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..."

Comments

Legos obsolete

[perdida]

Legos, as they were originally designed, are obsolete.

Hence, the Lego company, attempting to make money, made the Lego platform into a complex robot related thing and Web phenomenon.

This got them money from rich geeks, but made the product even less pleasant and fun for average, non-technological kids.

Kids who want to build with blocks was the original Lego audience. Legos were blocks that wouldnt fall down at the slightest touch from one's sister or dog.

Now, they are a boutique item.

A similar thing happened with Etch a Sketch.

Most of the Lego kids grow up fragging on computers anyway, so it's not a big deal.

New Sets != Death of Imagination

[john@iastate.edu]

Again, I see yet another adult decrying that the new (more than just rectangles) sets are the death of creativity for kids.

As the parent of an eight year old boy who has spent virtually every dime of allowance he has ever received on Logos, I just don't see it.

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.

Re:New Sets != Death of Imagination

[Nater]

...decrying that the new (more than just rectangles) sets are the death of creativity...

When I was 9 and my brother was 7, we built a huge layout using the castle themed stuff. The scene was a river flowing from a small lake through a valley with big mountains all around. On one of the mountains, there was a castle at the top. From that same mountain, there was a waterfall into the lake. In the lake there was another castle, with a rope bridge to the mountain, where a road went up to the other castle. Next to the lake, on the same side of the river as the two castles was a village, and there was a small bridge, wide enough for one cart, across the river. There were two armies in this scene. One, with the falcon crest, was defending the two castles and the bridge and consisted of a lot of archers. The other, with the lion crest, was a legion approaching from the narrow plain on the other side of the river, mostly spear, pike, and sword bearing infantry with few mounted soldiers. In all, the layout was about ten square feet and the valley was about three feet from floor to summit.

My brother and I titled this scene "The First Battle of the Rhine" and sent a photo in to the Lego Maniacs magazine (or whatever it was called, we were subscribers at the time) to be featured in the next issue. Our photo never materialized in print, and I know that this is entirely circumstantial, but over the next two years we saw Lego produce the following sets: a castle in a lake, 2 different a castle/fortress thingies on mountains (and pitiful two and a half inch mountains at that), and a river scene featuring a rope bridge piece over a river plate. At the tender ages of ten and eight, it was quite upsetting to see the apparent wholesale theft of my brother's and my ingenuity. Even more disconcerting, even at that age, was the idea that other kids wouldn't have to, and therefore wouldn't try to be as clever. The waterfall was just about the only unique idea we never saw in the Lego catalogues, which is odd, because I engineered the flashing lights from the monorail into the base of it behind some transparent bricks... it was possibly the most marketable part.

Of course, it never stopped us from buying more Legos... including all four of the aforementioned rip off sets.

Ya want a battle over bricks?

[Digitalia]

My favorite game in childhood was a true geek's game. We built stuff using Legos and then flung 1" diameter ball barings from siege-engines. You haven't played with legos until you've spent the afternoon building the Ice Planet Deep Freeze Defender and promptly watched it crumble to pieces as the slug of metal hit it. It's even more fun re-designing it to be more structurally sound.

Re:Ya want a battle over bricks?

[Telastyn]

My childhood lego game was similar, though instead of ball bearings, each team was given a set amount of bricks (usually ~12 2x4) to build a "bomb" out of, which was then lobbed in a high arc at the opposing teams' structure/ship/fort.

Thus you got the two designs of making one part sound, and the other part to make the other guy's unsound.

Remember your own days with lego....

[marijnm]

I mean, almost everybody builded the sets at least one time according to the 'cookbook'. As a (young) kid it took you a lot of time to figure out the directions, which also yielded some new insigths about 2D to 3D mapping.

BUT, after a few days it fell off the table or your brother or sister smashed it and that was the start of the real fun...

So the only thing I'm a bit worried about is all those special purpose blocks...

