space" lines; we know that castles and dinosaurs and houses don't really have little round nubs, but the spaceships of the future might; the same geeky love of scifi's possibilities for the future extended to lego.
And that's one of the reasons I've never been a big fan of the generic brick sets; Legos are, essentially, a kids 3D CAD kit in solid form. When all you have is clunky squares, all you can build then is clunky square things, but wings, engines, lasers, cockpits... with those, you could make things with a real sense of design, and more 3D presence than drawing on paper.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
When I bought my first x86 computer (a 10mhz 8088) MANY years ago, I could not afford a monitor. I bought the guts to an old monochrome monitor for $5 at a local electronics store and tried to use that. In a fit of insanity I built the case out of Lego.
It was incredibly expensive. (I spent more for Lego than i would have if I had just saved up for a new monitor.)
Now-a-days you can't even find the large buckets. It is all kits and gadgets. Everything is pretty much pre-designed.
I guess this is what happens when you let marketing run things...
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
you fuck.
I used to play with Legos for hours on end, days if need be. :-)
I just had my first child, and I'm already checking out the Lego sets in the toy stores. He'll definately have Legos and Duplo blocks to play with!
I think you're right, about the attention span thing. I've noticed that lately my attention span isn't all that great. I've started reading some good books (The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time series) to get me to settle down and relax. It's working!
Hopefully I can raise my child to have an attention span, and appreciate the finer things in life that you just have to be patient to enjoy.
"Forget" to clean them up when your mom told you to and then in the middle of the night when you went to the bathroom step on them. Son of bitch that hurt. After a couple of times of doing this I figured they would make great booby traps for little brother and dad. I was right. I used to randomly place a couple in fron of my door so nobody could sneak up on me. Then my little brother swallowed a head of one of the little men and I had them taken away.
Did any of you folks consider that the article might be just so much nonsense? I've got an 8 year old kid who LOVES Legos, so I've got a great real-time lab for observations on whether Lego toys are accepted by today's youth.
The article claims that the company hasn't adapted to today's kids realities. Uhm - Huh? So explain Lego Land or the Lego CDROM titles that my kid has played for endless hours, not to mention that he builds lego kits ALL the time. It is absolutely his favorite toy...bar NONE!
If my son is an example, Lego still has what it takes to make money, and they've come up with dozens of new and imaginitive products to keep my kid interested (why haven't I bought stock?? Hmmm..)
Have you compiled your kernel today??
You can still buy plain old bricks in large quantities, they're just not easy to find. I've found that the best deal for my money is set #3033. The contents of this set can be found here. Sure, there's a somewhat large number of the stupid 1x1s, but it still comes with a lot of useful bricks. My personal collection is up to 11 or 12 tubs now.
For general LEGOs, I've found that Lugnet is quite a good reference for shopping for LEGO as well as just plain fun LEGO pages and info.
Do not read this sig.
While you're at the Lego site, try their mosaic-maker too. Upload a photo, and have a brick mosaic delivered.
That's a whole bunch of my Xmas presents taken care of....
I was talking with my 8 year old cousin the other day and we were playing with one of his new LEGO toys. It was an alien that rode on some sort of hover scooter. I started to take pieces off of the scooter and rearange them. He got this horrified look on his face. "No, that's not how it goes!", he said. He quickly put it back the "correct" way, and went back to playing with it in the intended format. This is not an unimaginative child. Are our kids learning too much obedince?
Disclaimer: I have no kids yet, but will in September, then all of you parents can laugh all you want.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
I have a six month old baby (first child too) and have already bought her a couple of lego sets for babies called "Primo", they are before the "Duplo" kind.
Primo legos come for like 3 months and up, 6 months , 9 months etc.
They're pretty simple, but she seems to like them ! Hopefully she'll always like these toys, they're the best !
- sigs are for wimps.
Lego was wonderful, and I personally spent tons of time in my childhood toying with them, but the really amazing geek-child toy was Fischertechnik.
:)
I know some people are fans of Erector, some are fans of Tinkertoys, and others fans of Lego, but I've yet to meet someone who played with Fischertechnik that didn't end up loving it above all else.
A while back I asked my Dad, "You know, I wish my kids would have something like that to play with." He asked me if I remembered how he told me to put the pieces back in the box, each piece in its own little slot, when I was a child? I did. He asked me if I remembered why he told me to do that?
Because one day, when I had kids of my own, I'd want it for them.
