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Has Lego Sold Out?
Hugh Pickens writes "Matt Richtel and Jesse McKinley write in the NY Times that for generations of American children, Legos were the ultimate do-it-yourself plaything. Little plastic bricks, with scant instructions, just add imagination. But today's construction sets are often tied to billion-dollar franchises like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and invite users to follow detailed directions, not construct their own creations from whole brick. It's less open-ended, some parents and researchers say, and more like paint-by-numbers. 'When I was a kid, you got a big box of bricks and that was it,' says Tracy Bagatelle-Black. 'What stinks about Lego sets now is that they're not imaginative at all.' Lego loyalists are quick to defend the company. Josh Wedin, the managing editor of the Brothers Brick, a Lego blog, called complaints that they are less creative 'simply ridiculous,' adding that Legos always included some instructions, though he says he misses the alternative designs that used to be on the back of the box. But Clifford Nass, a sociology professor at Stanford University who studies how people relate to the physical world versus the virtual world, says some essential qualities were lost when Lego became more like other toys. 'The genius of Lego was, you had to do the work.' Learning about frustration, Nass says, 'is a hugely important thing.'" (And watch soon for a review of The Unofficial Lego Builder's Guide, a book intended to help Lego users escape the tyranny of block-by-number instructions.)
The first step is to completely ignore the manual, and this is what they're teaching children. This is a skill I wasn't able to master until I was in college, but today's kids will have it done by high school.
Doesn't the NYT have anything more important to publish than people bitching about legos? If you just want a bag of bricks, you can still get them. In fact, you can order them in bulk now, which wasn't offered when I was a kid.
Ah, I agree so much. I had my fair share of legos when I was a child and the building blocks were nice and generic. Nowadays, all the pieces are molded to shape whatever you're supposed to make much better, resulting in a nicer looking whatever-it-is-you-were-making, but taking it apart, I wonder if there's much of a point in trying to make something else out of it, even beside the alternatives listed on the back of the box.
I'm glad I kept most of my legos for when my son's old enough for them. Other than that it looks like I'm stuck remembering the old days fondly.
What happens in my house: my son gets a Lego set. He excitedly spends hours building them (or one hour, if it's a small one). then he plays with it a little. A few days later I find it in pieces and deconstructed all over the playroom. A few days later, something else comes out as he institutes his own creations and modifications.
It's not a matter of lacking the manual, as we have kept every manual for every set he ever received. He knows where those manuals are, too.
To me, it seems like Lego has stuck a good balance.
They have had detailed instructions that you could follow for almost as long as Lego has existed.
The problem with today Lego I that they made they completely out of proprietary big pieces that do not really fit together any other way.
You used to be able to buy some castle set, with step by step instructions, but it was made with the exact same pieces as every other set out there. So at the end of the day you could take it apart and build that castle into a space ship. Now Lego is basically just action figures and video games.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
you could still buy buckets of bricks, and the whole back wall was loose bricks for people that wanted to make their own bucket. I've been playing with Lego for thirty years. I always wanted to make what was on the box first, but eventually it became whatever the hell I wanted it to be. If someone wants to whine about children not being creative these days, I think Lego is the last reason they aren't creative!
When shopping for presents for kids it seems all of them have tie-ins to other products: Barbie, some movie, cartoon characters, etc.
Simple toys that exist on their own seem a rarity now (Spirograph, Rubik's Cube, Mechano (sp?), etc.) that I frankly hate shopping for something for kids.
Even Crayola products seem to be tied to Dora or whatever. Or come with coloured markers that seem to expire instantly, unlike crayons.
I don't remember it being so bad back in the dark ages when I was a kid. Was it Star Wars that brought us this trend? McDonald's Happy Meals? Where did it start?
A handful of years ago Lego was going bankrupt and they were searching in vain for how to stop it. Then they figured out that open ended didn't sell so well. They created their Bionicle sets. Then they started the licensed sets with Harry potter and Star wars. It is the only reason lego even still exists. And now people decry that lego 'sold out'? Make up your minds...
http://www.fastcompany.com/43497/why-cant-lego-click
That title must go to Meccano. With this you could build real things that worked and would not fall into bits at the first knock. With strips of metal held together with nuts and bolts you could create great things. I loved it.
But today's construction sets ...invite users to follow detailed directions, not construct their own creations from whole brick...
