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Lego Goes Back to the Basics: Building Blocks
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "Slashdot recently covered Lego's plan to stop producing its Mindstorms line in response to the Danish company's worst financial loss in history. While the original article linked focused primarily on Lego's plans to cease production on various toy lines, Yahoo News now has a follow-up article that looks in greater detail at Lego's plan for the future. 'We are returning to Lego's former concept,' says Lego owner and president Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. 'We're going to focus on building bricks as our main product, concentrating on little kids' eagerness to assemble.' Kristiansen goes on to blame the company's financial woes on its attempt to follow trends rather than focusing on its more traditional products. In turn, the company's plan for 2004 will include a renewed marketing push for Lego bricks as opposed to licensed products like the Harry Potter and Star Wars lines. Toy researcher Joern Martin Steenhold also notes the following in the article: 'All research, including my own, shows that computer games and other electronic games take up only 20 to 30 percent of children's play time. Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.' Zero to seven? What about the Slashdot crowd?"
I always preffered unabashed Lego sets.
Having 100 of each was great. The sets with instructions were fun, but it really was more enjoyable to be creative. That's what we should getting children to do anyways.
is a return to the way legos were sold in the 80's, not in sets, yes there were those, but you could also just get a generic set. I have not see a generic set in the stores around here, they all are some set based on some movie game or some thing, but no generic set.
The problem with LEGO is the stupid pieces.
Grab a random $20 kit at a store, it's full of special pieces with no real use.
What happened to actual blocks? you get only a few if any in the average kit.
I was going to buy lego for some children, until I realized I would need a moderate fortune to give them a decent assortment of basic pieces.
Zero to seven
I would never give a child under 1 year old something that swallowable.
Vonal Declosion
I like the "back to the basics" idea. Today's Lego sets look way too specialized to me- too many specialized pieces, not enough basic Lego bricks- so there's a lot less creative potential. They also look way too expensive.
I think that selling basic Lego sets again is a nice potential return to the things I liked about Legos as a kid in the early 80's. It would be nice if they could sell the basic sets in addition to the fancier licsensed sets and the advanced products like Mindstorms instead of canning those products entirely, but all in all I like this move.
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Gosh, that's going to be one unhappy baby. All it wants is something plush that maybe it can wrap its tiny fingers around while lying in the bassinet, and instead it's going to get a pile of hard, sharp angled blocks that it cannot possibly understand how to assemble. The odds of a zero-year-old choking on Legos, I would estimate at fifty-fifty.
What a horrible idea.
--
RumorsDaily
What about girls? (And there's supposed to be ingrained gender equality in Denmark hmmmf!)
OK, the girls that play with Legos and stuff like that might get shunned by the the silly girls who play with dolls and maybe some parents want their little girls to wear frilly dresses and play with dolls and girlie stuff but 1) it was always more fun to play with the boys, and 2) who says you can't make a tea party set with lego blocks??
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
Although I don't ever touch legos unless I am playing with a younger sibling, I think this is a move long overdue. We never, ever bought any of the licensed stuff, as most of it was silly. Why would I want a Star Wars lego set when I could get a GI Joe sized star wars figurines?
The beauty of legos is that it stimulates the imagination, and I think that kids nowadays have decidedly less imagination than those of previous years (I am not saying that this is only due to Lego...it seems less children are encouraged to find a quite place and read a lot as well).
This makes me very happy to hear. I'm 25 and my favorite lego series was the "Model Team" with the Semi trucks, jeeps, vans, helicopters and generally cool, LARGE fully functional models of real life vehicles.
I recently rebuilt my model team semi and it now rests proudly on my desk. Right now they have a very nice lego Shuttle in the stores for $50 bucks (same price as most of the model team models back in the day, and even today on ebay)that I've been trying to convince my wife we need...hehe
Its really disapointing to go to the store and see Soccer, Harry Potter, and Star Wars sets with little more than 20 pieces and some look alike action figures. Give the kids somthing that will take them a few hours to build and leave them enough blocks to construct something different if they should choose.
Just this weekend I noticed some new sets out called "design sets" that were of normal everyday objects (one was a pontoon plane) and each set is capable of being at least 3 different things. (I assume they have docs inside which show how to convert as well..at least the last technic model I bought did)
This is the lego I remember and love, and I think more parents would rather buy somthing that can be more than just a scene from SW or HP.