Dad, while finding it increasingly hard to find Fischertechnik in America (you can still get it, but it's not available in major department stores like it once was), saw the direction the company was heading, didn't like it, and knowing what a great toy it was thought ahead, way behind where my brother and I were thinking.
He still has all of it. Every plastic and metal piece.
I'm going home this weekend, and I'm going to build myself a crane with it.
What's this bullshit about kids not having the proper attention span. That sounds like a bad job parenting. Just because it's easier to dump a kid in front of a TV, doesn't mean they don't have the capacity to learn, or pay attention.
My boy just turned one, and in a few years will inherit the legos I had when I was a child. They've lasted and certainly have some magic left in them.
...at 45. I suspect, though I can't prove it, that I was one of the first kids in Canada to play with LEGO. My father worked in the Valuation division of Canada Customs, and sometimes got to bring home samples that they were done with. I well remember this big flat box that had these bricks inside, and building all sorts of stuff based on the drawings on the box.
I just recently bought a 16-liter pail 2/3 full of LEGO at a garage sale. My sweetie and I have had loads of fun with it, as have a bunch of our friends and neighbours, and the teenaged kids of some of the aforementioned friends. We've built all kindsa stuff, taken it apart to build other things, and generally had a blast. No motors, no batteries, no instructions, just hours of fun. Add in a big pot of tea and some fresh chocolate chip cookies, and there's no better way to spend time with friends of all ages.
I'm going to have to add to this assortment, I think. It's just a shame that the bulk LEGO seems to be limited to bags of 25 of one piece. I want to build furniture out of LEGO, and computer cases, and stuff. C'mon, bags of 100, or 1000, priced appropriately; that's what we really need to make things out of LEGO.
I do find it fascinating, however, that so many people built things and then actively worked to destroy their (or others') creations. Maybe that's what's wrong with this world....
more desirable on the surface
in fact less useful
more expensive
[AOL]Me too![/AOL]
I don't think any lego vehicle is indestructable, but I'm open to ideas.
Actually we used to just forgo the puppets and try to design vehicles that were indestructable, and then take turns ramming them into each other till one vehicle could not maintain motion along the ground.
The best construction we came up with was a couple of rows of angled roof bricks sandwiched between two flat boards. Most ramming attempts on this sort of vehicle would simply result in the attacker going up the ramp of the bricks and causing more damage to itself than the defender.
Main vulnerability of this design appeared to be the wheels, which if repeately rammed, would "lever out" the top bottom plates, allowing the rest of the vehicle to be broken up.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
What most people have mentioned so far is a childhood filled with legos and other creative toys then moving onto computers. I share this common experience and happen to think it is part of the progression of the LEGO ideal. Kids who played with LEGOs were intrigued when they could fiddle with an old 286. Printing 'Hello World' on the screen moves onto building larger things.
/. readers probably spent a good hunk of their childhood fiddling in a lego like manner.
Kids today, although they use computers and such, have a much different experience with them. The LEGO generation is interested in finding out how things work, and creating things while the modern child is born to be an enduser.
Computers are not the death of Legos/creativity. Buy your children legos, but don't scoff when they want to fiddle with your computer. Most
never quite understood why lego has never expanded their market into the non-kiddy domain. for example, every time i built a new computer i couldnt help but ask god why i cant just snap the components together like legos. hello, lego, are you listening?
:T:R:A:N:S:
(:
Left handed smiley ?
Smiley wearing tin hat ?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Playing with lego's was one of the best experiences of my life. I had more than anyone I have ever met, mostly all free-form blocks, although I did get the battery pack and motors, but I ordered them from a catalogue, so they were very generic. I liked that they chose sizes for thier belts so that I could replace them with parts from the local hardware store.
Enough nostalgia, on to the real stuff.
To understand me, you need to understand how I solve problems. If thier are directions, I throw them away first thing, then I start tinkering. I do this when I work on my car, and I do this when I am programming. Knowing the answer before starting is never as much fun, it can be quicker, but nothing is learned aside from one fact. This is why physics labs bored me in college, not because we were not studying cool things, but because we were told how to do everything. We weren't given a problem and told to solve it, we were given a solution and told to explain the answer. This did not promote my interest in learning the equations which we discused in class. It worked well for the other students, many of them flourished in that environment, but it did not work for me.
It was not until my last lab, where the lab manual had been lost and I was told to make it up, did I actually learn something from physics labs. The other ones were too canned to be interesting to me. Its because they did not fit into the lego mentality, experimentation is more than doing something someone else has done before exactly as they did it.