Absolutely sensible approach. Today's child is growing up in today's environment, and will become a designer tomorrow. Today, if you create a design for which some idiot possesses a design patent, the latter will sue you for billions of dollars. If you have a brick with rounded corners, is glossy or black in colour, even God cannot save you from litigious thugs.The child needs to learn this lesson very early, and learn to 'behave' and 'obey' and 'conform' rather than be creative.
So Lego has researched and come up with designs which are not encumbered by prior art or patents; and given detailed instructions for kids to follow. 10 years from now, a design company would have about a 100 lawyers for every 5 designers. These lawyers would tell the designers exactly what to design, what not to design, and how not to be too successful and gain the wrath of patent holding Big Businesses.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
They sold kits in the old days. They even sold kits with various themes and special (non-brick) parts.
All of this nostalgia and angst is misplaced. These people are running off on a tangent based on some idealized notion of the past rather than what actaully happened.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
American kids (or any other kid for that matter) aren't as dumb and unintuitive as we may want to think.
Because of this, we have the "maker generation" today. These are kids of any age that build stuff out of anything they have laying around. What can be more creative than that? Lego is no different, except it was made with the very idea that you could make anything you want out of these building blocks. Just take a look at Lego Mindstorm to get an idea about what I'm talking about here. (And of course, google make magazine, and makers everywhere).
American kids are just as curious and impressive to me as they where back in the days where we used electronics kits to build stuff with. Many of the kids today make LEVELS for video games and that is just as creative or advanced as what we did back in our days. (I'm in my mid forties and grew up with Lego and Electronics).
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My construction toy was an Erector Set, now long gone. These days Erector Sets in the US are rebranded Meccano sets.
Anyway, the thing about the Erector Set was that it not only exercised your imagination, as does LEGO, but it also exercised your manual dexterity, which LEGO does not. When you have to use little nuts and bolts to put things together you get good at manipulating small parts, which is excellent for improving hand-eye coordination, improving delicacy of touch and learning patience.
If you make things too easy for kids how are they to learn?
The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb
Yeah I remember space theme lego back when the space shuttle was still new.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Space
Plenty of themes back then:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Lego_themes
My 15 year old stopped with the legos about 3 years ago (I will always remember the day he had $20 of birthday money to spend and ultimately chose a CD instead)
At least in our house, after one of the fancy kits got built once, the instructions were promptly lost or eaten by the dog, and all the legos ended up in 1 giant bin. Then the real fun started (the creative part)
This is the most ridiculous complaint I've ever heard. Greater variety in LEGO bricks? STOP IT NOW! EVERYTHING MUST BE RED 2X4!
I grew up with LEGO and I still regularly purchase, build and play in my late 20s. The new pieces are AWESOME. So are the new colours. Pick a brick and LDD make prototyping, buying and building your own creations a snap (though you have to manually generate a parts list these days). If that ain't enough to keep LEGO fun and interesting, trade in your kid.
Didn't RTFA because WTF.
Do you see what I did there?
Not all legos are equal, they have sort of diverged into two types: the traditional brick type (and in that I include even the specialized pieces, as long as they fit together in the traditional stud/brick mechanism) and the Technic/Mindstorms type, which use pieces more like girders that fit together with special connectors. The brick type has moved more in the licensing/set model direction, and those I sort of agree that the creativity seems to be missing these days. But I have to admit I'm glad they came up with a decent lego millenium falcon, which was absolutely perfect for my son for Christmas a year ago.
On the other hand, the Technic/Mindstorms type still focuses a lot on creativity, with alternate directions for different models included, and lots of resources available for idea books and programming and such. If you look on the Lego education site, they seemed to almost have moved in the opposite/more creative direction, with resources for bodging together Mindstorms electronic components with a metal frame & RC servo-based robotics construction system (vertex? Tetrix? I forget what it was called) that another company makes.
Bottom line, if you want to emphasize creativity, go Technic early, then maybe branch off to mindstorms.
But can you even find "plain" kits any more? Seems like everything Lego I see is tied to a franchise of some sort. Even their "Friends" line is just buildings to put together.
Moreover, Meccano taught important lessons that Lego could not: understanding engineering tolerances. Lego bricks just snap together, and unless you are building something pretty infeasible that's generally the end of it. Meccano was all about lining up plates and brackets by eye (the holes were bigger than the screws), making sure things weren't too loose or too tight, ensuring that load-bearing parts were properly cross-braced, and so on.