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The great part about parenthood is that "having a life" means that you spend time with the kids. Having kids means that you can go out and blow a wad of money on toys and not feel guilty about it. My munchkin is still a little young for lego, but when he's a little older you can bet that he & I are going to be spending many hours playing legos together.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
A corporation moving back toward imagination and away from limiting corporate tie-ins, don't see too much flowing in that direction these days.
I wonder how much of their decision is based on the licensing fees that Lucas, etc. were charging. I can easily see them saying "Your license isn't bringing enough sales to justify the money you want for it. Thanks, but no thanks.
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
Well, for starters, there's a lot more kids under ten than there are Slashdotters. Millions more.
And the electronic products are expensive, relatively low-margin products that can only make them money if they sell lots of them. While Good Old Plastic Blocks are incredibly cheap to make, can be sold for a huge markup, and appeal to a lot more than just folks who want retro toys.
I'm sure they'll still make some money off the licensed stuff for the time being, but licensed products have higher costs and since they're designed to be used for specific things they aren't really as interchangeable as standard Legos. And they cost the buyer more, too.
Mindstorms may be wicked cool, but Lego needs to make a profit. They made lots of money selling plain old blocks, then they decided that they needed to grow into other areas to survive. It didn't work.
I'll miss the cool stuff like Mindstorms, but in a couple of years when my son is old enough to play with Legos I'll be buying them for him. And he won't miss the robotics at all, I suspect.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I have a 6 and 3 year old, and we're moving from duplo to lego. I consider these essential toys.
;-) ) is its interchangeability of pieces and flexibility. Their recent design and marketing trend suppressed its fundamental characteristic!
It drives me nuts to go shopping and see only pre-determined model sets, with all kinds of non-generic parts that, once inevitably added to the bucket, will not be used as intended, and in fact will get misplaced into other toy boxes and barely used at all.
I don't appreciate paying the premium for a product design that comes broken in the box. The whole point of lego (in my 38 years of experience playing with it
Lego is, in principle, back to basics, I'm happy to see them waking up to that again. I'll be one of the first to go and get a generic assortment box when I see them on the shelves again.
Damn those pesky terrorists
They'll sell for a high price in eBay after a few years if Lego really stops making 'em...
Lego was by far my favourite toy growing up. Indeed, I played with the stuff so much that I am convinced that it has affected my thinking patterns, and in good ways. My visual-spatial sense is excellent, and my mind is forever trying to break down problems into modular pieces; or, seeing a collection of modular components, trying to figure out intriguing ways to assemble them into a larger system. In short, ladies and gentlemen, I think in Lego.
That said, I hope that the Lego company goes about this the right way. The things I always wanted as a youngster were more hinges and other such articulated pieces in order to build things like spacecraft and vehicles with moving parts; doors and hatches that open, sensors that swivel, and so forth. Lego's strengths were always in the design of clever models that most of us would build at least once. You could learn some neat tricks by understanding how the model designers accomplished a particular effect using a small number of bricks. I agree with posters to a previous Lego story who criticized the overabundance of specialized pieces (anathema to the creative Lego builder) and the rather exorbitant prices of Lego kits.
Perhaps Lego has decided that its future is no longer in robotics, but computers can play a role in its revival. Embrace the Internet! As so many slashdotters will attest, there are large numbers of people for whom Lego remains a unique creative outlet. Work to bring them together through the Net, and offer to sell them what they want through that same channel. More standardized, well-thought-out basic bricks, offered with the promise of volume discounts through Internet purchases. Parents who still enjoy Lego and can get access to their favourite toy in bulk and share their love of creating with a community of fellow builders will have kids who will get an early taste of the joys of building with little plastic blocks, and will thus pass on the hobby to the next generation.
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Don't know how young your munchkin is, but my 2yo daughter is currently helping me build the meter-long Death Star. I pick out one example of a piece of which I need 34 and tell her to find 33 more of them. She really digs it. It helps with her fine motor skills (handling the small pieces), fine shape distinctions (1x1 plate with a loop at the end is different from a 1x1 plate without), and counting. And when we finish a page of building, she cheers.
It may take 10x as long as doing it myself, but who cares? That just means more time playing with Legos!