Spring is here. Don't believe me, look outside!
These days people wouldn't stand for violent behaviour as described in the header. Employing devices of mass destruction against cities? You're expelled!
I'm amazed at how many people know what's wrong with Lego. Or rather, I'm amazed at how Lego doesn't do something like people are suggesting.
I've got two of the most generic Lego sets (the blue tub and another "basic" set). It's hard to use them to build anything like what I built as a kid. Sure, there are plenty of really basic bricks in the blue tub, all full-height. But there isn't a single plate or any other 1/3 height brick. No doors, windows, roof pieces, wheels, etc. Nothing. In the other "basic" set, I got some of those things, but nowhere near enough plates to do anything significant and not enough roof pieces to cover anything larger than about 16x16.
I was just looking at sets last night at the mall. Nothing was that interesting. A dozen Lego soccer sets, a few movie sets, a bunch of Star Wars sets on clearance (half of which were unrecognizable to me), an assortment of pirate/racecar/superhero/mineshaft/arctic themed sets, some new dinosaur sets, a bunch of those Fosters can sized figure sets, and some new sets that look more like a collectable card game. Nothing was worth buying. The only things worth it were some clearance Duplo sets I already got my kid (an american indian set, some Pooh crap).
Give kids what they want. Make a $20-30 blue tub sized set that lets kids build cars and houses. Make another one that lets them build planes and spaceships to crash into the buildings. There you go.
Give "adult" geeks what they want. Classic Star Wars stuff. Something we'd be happy to plop on our desk at work.
Stop giving us what we don't want. Lego Soccer in the U.S.?
For some reason, I missed out on Lego/Mechano etc.
;)
I used Capsela (gears/shafts in globe-modules) but I don't think that was the best substitute.
Lego is a great imagination building system. I think it could've been good for me. I think that my imagination has suffered because of not working with it. Or I could be just imagining.
I also find it frustrating buying the stuff for my nephews. I couldn't just by a foundation set. All I can find most of the time is the 'space stations and garages'. These are great but there's not too many 2x8's in them.
Lego's definitely helped make me who I am today, I useto spend hours and hours playing with them, just the basic kits, before they got all crazy. ... ah the memories :-)
;-)
My friends had loads of space lego's and we useto hook up a vacuum in reverse (as a blower) and make some crazy creations that would launch 'rockets' (stacks of 1x1 blocks)
My parents threw out all the lego's when I was 13 that really sucked but Radio Shack became my new home and I spent every dime I had buying electronic parts and building electronic creations. From there I fixed my first computer (a Commodore 64 with 6510 MP) and started programming BASIC, didn't even have a storage device so I couldn't turn off the computer or I would lose my programs.
I was given an 80386DX33 computer when I was 15 and spent every waking moment coding in every language I could get my hands on... then my parents burned (yes burned, with fire) my whole system and I lost everything.
Looking back I guess things turned out alright I'm 22 now and the point... yes there is a point to my rambling... well it all started with the LEGO
Every young child deserves some Lego's because a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
We've all done it before -- stepping on Legos scattered all over the floor in the dark hurts like a bitch, stumbling from one painful pile to another, wrecking a whole day's worth of building while leaving your feet full of small indentations, all perfectly arranged and usually in an 2x4 pattern.
Yes, stepping on Legos certainly sucked. (For some of us, I'm sure it still sucks.)
J
I remember having two or three floating ships way back in the 80s. They had a big weight you stuck on the bottom to keep their bouyancy from flipping them right over.
Admittedly, the hulls weren't useful for much else, but then again, they floated. That, in my opinion, is a pretty good tradeoff.
Now, purely specialized parts for other things aren't nearly as appealing, unless you get a huge benefit out of it in the end. (Like floating ships)
The dumbing down of America continues, Lego's falling popularity is just another sign. This all goes back to the digital divide, which is really just an intellectual divide. It's not about black or white, rich or poor, it's about smart or dumb. I know it sounds bad, but it is bad: Americans are dumb for the most part. I'm American, and Southern (so I should be really dumb according to trends) but I consider myself of above average intelligence. I had an Erector Set, all sorts of legos, a football, baseball, a wide array of toys, including video games. Kids these days don't get toys that make them think, they get politically correct toys that are designed so that even a 1 year old could figure them out. It's either that or mindless video games with such atrocities as "one button mode." It's not our kids' fault though, that lies soely with the parents. Today, parents get toys for kids that "shut them up," or get the kids out of the parents' hair. Not many Dads take the time to teach their kids the fundamentals of throwing a football or kicking a soccer ball, not many Moms take the time to play counting games with a few dollars worth of change to get those math skills going, not many parents challenge their kids to develop in any aspect of life other than sitting down and shutting up. I thank God every day for the parents I had. They took a lot of time out of their schedules to do things with me that helped me develop as a person. They also encouraged me to play with toys that did the same. It's sad for Lego, but that is just rare these days.
