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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.
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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.