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

Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this story has the building blocks of a good story. All it needs is some relevance, and a point.

Keep up the good work!

Lego(again)

[hardburlyboogerman]

I have watched,with some admusement,the stories involving Lego blocks.Keeps a smile on my face.(Since I am stuck in a hospital bed,rigging a dial-up using a old Pent. Laptop thru the hospital phone system.)
It just goes to show what can be done with a little though and maybe a touch of insanity.
;)

Lego User

[webword]

CmdrTaco confession at rehab Clinic: "Yeah man, I, uh, frequently use Lego blocks. No, man, no, I am not addicted. Just, ah, just give me one more. Just one more block. Yeah, yeah. Yes. No. I, ahh, mean it. I need one more block. Look at this Linux box I almost built! One more block will do it. If I don't close that hole, they'll get root! Pleeeaze. I need one more block. Fine. Uh, fine. You've got me by the balls. One more block and I promise I won't post any more Katz...."

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.

Re:Legos obsolete

[sllort]

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!

Re:Legos obsolete

[Apotome]

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.

Re:Legos obsolete

[SaxMaster]

So you assume that all working class kids like monster trucks, have mullets and will marry their sisters? For Shame.

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

[Apotome]

I grew up on LEGO sets that took an hour or two to assemble for the first time. I have fond and lasting memories of the company and their products.

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.

Re:New Sets != Death of Imagination

[Peter H.S.]

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.

Re:New Sets != Death of Imagination

[singularity]

Perhaps, but as an avid Lego fan (65,000 blocks), I can say that there have been some good sets out recently.

The Bungee Blaster is one of the best designed sets I have ever seen. Everyone on Slashdot should go out and purchase this set. It is simple, inexpensive, and will have you playing with it for hours.

See this Usenet post and related threads.

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.

Re:New Sets != Death of Imagination

[gi-tux]

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?

A toy can be challenging in many ways. As a parent (yes I am a parent of two lego maniacs, a 9 year old son and a 3 year old daughter), giving my children a set of lego blocks is a part of the challenge. They can build by the instructions (at their respective levels), but that is only the start. There are other things that can be done to present a challenge to them.
1) lose the instructions after they have been built once or twice. You might file them away somewhere so that they can be retrieved at a later time if necessary. But save the box, haven't you noticed that on the back of the box are other models which can be built with those blocks? No instructions, just a picture. I know that this still isn't using the imagination, but other skills are being learned. Just as following instructions is also a good skill to learn.
2) come up with your own games. Yes it takes a little work on your (and your childs part) but it can be a lot of fun. We play lego yard wars (our own version of Junk Yard Wars (on The Learning Channel). My son and I will decide on something to build and how to test it, and then we will go build it from lego blocks. We have built bridges that had to support a certain amount of weight and vehicles that had to travel a predetermined path, machines which could walk, and many others. But we did it together and with only our imaginations .
3) start early. Even my 3 year old builds with blocks, she uses duplo blocks which are more her size. She build walls and towers and even sometimes builds with her brother using duplo and lego blocks together, learning to cooperate and share.
4) give your child an assignment. Make it very broad and tell them that using instructions is not allowed. Start simple with stuff like a wall. Get more specific and complex as they start to use their imagination. Remember an imagination like any other skill must be developed, it doesn't just happen.
5) join in! Do your part as a parent, just providing isn't enough. Yes, I have trouble with time myself sometimes, but when I sit on the floor and dump all those bricks out and start building, nothing else matters.

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?

[Digitalia]

Laid? Where do you get that set? eBay?

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.

Technic is the way

[dimator]

Lego's are cool, but I would guess most of the older types would prefer technic, just because there's so much more to do with them. Any toy with a universal joint piece is OK in my book!

Oh yea! Especailly the new Harry Potter set!

[disc-chord]

Legos are truly the greatest toy you can get for the little geek in your life. My younger cousins are all clamouring for the new Harry Potter set. The new sets just keep them interested, I can't imagine how anyone would find them to be the "death of imagination".

Re:Oh yea! Especailly the new Harry Potter set!

[Spy Hunter]

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.

Re:Oh yea! Especailly the new Harry Potter set!

[T.Hobbes]

I haven't acutally _seen_ any of these newfangled sets, but hey.. fuck it. Kids are kids, and they'll find ways to use the new oddly-shaped pieces for random creations of their imaginations. As long as you have a good store of plain vanillas, you're ok.

Re:Oh yea! Especailly the new Harry Potter set!

[Nater]

I think the key to getting the full potental out of these sets to provide a huge ass box of miscellaneous lego to go with it.

Hear, hear! Amen!