~ now you know
What would you do if Toa's came in seeds?
--You'd sow-a-toa
What would happen next?
--You'd grow-a-toa
What would you call a snake that swollowed it whole?
--A toa-constrictor
What would happen if you invited a toa home for dinner?
--You'd get to know-a-toa
How would you say that you don't trust a toa?
--I don't trust you any more than I can throw-a-toa
What would happen if you hide a toa?
--You would stow-a-toa
Thank you very much, I'm here all week.
Be sure to tip you waitress...
One of my college English teachers at Georgia Tech said she made the mistake of asking a freshman class to write an essay on their favorite childhood toy. She read 30 essays extolling the virtues of the legos we grew up with, and bashing on the "new" legos that had such specific parts.
She never made the mistake of asking for that essay again.
I remember when Legos came out with their Space stuff. All grey. Between myself and 2 friends we filled half of my friend's room with a spacestation, buildings, ships all in grey.
Now my son has every Star Wars lego out except the pod racing set. He has all of the dinosaur kits and boats, and planes god know what else. With the exception of a few of the Star Wars legos all the rest are in 6-8 huge tubs of spare parts.
The one thing I noticed is that most of the new kits are only vehicles, no buildings. I think I'll buy him a couple of flat bases and start building tonight!
....... Thus ends my attempt at wit or whatever
spellcheck doesn't care that you are using the word properly, it just cares that the word is in the dictionary.
where, ware, where, there, their, they're
Man, If you can't hit a lego building with a pool ball, keep it to yourself.
If the rest of the world finds out we can't hit jack shit, the "Right to Bear Arms" won't be worth a damn.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I can still hear the sound of hands rifling through a huge box of legos. Ahhhhhhhh.
My handle breaks slashcode, what does your handle do?
Somebody's a step ahead of you.
LEGO has been watching Microsoft for YEARS!
Of course they've introduced entirely proprietary lego pieces!
LEGO doesn't want you to make a boat out of that X-Wing Fighter!
LEGO you to buy their boat model!
In effect, they've created a subscribtion based revenue model based on the fact that kids always want to build something new!
Here is an excellent site: http://www.lugnet.com
Probably the only online Lego resource you'll ever need. I got all of my old set instruction manuals from it.
Also, check this out: http://www.netpresonic.com/lego/orca/
It's the Orca from Command & Conquer, and is an excellent example of what you can do with all those supposedly inflexible spaceship parts!
Anyway, I suppose I should respond to the article...
Among the reasons for Lego's "decline" (I have my doubts about that. They certainly seem to disappear from the shelves around christmas time...) they list TV. I don't know how many fellow slashdotters have had the opportunity to watch any childrens TV lately, but it's really taken a dive in the last 10 years or so. It's basically just a bunch of touchy-feely, polotically correct garbage. It isn't even entertaining (mind you, I don't know what's on Nicolodean or the Cartoon Network these days, just the free channels). As far as I can tell, nothing descent has been produced since Animaniacs. The most entertaining kids show I've seen recently is Teletubbies, which is disturbingly surreal. My 1 year old daughter loves it though, which really makes me wonder about the perceptual world babies and toddlers live in...
I guess my point is, how can this crap compete with Lego, except by numbing the childs mind to the point where independent creative thought is impossible? And what are the ultimate effects on these children when they grow up?