On the other hand, Meccano was pretty perishable. It didn't take long to scrape the paint off the parts and permanently mangle the so-called flexible plates.
He *could* care less, so he does care for them then?
Here's a quick explanation.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I don't know about kits but you can definitely still buy Lego by the tub. There's a big Lego store at the Mall of America near where I live. They sell lots of licensed kits but there's lots there for freeform building. A few shelves are dedicated to tubs of plain bricks as well as some utility sets. Last Christmas we bought for my cousin a box of nothing but wheels and windscreens. They also have an entire wall they call "Pick-a-Brick" where you can fill up a cup with any assortment of bricks that you please. We're giving him a cup of those this year to provide him with some of the pieces that tend to get overlooked in the boxed sets.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
I'm in my 40's and all the kits had instructions when I was a kid. There were odd kids that just built what was on the cover and then never took it apart. That singular lack of imagination had nothing to do with the Legos themselves - most of us dumped all our kits into a big bucket and then just created our own stuff...
However you could accuse them of selling out with all the co-branding. When I was a kid they were space sets and medieval sets, not Star Wars or LOTR sets. All the movie tie-in crap is annoying but a sign of the times I guess...
One way in which they can fail is, as other folks have mentioned, specialized parts. There's a fine line between making something new and different and cool, and making parts so specialized that it becomes hard to build other things out of them. But you know, I'm sure the purists were up in arms when my space kits in the 70's and 80's had wing-shaped parts and other such monstrosities. And maybe some proto-nerd of the era went on his local BBS and whined about how they were destroying Legos, that they weren't allowed to be anything other than cubes...
While my daughter was growing up, I had a random choice of what to step on if I went walking barefoot around the apartment in the middle of the night. I could step on a Lego, which is quite painful, or step on one of her goldfish that had jumped out of the tank. If you can see in the dark, pick the Lego. They won't die if you squash them and you don't have to explain to a little girl how you killed her pet fish. She is 40 years old now and still reminds me of this. You would think people would move on... Personally, I think the fish was depressed.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I always put the set together the way the instructions say once. It's a good way to see what techniques they use for certain things (building trees with some of the recent sets, for example). After a while it gets recycled back into the bins of Lego to be reused. I'll often buy a set specifically because it has new pieces or minifigs I want. When I was a kid, I'd often start with one of the spaceship or boat sets and just keep adding pieces. Ended up turning a tugboat into a 4' long freighter once. :)
I'm not so sure about that. I recall my brother and I getting a bunch of really cool looking Mega Block sets one year for Christmas. There were colors and shapes we had never seen before, and neat themes like dinosaurs and moon bases. In theory it was all compatible with the absolutely huge amount of Lego blocks that we had in our combined collection. What we quickly found out however was that Mega Blocks were cheaply made. They barely locked together with each other tightly enough to build with, let alone with Legos. They were also fragile and routinely broke because the outer walls of the blocks were so thin. My parents actually ended up complaining to the company, which netted us a ton more Mega Block sets. We tried to make the best of it, mostly because the dinosaur pieces and 3D building bases were unheard of in the Lego ecosystem at the time. Eventually however, my brother and I went through every storage tub we had and purged the Mega Blocks from our collection. It was a lengthy undertaking, especially at that age, but the Great Purging left our superior Legos free of any kind of contamination. I'm not sure if Mega Blocks have improved over the years, but I wouldn't chance it personally. I still have all of my Legos in storage though, about ten big, plastic bins in all. One day they'll have someone to play with again.
Now has Lego sold out? Probably. I recall branded sets like Star Wars on the horizon right as I was growing out of the little blocks. It didn't seem harmful then, but nowadays it seems like Lego has more licensed sets than they do good 'ole fashioned knights and pirates. You can still purchase the regular old blocks, but they don't get the shelf space at the store that Harry Potter and Batman does. On the bright side, it does seem as though Lego has really tried to move away from the specialized pieces that were becoming so prevalent toward the end of the 90s. There's also an exciting global community that has sprung up around Lego, so you can buy homemade, custom pieces. I've seen weapon packs, for example. My brother and I would have loved something like that back in the day, when we were building entire Lego cities across our bedroom floors. We didn't realize it then, but we had essentially created a Lego RPG. Each character had a name and personality. Characters could only move so many pegs per turn, battles were decided vie dice, etc. Go figure. :p
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I think this story is a non-issue. I recently built the Millennium Falcon for work (yes, you read that right). It's an expensive set, but I was surprised that it only had two non-standard pieces (those comprising the cockpit). You could easily make something else with the pieces, if you so desired, or you could follow the instructions (which seemed barely more detailed than when I played with the Space Police sets) and make a cool, recognizable ship.