My brother and I grew up on the transition from vanilla Lego bricks to the newfangled one time pieces (OTPs), so most of our enormous collection (about twenty-five cubic feet of plasticky goodness) is vanilla bricks, but there is a substantial minority of weird non-brick pieces (WNBPs) and just a few OTPs. Our older step siblings did not grow up on Legos at all. Come Christmas and birthday time, my neices and nephews get the bulk packages of vanilla bricks from me and my brother, and sets from their parents. Together, they make a wonderful compliment to each other.

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

Lego and Thought

[under_score]

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.

Re:Lego and Thought

[SEE]

Is there any other toy that comes even close?

Construx (a plastic girder-and-connector systme). Unfortunately, they stopped making them in 1997. Building with Construx was like building a (steel/wood) frame structured building, instead of building with bricks.

Of course, we developed ad-hoc interfaces for Lego-Construx combined works; but we really preferred the Construx around my house.

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.

Re:I never really took to Lego

[Apotome]

There's nothing at all wrong with any of those other materials and systems that you mentioned.

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.

Re:I never really took to Lego

[RedWizzard]

But what is wrong with wooden blocks, woodworking, metal working, clay, real electronic parts, solder, or paint?

For some reason my parents wouldn't let me do any woodworking, metal working, soldering or painting when I was 6.

Re:I never really took to Lego

[(trb001)]

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

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.

Fear this:

[drinkypoo]

I must confess that I believe in certain absolutes when it comes to raising children. Kids should be taught to sit still, so they can make it through a piano recital without disrupting the entire event. They should eat what's put in front of them at dinnertime without complaint.
...
(http://www.fastcompany.com/solo/solo_feature/lego _gates.html)

I wonder if the last name Gates can be scientifically linked to expecting people to shut up and eat what you put in front of them.

Re:Legos obsolete NOT!

[brassrat77]

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.

Re:Lego, not Legos

[Samrobb]

For the same reason folks in other countries misuse American words and phrases, and vice versa... because language evolves. Does it really matter, so long as everyone understands what you're talking about?

Oh, and the correct plural of mongoose is polygoose. Well, OK, maybe not. But if there was any linguistic justice in the world, it would be.

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!

Legos these days

[spacefem]

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.

Enduring.

[A_Non_Moose]

Heh, judging by the comments one thing seems true: Legos are a product that never go out of style.

Consider the Erector set story posted earlier, and the "bringing it back".

I mean boys, girls, the engineers and the artists of the future probably have all played with legos.

If you ever want to know the true power of a product go to a doctors office or place of business with the "Lego Table". The table top is the connector portion of the legos..."I wish we had those when I was a kid" I've said.

Kids of all kinds gather there...even the "big" kids. And it keeps me... err, them quiet for hours.

Even the "special" legos can be use with the other stuff. My son has made some pretty interesting ones with the Starwars ship (forget which one it is) and 3 he got from Mickey D's (originally a boat and 2 prop planes).

Fun stuff, but as a parent we need "Nerf Legos" so when I/we step on them the don't hurt so damn much!

Moose.

Time to clean up your...OW...room.

Lego Block Candy

[neema]

Anyone ever have the Lego Candy?

That stuff was tasty. But probably took out a few of my teeth.

Check out the new sets

[Migelikor1]

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.

Re:Sets!=Death of Imagination (The Boats)

[OctaneZ]

I had the old set where you built the boat hull out of parts, now they are prebuilt

I have to admit that the preformed hulls worked great. As a kid facinated with water, boats, and just generally anything that's wet,the single piece hull was a god-send. You could make your own hull out of plates and bricks, but after more than about a half an hour, the water would just flood right through (admittedly this worked much beter when the goal was to sink one of them by running two or more boats into each other, or capsula creations) but the ability to build models that could stand up to repeated soaking for a long duration was a ton of fun. The best part was the ability to have your legos interacting with other things in a new medium.

The truly best part about being a geek, was having a couple different things to throw together; thousands of hours of time was spent combining LEGO, Construx, Starcom (yeah I know it was themed, but I just loved the guys with the magnets in their feet.. nothing like a war on the fridge), and good old fashioned wooden blocks.

While I think that there is a certain nostalgia about building everything from the 1x2 blocks, the new pieces do draw in a different market; kids are still going to tear everything apart when they get bored and do something new with it (if you claim you didn't do this, ask your parents, I am sure I am not the only one who took apart the phone).
-OctaneZ

Re:Lego, not Legos

[ShaunC]

>Do you say one sheep, many sheeps ? (It's sheep)
>One cactus, many cactuses (It's cacti)

One photo, or many photos?
One Lego, or many... Legos.

Lego "are" a great company, isn't that how you'd say it across the pond ;)

Shaun

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...).