As long as kids have relatives that think creativity is important, Lego will will always have a market. So what if they haven't been in the top twenty toys for the last x years, it's better to have a sustained market than to be a flash in the pan, despite corporate America's obsession with quick profits. How many little brothers will have even a passing interest in just one of those top 20 toys?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
No, but would be a ding in your quest to run the Dept of Public Works.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
the beauty of LEGO is that it is primordial and you can make and recreate things. mindstorms is chief among these, they flew off the shelves and can do all sorts of things like automate our classroom miniblinds, etc... and still build towers to the ceiling. the only thing hurting the basic bricks is the attention-span-robbing introduction of the model/theme sets - give a kid basic bricks and they'll still make great things.
you can still buy basic buckets at toys-r-us and online you can buy bulk bricks, but not many types.
while we're at it - notice for all the LEGO in the states you've never seen a LEGO semi on the highway? except for a model team rig and a hicube or two for schlepping around enfield, they don't have distribution trucks. everyone comes to enfield with their store's trucks to pick up their lego (walmart and toys-r-us are their two biggest clients as of a few years back) - everyone comes and gets it, LEGO stay out of the truck fixing business.
more cool stuff - their manufacturing and packing lines in enfield have been run with everything from commodores to bare bones PCs, and they improve automation periodically. yet no one has ever been let go because their station was automated - they are put to work in another part of the plant on a new position. that was as of 99 - they have had many company-wide adjustments since then, though. still wonderful stuff. it did my heart good to see kids at FIRST realizing who LEGO chairman peter eio was, and asking him for an autograph!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Hehehehehehehe.
Whoah, hehehohoho. whoah eh, ah! I just crapped my pants I was laughing so fucking hard. God damn, that's some funny shit.
Funny, and somehow, sadly appropriate to my day.
How the fuck does the above post violate the "postersubj compression filter", whatever the fuck that is?
I was working in a software startup in a 4th floor walkup in the Moleculon building in Tech Square near MIT in the early 80s. Across the landing from me was a small office with two wildly creative guys who were in an educational software startup associated with Seymour Papert. They were busily cutting Lego bricks in half, embedding touch and light sensors, and building systems that used the sensors and motor controls to build really cool robots.
As I recall, all the software was written in a Logo dialect running on an Apple II. The really cool thing was the pilot work they did in schools. I saw video tape of second graders designing and building systems that would sort bricks by colors, or robots that would follow a line drawn on paper. All the things that Mindstorms do now.
At some point company was disbanded, the ideas folded back into the MIT Media lab, and eventually incorporated into the Lego partnership. I don't know what happened to the two guys who did the work.
Maybe the reason for the declining popularity of Lego is the fact it's such a good toy and made of nice, durable plastic. I doubt anyone with a sizable collection of Lego will ever even consider throwing them away. Once you have handed over your crate full of Lego pieces there isn't much of a need of buying new ones.
Kill'em! Kill'em all!
I've read many comments today about remembering Lego. There are many of us who never stopped enjoying them. We AFOL's (Adult Friends of Lego) have enjoyed and supported this wonderful company for generations. One site I must mention is LUGNET, http://www.lugnet.com. This is a great community where this great company and it's products can be discussed.
I encourage those of you "remembering" Lego bricks to stop by.
Play Well...
http://www.brickshelf.com/scans/
I had fun looking at the old kits I had from the early 70's - like most people here, I built it once and then spent untold hours having building competitions with friends (I grew up in the Yukon where going outside to play in the long dark winter wasn't an option!!)
A few years back I was off work with a broken bone or 2, pulled the lego out and rebuilt all my old kits - what a blast!
In hindsight I think one of the most valuable things is I you learned to make what you wanted with what you didn't have. It always seemed like I din't quite have enough or the right parts but I always figured out how to make it in the end. The ammount of problem solving I did with Legos as a kid is really mind boggling, and I doubt I've ever had as much fun solving problems since. One thing I liked about the article is how it pointed out how there isn't a wrong way to play with Legos. That's really true, and I don't think I can even think of another toy as versitile and actually teaches you some things that help you later on in life.
Probably the worst thing I can do while cleaning is come across my old lego bin... I can never leave it alone and always waiste 3 hours or so doing something with it. I think that's happened to me 3 times over the years since I eventually gave them up as a kid
Kids don't play like they used to, Lego has realized they want a story.
My personal opinion on why Lego has gone into decline this decade: Specialized Bricks. I'm 22, but I bought Lego sets up high school, and still request them as gifts. But not in the past few years. When a whole model hinges around one super-brick, it's hard to get that piece into something else that doesn't evoke the original model.