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I am constantly frustrated when I try to buy Legos for my daughter. She loves building with Legos, but is not really interested in the kind of macho directions Lego has been going (fighting themes). Clikits does not fit the bill, and it's almost impossible to find a store that carries Belville sets.
Maybe if Lego would try harder and with more imagination to reach the other 50% of the zero-to-seven set, they's make more money.
I watched my little nephew put together one of these "Bionicles" this weekend, and I was saddened at the way Lego had gone from being a building toy where you created something out of your imagination to being just an action figure with a gimmick: you get to assemble it yourself. I was actually surprised when I realized the toy he was building was "Lego."
Now, I haven't seen the mindstorms; those probably fit more with the concept of encouraging creativity than the toy I saw Saturday. But I'm glad to hear they're going to start producing toy sets again and promoting them over Harry Potter and Star Wars action figures relabelled as Legos.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Sure lego is a great toy. I loved it when I was young and even like the idea of mindstorm. But even as an adult with a very reasonable income I find lego just a bit to much. What the lego company never seemed to have grasped is economy of scale. Make it as cheap as possible so that as many people will buy it as possible. Instead they charge a premium. This is a fine business tactic until the economy goes down.
Compare premium airlines with the budget ones when the bubble burst. Compare big american cars with japanese car when the fuel crisis hit.
Oh well good luck to them. Maybe if they go bust I can pick up some mindstorm in the bargain basement.
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I really hate those little Lego "kits" with just enough pieces to re-assemble the particular item featured on the packaging. These are usually based on some marketing department 'idea", and clearly outside the best use and enjoyment of Lego itself.
All of those model-specific parts: animal heads, guns, etc. It is the death of creativity and imagination.
"Why design and figure out how to make your own submarine? We've done the FUN part for you! Just stck the blocks together!"
My kids are LOVERS of Lego. They get the BIG blue box, and build what they like.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
On a related note, there was an intersection near my home town that for a while had a gas station on each of the four corners. Recently they torn one gas station down and put up what else? A Walgreens!
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The existence of basic Legos is absolutely critical to the fostering of a generation capable of survival in the coming century, and I am not engaged in hyperbole here.
1. I work as a policy wonk, but have always had a technical bent; it's just enough that I will take apart the things that I own, or install my own software, or be mad when something is poorly designed. In a variety of other ways, I realize that the technologies I own did not happen to me and are not immutable. They are for me to use, they could have been made differently, and I fundamentally have control over them, to modify or reject them.
This is a worldview formed before, really, I had ever touched a piece of software; formed entirely from playing with Legos for HOURS A DAY when I was little. I would posit that the United States' technological elite, people who really look at a computer program or a bacteria or a steam engine and think "I could take that apart and do that better", played with Legos far more than the general population.
Cause and effect there are left as an exercise for the student, but the point remains that Legos are the preferred play object of the people who grow up and become our producers of technology; and if you think play is not that important to learning, attitude development, and general life outlook, you need to read some educational or vertebrate behavior research, or at least go watch some otters.
So if we grant that they're centrally important (and if you would doubt this, why are so many of you so fond of them? Why does Slashdot have a Lego icon?) then their *composition* and *direction* is centrally important. Our kids should feel that helicopters, robots, dinosaurs are made out of simple parts that can go together different ways, that to find out how those parts go together you have to *try things out* and *maybe screw up*, and that you, at six years old, can make something new and cool that no one has seen before and be proud of it.
The other option is just to have another pre-molded piece of plastic that works, for sure, first time. You're not sure why, someone else designed it, that's where technology comes from, I didn't have anything to do with putting it together because I can't do something like that, *fast forward ten years* what? Digital Rights Management? Biometric scanning in shopping malls? OK, I'm no engineer. These things happen, you can't change them. Is this a pill that I should take? If you say so, doctor, no point looking at it, machines are something other people make and understand and then I consume them as is, especially if they're trendy. *shudder.*
I've had trouble for years articulating why it bothered me so much that Lego was moving towards more specialized pieces and more licensed properties; they were teaching passivity and damaging the kind of play that gave me what intelligence I think I have today.
2. The tiny yellow Lego people of my youth existed in a shiny, functioning, Utopian republic, where there was no violence, no conflict, and the guy who drove the tow truck one day could - would - pilot the innovate Space Shuttle / submarine / dinosaur hybrid the next.