Marijn

I never really took to Lego

[mj6798]

For "engineering" applications (building things that do things), Lego always seemed to limited to me. And purely for shape and sculpting, it had all the charm of an Etch-a-Sketch: you spent most of the time trying to get around its oddball rectangular limitations.

If you must use a construction set, there seem to be better ones around than Lego: systems like ErectorSet, FischerTechnik, and others, are a lot more flexible and have a lot more interesting mechanical components in them.

But what is wrong with wooden blocks, woodworking, metal working, clay, real electronic parts, solder, or paint? Why learn something as limited, expensive, and plasticky as Lego when you could learn real skills with the real thing? Start off with clay and paint, move on to cardboard and paper, then to light wood, then, well, you get the point. And if parents actually get involved with their children, they can start supervised woodworking and metal work very early.

Long ago on a 32 foot cruising sailboat....

[SwedishChef]

somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, in the confining spaces of a sailboat 32 feet long and 10 feet wide, there was a 3-year-old red-headed girl. This little girl had to herself a bed approximately 2 feet wide and 5.5 feet long. At the foot of the bed was a bookcase whcih contained all the children's books in the knwn universe and from them she learned a love of reading.

But a little red-headed girl does not live by books alone... she needed toys. Toys to make houses, cabins, cottages, kitchens, bedrooms, villages, cars, motorcycles, boats (not many boats, actually), flying machines of unimaginable proportions, castles, dungeons... in short, everything. Where oh where would this little red-headed girl find the room to take along so many toys on such a small sailboat for such a long journey?

Well boys and girls, behind the pillow where her head rested every night was a door; and behind that door was a tiny cupboard; and in that cupboard, resting in the dark where no one else could see (and only she could find it) was the only toy a 3-year-old red-headed girl needed for a 5-year-long journey around the Pacific Ocean on a 32-foot sailboat.

Legos.

And she lived happily ever after.

Legos......and ripping off K'nex

[Chanc_Gorkon]

I was in the store Saturday and we walked past the Lego's after picking out a hot wheel for my son (two year old....I know, they are 3 and up but he doesn't put them in his mouth and he KNOWS what they are! :) ) and I was amazed. I saw a Lego set that looked more like K'nex then Lego. You could combine it's pieces with Lego blocks (it had four Lego dots on some pieces, while others only had one). It looked nothing like Lego. Lego can do the special pieces, but then make them WORK for other things. I remember getting wedge shaped pieces that had computer panels on them and I loved those! When I did not have enough of those, I came up with the idea of using regular wedge shaped pieces as computer terminals.....every spaceship I built had many seats with a computer terminal at each seat. I remember building my own warp drive on some with the engine pieces. I remember building engines out of blocks when I didn't have enough. I remember when you used to be able to buy figures by themselves and they had multiple handheld acessories for them to carry.....every accesory had a lego dot on it somewhere, and I have been known to use the handheld devices in strange places.

Now, with these frickin HUGE pieces everywhere, how are we supposed to be creative? I remember when the cockpit windows were all some sort of cool looking wedge shape derived from the roof tiles. Now they have these huge bubble butt windows that can't be used for anything BUT cockpit windows. With the wedged shaped ones, I can use those to create a dome on my space station and things like that. You can't do that with these huge pieces!

Solutions

[osolemirnix]

I still have a big box of legos (mostly from the Space series). No instructions however, but I don't remember that spoiling any fun. We would build the sets according to the instructions maybe once, to learn what could be done with the parts. Now the instruction booklets are all lost, but Lego still is fun.

If you get a kick out of creating your own and don't like the price or the fact that the new sets contain less "generic" parts, try flea markets and garage sales. You can get bags full of old-style blocks really cheap!

I think part of what kills Legos sales is that their "toy" lasts so long and doesn't really go out of style. So they think they have to invent all this new stuff, tricky situation for them. On the other hand: one can never have enough parts, really (I built my own StarWars ships after I saw the movies as a kid, and my parts were just enough for an X-Wing and the Falcon, the latter had a diameter of about 30 cm. If I'd had enough bricks, I certainly would have built that 3 meter long Star Destroyer...).