The only way I would think that Lego has sold out would be if a significant number of the pieces in any given set were non-standard and hard to incorporate into a custom design. Maybe that is a case and the set I built was an outlier, but it seems the option is still there to built whatever you want. In other words, Lego seems to be pretty much like it was when I was a kid, only with more brand recognition.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
The Tyranny of "block-by-number" kits... That Lego fans choose to buy more often than not because they want to build the deathstar, Millenium Falcon, whatever as shown on the box.
If they wanted the "big box of blocks" experience they can still buy them, and now there are Lego stores that sell bulk Legos - something unheard of when I was a kid (early 70's/late 60's).
Some people want the end-product (the item on the cover of the box), some want the process (the frustration the one researcher noted), and some want to raw material to build what is in their imagination (the big box of blocks) - none is the only "true" reason for Lego.
Ken
Yes, Lego has completely sold out. Actually, that's not true. That implies that that there was a time that they hadn't sold out. It's a for-profit company. They are in it to make money. Nothing wrong with that, but that is what they are, first and foremost.
They will do what they need to do to survive. In their opinion, they cannot sustain their business by using the value proposition of 40 years ago. As much as I admired that value proposition, I personally agree with them. They could not survive turning out the basic building blocks, or even more advanced building kits, or even robotics kits. They wouldn't have the market share, or the advertising appeal, or the patent protection. They are fighting for their existence every day. They've got constant competition for kids' time and for M&D's dollars from endless and ever-increasing sources, and competitors willing to race them to the bottom every step of the way.
There was a time that Lego said, "we'll never make Lego guns". That is long gone. There are Lego guns, ray guns, knives, swords, scimitars. Heck, space ships with laser cannon. They've made endless marketing deals with entertainment conglomerates in order to stay relevant. They have not yet found their bottom. They have not yet found where they will not go to stay in business.
To me, as much as I still love the company, and the product, they've lost their soul, and they are walking dead guys, however successful they are currently. The color palette is out of control. The types of pieces have grown to be absurd. Although there is still play value, it becomes harder and harder for any pile of n Legos to have general playability. If you have a Luke Skywalker, and a wookie, then that is your story palette. It becomes that much more challenging to make a house. If you have the batmobile, it becomes difficult to make a regular car.
One could hope they'll split the company, and spin off a company focused only on the basics for ages 0 through 10, without marketing tie-ins, and another company focused just on robotics, and let the main company battle it out in pop culture land. But it will never happen.
Perhaps the 3D printer world will take over the basics niche. I could see a not-for-profit doing very well making it easy for people to print their own sets for their 1 year olds or 5 year olds.
Just my 2 bricks.
Picture a world where Lego did not sell all of their kits and just sold plain blocks. There is only so much you can do with plain blocks and sales would slowly go down. The recession hits and that is the final straw and Lego declares bankruptcy. Slashdot readers post stories about playing with Lego as a kid but complain how Lego really hasn't innovated with the times and those old corporate fossils we doomed to fail if they couldn't adapt.
Now we swap back to our world where Lego is constantly innovating to make kits that work with 95% of existing Lego pieces, tie ins with current pop culture, even Lego video games that are actually good and we need to complain how Lego isn't the same as it was 20 years ago. Go figure.
That title must go to Meccano [wikipedia.org].
Meccano is still available. Toys-R-Us carries it. I have a Meccano set I use for prototyping linkages. It's not unusual for first-round engineering prototypes to have some Meccano parts.
Working on some joint research I visited the main LEGO Billund Denmark site years before the big crisis. As part of a tour I was shown an enshrined list of commandments created by the founders. This list captured the fundamental philosophy of good, creative toys. I remember being deeply impressed with the foresight of the founders. But I also remember that there was a rule that was explicitly against the idea of LEGO ever to create human like characters that would resemble true or fictional characters from popular culture. The idea was that the characters should remain generic and in the eye of the kid playing with it could turn into anything, anybody they wanted to. Fast forward to the current situation with LEGO licensing tons of characters from Lucas Art and others. Now LEGO is saved because it give they kids the Darth Vader etc. characters “they want”.