The other problem is lowered brick count. I loved the castle series, for many years I had one of every set, although I quickly stopped when they dropped the piece count by using those mountain plates so they didn't have to provide wall pieces. You really couldn't build anything more than what the set gave you, except maybe move the tower around. And that really is where creativity starts: you build a model, but decide it would be cooler with another tower, or a bigger tower, or the blacksmith shop built into the wall. I haven't seen these Bionicle sets, but they sound like they're getting back to old-school Lego. Cool.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
Lego is good, but as one post said, lately they're almost models. With all the funky specialized parts that come in today's Star-Wars-whatever kits, its pretty hard to be creative (and often harder to find regular old blocks).
Brio on the other hand, is pure and simple. You build a railway out of wooden train tracks and you play!
I grew up on these! I would spend hours designing the most intricate tracks winding in and out of furniture. I had whole cities and towns and commuter expresses. Later I even designed some of my own pieces. Brio is safe and has been around forever! Check it out!
As a subscriber to Fast Company, I got this article in print, along with the pictures that go with it. The pictures are of humans posed in scenes with giant lego heads on their bodies. I cut one out of a manager behind a desk and framed it. The other pictures were:
2 people staring at a blue brick with a viking in the distance.
A father (looking at directions) and a son at a kitchen table with legos all over the place and a mom doing dishes.
A father and mother looking down at their kid who is playing nintendo.
It's amazing that you even know how to work this site.
Oh, I'd say he definitely knows how to work this site. And you.
I can alwase remeber having large mass amounts of blocks, me and my friends when i was REALLY little would get together and try and build weird trains and the like then just run around with them on the floor, the entertainment value was amazing. Ya want a space ship or a big ass helicopter just start picking out peaces. I personally have alwase been passive so i didnt ever do the smashum till they brake thing but i still enjoyed flinging them around on the floor (hey look its a race car, watch it go)
;-)
Some of you guys are talking about how its sucking now that there putting out the predeterimed parts and big modle sets. its not anywhere nearly as bad as your making it sound. I played with legos from when i was probably 4 till when i was probably 12 or 13 (I'm 17 now and getting a craving to play with them again) But if me and my friends had a large amounts of the futaristic blocks and the medivel blocks and the modern blocks so be it. It all got jumbled together into one weird ass ship, we would make up our storys and reasons for them being that way ("its the postapocaliptic future, and the wizard is going to destroy the demonic army of cyborgs, my dudes lair wont be destroyed because its on top of the coutch")
Anyway, its bad that lego is going down but they wont ever go out, there a accet to the world. Once i end up having children i assure you they will get to play with my old legos and if they enjoy them off to wal-mart to buy some new ones. I want smart children damnit! good braggin rights
I remember and loved the first Lego Space Sets. They were the core of what me and my brother did: build unique looking Lego Space ships. I loved some of the special parts that they had then like the Rocket Nozzles and the space dudes. Now, I walk into a store and see Star Wars Legos and think they are even more cool. I do thing that the need to nix some of the special parts, or, if they are going to include them, include instructions for more then say the X-wing. I dunno if they do that, but if they did, it would then open up their minds and see well if I had two Xwing kits I could make a 8 engined X-wing or something like that. Oh and I saw the Bioncles and they suck in my opinion.
Gorkman
I think it's important to have toys which are tools for the child to learn about his or her world. Whether it be wooden blocks, Fischer Technik or Lego, they all encourage the youngster to solve engineering problems
(and for that I'll be mod'ed to redundant, but who cares)...
I had the Lego Technics sets, and I had both the motor and the pneumantic arm (Made by Parker Hannifin, actually) that they made for a little while. One of my first creations (with both sets) was a 'round up' type ride for my little lego men.
I was looking at the toy section the other day in the mall, and all I could find are very unique sets...they don't have the assortment of pieces that once came, and they don't have the hard-to-find pieces any more (like the one that opened the hanger for the space shuttle lego set). It seems to me that they should open up their production to more types of toys than what they make now...bring back the 'bucket 'o legos' and the technics sets that have the cool little gizmos.
I disable sigs...do you?
I didn't have any idea of Lego's existance until about 20, and I still survived and even have reasonable mental abilities, can tie my shoelaces, program my Perl and even was able to make my B.Sc. So I guess even Lego-challenged people can find their way in this sad world.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
It's simply because they are too damn expensive and there are video games now. That's all.
Period.
Ever seen the prices these days? It's crazy how much a little car costs!
