Slashdot Mirror
Battle Over Blocks
RoscoHead writes: "S'pose you've already seen this over at Fast Company - a follow-up to their previous article by Charles Fishman. The follow-up includes comments from three different "users" of Lego - including Hemos, alias Jeff Bates, Slashdot's esteemed Lego guru..."
This got them money from rich geeks, but made the product even less pleasant and fun for average, non-technological kids.
Legos are hardly the place for taking pot-shots in the Class Warfare struggle in America. For every nine year old child building remote controlled cars out of legos, there are working class children too, building oil rigs, monster trucks, and freight trains, powerful symbols of blue collar existence. The extensive flexibility introduced by the newer legos do not extend new possibilities just to upper middle class science-fiction fans, but to children everywhere with a solid engineering background and about a hundred dollars.
Pure left wing nonsense!
The reason so many people hate the new sets is the proliferation of "special pieces." It used to be that lots of Lego sets came with special pieces such as hinges, turntables, and such, but they could always be used in your own models, and most of the pieces were still good old vanilla lego bricks. Now it seems that it is impossible to buy a set without over half of its pieces being large, oddly shaped pieces that can hardly be used in any way other than to build the set in the instructions. Regular lego blocks make up fewer and fewer of the actual pieces. It hinders the creativity aspect when you can only build one thing from your lego pieces. Its sort of missing the point. Legos just become some sort of model kit like a model airplane, which isn't what Legos should be.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Saying that the original LEGO bricks are obsolete is akin to saying that in architecture the cantilevered beam is now obsolete because we have new composite materials. It's o.k. to move ahead, and the LEGO company needs to do this. But it's also imperative to know where you've been and what worked in the past. The LEGO company can't seem to come to grips with it's own past successes.
Lego is one of the best educational toys possible. I grew up with Lego. My father bought me one of the very old technic sets with the yellow, blue and red gears. Wow!
I have played primarily with space sets and technic sets. I have Mindstorms. I build gross huge disgusting complicated stuff. Backhoe loader with 6 degrees of freedom using pnumatics, four digit trinary counter power distribution system, spaceships over a meter long (3') etc.
Oh. And I'm thirty, I have a three-year-old kid, and we play together now :-)
So, Lego is great. But why? Because it does what no other toy I know of does: it challenges the mind in details, in abstractions, in planning, in three-dimensional visualization, in imagination, in story creation, in beauty, in symetry, in working with constraints, in memory (ever had something break and rebuild it from memory?).
Is there any other toy that comes even close?
Buy the sets you think are best. Don't buy the ones you don't think are good. Lego Inc. will get the hint.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
What will your son feel when he grows up and his memories are of a toy that never challenged him for more than a few minutes?
The damage to the company is being done now. The products they offer may be selling well (though many are not) but at great cost to their reputation and their future adult fans. They are in desparate need of getting in touch with their 'core values'. They know it, they are just reluctant to do it.
But one of the things that gives traditional LEGO bricks their charm is, in fact, their retangular limitations. By adding some restrictions you sometimes force more creative thinking within those boundaries.
Censorship has the same effect on literature.
Sometimes having an unlimited palate and/or supplies and/or range of motion leads to aimless and timid designs.
Legos is generally the kids plural form (most eight-year-olds haven't quite mastered the rather obtuse English plural rules. ie. "Mom, I need more Legos to build the super-robo-tron"). Lego is the generally the adult plural form ("Honey, put your Lego away").
As the next line in the article was about "grown-ups", it's likely the article was just trying to sound "like a kid."
On the other hand, there's no real reason for the average parent to know the "correct" plural, anyway.
And who says that the plural isn't Legos, anyway? Lego in the singular could refer to the "Lego System." To me, "where are my Legos" sounds much more natural than "where are my Lego" - "where is my Lego" sounds much better. "Lego" could refer to individual bricks or the individual collection of pieces; "Legos" would refer to "Lego bricks."
Again, I see yet another adult decrying that the new (more than just rectangles) sets are the death of creativity for kids.
I remember the same complaints in the late 70's. And, I am ashamed to admit, I too, was once complaining about that.
I guess that ones own "golden Lego moments" are frozen with the sets and bricks available at the time. What comes after, seems like follies, and crass commercialism.
I do think that Lego is expensive, especially because the rule about "quantity is a quality in itself", is so true about Lego. Lots of bricks is lots of fun. There is also a certain "critical mass of bricks" needed for many continouse hours of zen-like Lego constuction and play time.
On the other hand, I also think that stuff like Lego are really great toys, far superior to so much else. If for nothing else, because Lego pieces tend to very tough (oh, all the "glittering" plastic trash toys I used to own, who could not withstand even a low intensity afternoon war in my bedroom;)
Sure, roughly 4 nanoseconds after getting it home (only because we banned doing it in the backseat) he has it open and is building it according to the directions -- BUT in a couple of hours he'll have it apart and he'll NEVER build it that way again.
He, he, the frantic art of backseat assembly of Lego sets.
A woman in the one of the articles, is worried because her son only assembles the kits and never take them apart. She blames ready made sets for destroying creativity. But in my childhood (early to mid 70's) when Lego sets were much more simple (and therefore "better"), I knew kids, who would _glue_ the assembled sets together; The horror!
So I think that the "build once, then atomize" or "neatly build, then display" strategies, has much more to do, with the childs basic personality (and age), than with what kinds of sets Lego offers.
My kids still prefer building free-form objects with legos over the kits (my son will build the kit, then after it begins to fall apart - they PLAY with it, after all - use the "special" pieces to make more interesting things himself).
One of the BIG advantages of Legos is they require less manual dexterity than traditional models, while allowing greater creativity. Kids gravitate to that. OK, marketeers and the toy store buyers who decide what goes on the shelves DON'T. That doesn't make LEGO themselves "obsolete", Just harder to get into the stores.
Oh settle down, it's all about using the technology. When I was a kid I had most of the outer space collection, weird peices are great because they're that much more challenging to use in different ways. No peice is made so it can't be anything but cockpit windows... if that's all you see, you're not thinking outside the, um, block.
spacefem.com
go to http://www.lego.com/eng/bionicle/frontpage.asp
Click on Toa, and then see all the sets on the submenu....their pieces are totally specialized, and they look like action figures.
Click on Turaga, and again click the little submenu tabs. These guys are tiny bits of leftover Technic pieces. There are no gears involved though, just joints and rods, but at least the parts can be interchanged.
Makuta seems to offer the most promise, click the pictures at the bottom. The kits build large technic animals. These, unlike the other two subgroups, could be quite fun to smash apart and build a super thingy out of.
I have to say, I don't see a single raised circle for attaching blocks on any of these sets...oh well. That's modern business, taking things that rock and making them suck.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
Just wait until YOU have kids, buck-o.
You'll be ASTOUNDED at how much you will find yourself agreeing with her, and damning yourself for making the *severe* mistake of empowering _any_ offspring under the age of 18.
Just wait.. oh yeah.. you'll see how moronic what you just wrote truly is.
Prepare for a life of pain, pal.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Why learn something as limited, expensive, and plasticky as Lego when you could learn real skills with the real thing?
:).
Because you don't typically build a soap box derby car, then take it apart and build a tree fort, then take that apart and build a dog house. Legos are all about reusability. I had two big castle sets that I then made probably 20 different castles with. That doesn't typically happen with wood/metal. And furthermore, my mom wouldn't let me play with a hammer and drill when I was 5 (good call
--trb