There are many ways to think about this. I’d say acting directly against the explicit philosophy of your founders is definitely a sell out. On the other hand, what choice did they have? I wonder if the list of commandments is still on public display in Denmark or if it got moved into some dark drawer. Does anybody have a copy?
What a load of rubbish, Lego sets have included detailed instructions to make the specific thing on the box for decades! The main difference now is that sets are tied to specific films like Starwars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter and so on rather than just generic themes like space, pirates, castles etc.
How is this pirate set from 1989 any worse than this Pirates of the Caribbean set from 2011?
It may be a movie tie-in but you've still got to build the thing yourself and you can take it apart and put it together again any way you like.
Just after reading this article a commercial came on TV that showed families building random things with creativity. Tagline was something like "Everyday families are building memories." Seemed like a direct response to the article!
As a 30 year old guy who has gone back into his old childhood Lego sets recently, as well as recently bought himself some new ones I uh, feel sadly qualified to comment on this story. My recent purchases were one LOTR set, and a Lego City set. In response to the lack of "creativity" in these sets, it's not the sets that have gotten less creative. It's the engineering in the brick placement amongst everything that has gotten better.
If you compare the brick selection and design of say, a 2012 LOTR set vs my early 90's Pirate sets you can easily see this. The 2012 sets use a number of small, angular pieces from what I've noted, that fit together in creative ways that the early 90's sets could only dream of. The pieces in question in the 2012 sets did indeed exist in the early 90's set, so it's not a case of simply making "less flexible" pieces.
You can tell that the designers of these sets have gotten really, really good at their jobs, in no doubt likely as a result of the difference in computing power between the early 90's and now. To suggest that the sets have gotten less "creative" is asinine. Have we gained more themed and licensed sets? Absolutely. However, the pieces they are equipping these sets with are simply fitting together better and looking more streamlined. You've still got your 4x2 bricks, your 3x3 plates, there's just less usage of them as the primary shape of a vehicle/building, and they are enhanced by the smaller 1x2 45 angle bricks say that really help bring out the details in the design.
In the end, they're still freaking Lego you can put together any way you want. It's simply the brick selection has changed for the better.
A neighbor dropped a small portable radio. The case was broken and ceased to work. I fixed the electronics part of it, but the case was in small pieces. I built a new case
I'm not sure where that thing wound up. :(
How about here...http://windupradio.com/trevor.htm :-)
"She's furniture with a pulse"
I cannot really pinpoint the moment, but somewhere in the last 30 years (i.e. when I started playing with it 'til now) they did.
I was into LEGO. Big time. It was pretty much all I played with between the age of about 6 and 14. And I built everything with it. Every cartoon that had its own toy line? Forget buying those, I build them. I built pretty much everything with them, including a Battlestar (of course with two working Viper launchers). Repairing the launchers when the rubber bands ripped was a hassle and a half, but it WORKED!
Fast forward to today. I cannot quite put my finger on it, but I miss the "generic" parts. They don't exist anymore. There are at best a few filler parts between the "special" ones that work out for that piece that they're supposed to be built to, and for that ONLY. You cannot simply take them and build something of your own imagination with it, it just doesn't work. They don't even fit in other ways than the "intended" one.
And, bluntly, LEGO was never about how anything was intended to be. It was about how I WANT it to be!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To address the "well, Lego sets always had detailed instructions, at least since the 1980's," well, maybe that is so. But many sets from the 1970's did not include detailed instructions. E.g., a store would typically have a bunch of general purpose sets like Set 190, plus some model-specific sets like Moon Landing and Brick Yard.
LEGO is expensive now, ...
Ok, I have to say this is simply flat out wrong. As a serious collector of Lego for over 30 years, I can authoritatively say that the price of Lego sets has held almost constant at ~ .10 per brick. Some of the newer licensed sets break that rule and go over that figure, but Lego has also introduced the Creator lines and similar sets with lots of basic bricks where the price falls well below the .10 a brick average.
But don't believe me. Go check out the prices on Brickset, a site that has a massive comprehensive catalog of old Lego sets and instructions. I looked up a few random set MSRPs from the early 80s to make sure I was remembering the prices right, and it looks like I was dead on. Holding steady at ~.10 per brick over 30 years is an amazing feat, doubly so if you adjust for inflation.
So, no Lego isn't expensive now. Its higher quality and less expensive than ever before. And Unlike 99% of the toys I had as a kid, it still works just fine.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!