It's a matter of the pocketbook. Even at 28, I still find myself buying Lego sets - but only after the prices have gone down. For example, I found the Mindstorms Robotics Invention Kit for $99 and the Dark Side Developer Kit for $49 on clearance at Target about seven months ago, found some of the expansions on clearance at CompUSA, and I buy Star Wars sets and some Bionicle stuff when I have extra money. But, I don't have kids yet and my soon-to-be wife and I have a combined income of close to $90K. Parents can't go hog wild spending $200 on a Steven Spielberg Director's Studio and then come up with cash for the other Lego sets the kids might want. Lego has got to join the real world and find a way to bring production costs down and pass those savings on to the consumer. Then parents - our generation, specifically - will be ready to buy more Legos.
Remember when there were (relatively speaking) only a few pieces? Now that there's a piece of every available size and shape, it's just not as fun as it used to be. I think that's a major part of their downfall. Lego lost character. The weird pieces were treasure, now there's just a bunch of stuff that doesn't fit together.
I remember when I was a kid I would hide my cigarettes that I stole from my older brother inside the spaceship I built, and I knew how to open so it would easily be put back together. My parents never found out because I knew they would not dare mess with my ship. I have quit smoking, but I still have that spaceship on my dresser!
Do you know how much research and diagrams went into the perfect 38 hit combo for Orchid? Killer Instinct may look like a fast game, but trust me, most of the "speed" is automatic. Actual thinking is required. (One of the reasons I really liked that game...)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I remember when i was a kid.....before i had my computer i had legos. That was my source of joy. Yes i had my nintendo and all, but still......the legos caught my attention. I have always been the creative one, and a sculpture oriented one at that. Legos taught me how to put my ideas in to an actual object. Actually, they still are nice for prototyping things that i want to build.
Its really sad that they're having such a hard time dealing with new technology such as all the console systems......channel cable tv, and the like. So in 15 years when all those kids grow up without a way to express creativity.....i think i know where it'll be from. Or maybe (dont mod me down!) its the whole education system finally coming around. At least here in germantown, creativity is beat out of kids. So maybe that explains why kids want simple video games. Don't need creativity because its a bad thing according to schools. Nope don't be individual we're all the same. Ugh.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o
As far as I can tell, there's no real legal threat implied. It is a polite letter telling you that Lego does not wish to have their image tainted like this. And of course they backed off. They don't want to destroy their customer base (unlike other companies). They just want to make toys for kids! Geez.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Who cares about Lego... WE'VE GOT FREE PORN!
Sad, but true.
I think that kids today are just as smart as we were; they also are growing up with the internet, which can be good and bad. Contrapuntally, intelligent people are having fewer children than those with unfunctional, unused minds.
LEGO, as I saw in the New York World's Fair of 1964-65, was part of this free-form childhood: even now, with my new LEGOs (folded into my 1966 kit with all care and due reverence) I can make a truck with an astronaut in full kit being driven out to launch (I titled this one, "Going to work, Mr. Armstrong?") one day, and a gas station the next. I look at the model kits in the store and think: hey, I don't have that kind of patience! I'd probably make a whole different story....one where the explorer has to give the ruby BACK to the Egyptians....but no. It's on the box...
Mindstorms I never touched. Too expensive. But I'd LOVE to make a nice little robot to drive the webcam around the apt to watch the cats....
teleny, friend of cats.
A former project architect earned my never ending respect when he pulled out a pile of Duplo and Lego to explain how our object oriented framework worked to a bunch of execs and managers. The fact that a grown man had a pile of childrens toys on his desk didn't seem to phase anyone, the fact that he had to resort to it to explain things to the execs was lost on no one. What can I say, you gotta put it in terms they'll understand.
As a kid, I always had legos around (for my 1st birthday my parents got me a big tub of duplos, the bigger version of legos) By that time (1986) Most of em were kits, so, I'd build what was on the box. I got tired of that after about 10 min, and first "improved" it, by changeing everything around, and keeping the same theme, However, I'd tire of that quickly as well. So into the big bin it would go. After a while, I had HUDGE tubs of lego and duplo bricks (probly 100k bricks or more) I would build vast planets over months and months. A few space ships to start out with, then some people, then spaceports, then houses, and roads, and statues, untill I had used up almost every brick (or my little brother came in, godzilla style and wrecked it all) That reminds me...I need to get a bucket of bricks for my desk, for while I'm waiting for compiles, friends, downloads, or when I'm just really bored.
What I think I was trying to say, is legos have been a big part of this kids life
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
I made a crappy implementation, but it can still generate enough of a breeze to cool my monitor down a bit. :-)
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
When I was a child, my parents didn't spoil me with expensive computers and toys, but instilled a sense of the value of goods and encouraged my brothers and I to make toys or entertain ourselves out in the fields, hills or sea.