Maybe not a viable image of the world for the long term, but a good first impression, and one that fixed in your head an early impression that what you did with technology was design better police boats and monorails and ice cream shops and in general make a better place in which to live your lives, rather than, say, Spam programs or chemical weapons. These are all habits of mind that I want my kinds to get early, far earlier than they grasp that they must follow the hot toy or trend of the moment.
I had not realized that this was upsetting me until it appears to be moving towards a solution. Halleleujah.
cc: Lego North America.
Contrux were amazing!
I made a robocop powersuit out of them. I even made a gun and a power knife.
You could also make some fantastic ninja throwing stars out of them.
I admit that I haven't in a while, but this is excellent news.
When I was young, there were none of the Star Wars kits and such. It took real imagination to devise and build interesting toys from parts.
My wife has bought a few of the Star Wars type kits for her nephew. There's nothing much to it -- read the directions, figure out which piece is which, put them all together, and that's it. Pay your $20*/5, spend 30 minutes throwing the pieces together (of course, I do all the work), nephew spends 15 minutes with it, and it's done for.
This took some real courage on their part, rebelling against the entertainment-retail complex. Hopefully there are still kids and parents who can think for themselves and don't have to live lives of tie-ins to someone else's creation.
If they really want to do something different, an interface kit to Tinkertoy or Erector Set would be great. Then people could combine these three classics to build new toys combining all of their strengths. That is, if they still make Erector Set any more.
What Lego needs to do is lower their prices. Their prices are just ludicrous! 80-120$ Can for a box of Legos? Lower the price to 20-30$ and people will buy.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
The reason your sons migrates to "boy" toys and your daughter migrates to "girl" toys is most likely because of the advertising of the toys, how they're perceived in society, and the role they play in social interaction.
If you look at the marketing, little boys are featured in advertising for "mascuine" toys--building things with blocks and shooting things with guns. Parents are often guided by this and buy the "appropriate" toy for the appropriate sex. When little kids play with their friends of the same sex, these ideas are reinforced by children wanting to fit in and conform to gender roles. Regardless of whether or not you suggest these toys to your children, there are other outside forces that suggest them for you.
When I was younger, I wasn't allowed barbie dolls and all my friends were boys. I played with blocks (legos included, and are still included though I don't fit the 0 to 7 demographic) and trains and the like. Later, when I entered preschool, my girl friends played with barbies which led me to want them. If it wasn't for my friends playing barbie dolls the likelihood is I would have been contented with the toys that I had played with all along.
The point being, kids will play with what they're given and what their friends have; their genes don't naturally draw them to what gender role defines as gender appropriate toys for boys and girls.
I was a huge, huge Lego fan. I have most of the space sets from 1980 on to whenever it was I stopped playing with Legos, '87, or '88 I think. Still have all the catalogs, sets, and instructions.
Occasionally in a fit of nostalgia I wander into the toy section to check out the new sets, and boy have they been dumbed down. When I played with Legos, I'd have sets that had 300 pieces. The bricks were bricks...You could put them together in just about any way you wanted, regardless of what the instructions said. Now the pieces are so specialized and few there's only one way to put them together, and you can do it in 5 minutes. It's not "space" and "town" and "castle" sets anymore. I don't think those even exist, and it looks like the offerings are mostly vehicles and micro-sets, so forget building your own town or space base. I think one of the reasons that Lego is doing so badly is that most people who played with Legos when they were kids are parents now, and see the same thing I'm seeing. I bet they have started looking elsewhere for stimulating toys.
-R
You cannot clone a highly recognized brand name.
You cannot clone (very easily) great customer service (and the accompanying customer loyalty).
They can continue to be successfuly by sticking with what made them successful in the first place: a good product, great designs, and strong customer support.
They will not "differentiate" themselves by adding their "Spider-Man" or "Star Wars" products to the vast sea of other "Spider-Man" or "Star Wars" products already available.
Lego's meant to foster creativity ("A New Toy Everyday (tm)") and you've just proved it. You MADE the tool you needed to do the job, and a few years later, here you are on Slashdot. I'm sure there's a correlation between lego use as a child and adult mad geek skillz...