This meant that when Lego (and to a lesser degree Meccano) turned up it was an outstanding toy. Lego packs for the next 10 years or so (for all of us) created a massive base for development of all types of creations - we made mechanical linkages before Technics came out, working wave and wind driven generators, a hideously inaccurate clock and once Technics came out we built a Babbage machine.
By the time I got a Dragon 32 (like a Tandy to the west-of-the-pond types) I had no interest in playing computer cames, but in writing assemblers, games, word processors, etc.
And now we are all in Mensa and have excellent jobs - you've got to get the brain development in early!
My kids are getting Lego and books - and no computer games for years, so they can get the good start my siblings and I got.
Please not that the plural of Lego is Lego, not "Legos".
Also, the plural of "box" is "boxes", not "boxen"!
Very much valued. Thank you!
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
I was a huge lego fan when I was younger and once I built a lego gun that could shoot small legos (1x2) about 20 meters or so. I used a mix of normal legos, technics and rubbers bands. It had a firing pin that had to be pulled back to arm the gun, and was held in place by a trigger mechanics, it also had a magazine with about 20 "bullets" that would automatically go into the firing position when the pin was pulled. The real secret of the gun where the 2 rubber bands that I used, which I got from a Marine Engineer, aparantly these were used somewhere in the engine, and where extremely durable and tight. It was so powerful that I had to glue it together so it wouldn't break apart when I fired.
:)
:)
I used to terrorize my brother with this gun, getting shot at close range stung like hell
I finally disasembled the gun, after the gun jammed and the firing pin broke off and hit me in the head, I had a red mark on my forehead for a few weeks
don't knock ritalin and the other adhd drugs they can help you focus maybe get something done when you have lots of things going on and the bird flies by outside your window and i'm looking out the window and thinking about the bird and the tree and the grass and i get up to go outside and on the way i stop in the kitchen for a snack and my sister has the tv on so i watch that and after a while i start drawing on some paper that is there but i want the green marker and i go to my room to get it and while i am looking for the marker i pick up a book and flip through it and i start reading it in the middle if you only knew how many times i was distracted just writing this you need to look at the rest of the agenda these people have who say oh horrors they have these kids on drugs most are behaviorist bleeding heart kids should feel good about themselves with no background in medicine sorry a bs in psych doesnt cut it or worse yet a degree in journalism or the ones pushing grapefruit pip extract herbal compounds and miracle diets right take your medical information from them i'll sell you a magnet to put on your gas line that makes your car run better you should listen to people who study the brain like dr alan zametkin at nimh instead of the media you could start with this paper if you haven't looked at adhd research you should really take the time to read it i would greatly appreciate it if someone will please mod this out of AC wasteland although probably half the people on here have adhd i ought to just post it under my login confusing to read this no apology i live in this it doesn't bother me not confusing my life looks like a perfectly logical sequence from my point of view but back to the drugs my brain works differently it is no worse to give a kid with adhd ritalin than to give a diabetic kid insulin oh yeah the europeans and chinese are so progressive give the kids one test when they are 12 that determines whether they become worker bees or go on to higher education and you call us drones nice troll though
I forgot my username and password. Oh well, I guess I am anon.
Anyway, two things here I think are interesting.
1. I attended a festival in July called Brickfest . Brad Justus, the head of LEGO Direct (he basically runs the web site and anything to do with the catalog, etc.) gave a great speech there. Among the interesting things he said was that there was a very good reason that LEGO sets are not like they used to be: kids are not like they used to be. LEGO knows their target market very, very well, and they have determined today's kids have much shorter attention spans than the kids of a generation ago. So when you see a set in the stores that has just a bunch of big parts, or looks like an action figure, it's because of a well-researched decision on LEGO's part. Everyone who grew up with LEGO wants their kids to play with the free form originality of the sets they made in the 70s and 80s. But as a WHOLE, today's kids want instant gratification, and don't want to put the sets together. They want a more "play oriented" environment, thus the huge action figure market and LEGO's eroding market share.
2. Someone mentioned LEGO films before. As a shameless self promotion, that's my hobby. I run a site called Brickfilms that I think everyone in the world should see. It is guarenteed to lift your spirits and make you think LEGOs are cool again. It's, IMHO, the BEST and DEFINATIVE site for LEGO films in the net.