If you don't like the licensed sets, or even sets with instruction books, then you're still covered. Lego, Mega Bloks, and others have buckets or bags of just parts. To stick to Lego without a themed set, look for The Lego Classic line. If you want them as a themed set but maybe without a media license, there's the Lego Creator line (which does include some licensed material like the Bond 007 Aston Martin DB5).
Kit 10698 is a decent value for building toys and comes with its own storage container. Hasbro has multiple brands of brick building sets, but under their Kreo line there's A4585 or A4584 value buckets. I have a 759-piece Zuru Max bucket that's like $20 - the pieces fit but the quality/durability feels a little less than Lego or MEGA.
Most of the now & then examples are both true now. The classic sets still exist and how children play with Lego depends on their personality and what they have available (and how it is stored). Children are individuals and Lego allows a larger variety of play than most other toys on the market.
My kids have a mix of classic & branded sets and the play area is a mix of designed builds and improvised creations. The favourite and larger sets stay in their own bags when deconstructed but most others are added to the common boxes, which are sorted by rough shape based on what we’ve seen stimulates free building. There are a lot of complex shapes but many of those are useful in free building. I’ve purposely bought some sets with multiple complex flats & bricks as they allow more creativity than just the basic bricks.
But I know other children who just like to follow build instructions or just like to play with the characters and that’s OK. That’s the flexibility of modern Lego.
When my daughter was about 3 years old,I went on Ebay and bought a huge bag of used Lego. I think it was 10KG or so. My wife nearly got a heart attack, especially when I poured all those little pieces into the bath and filled it up with water,so I could wash them a bit. Then ended up catching the smallest pieces when I pulled the plug. We poured all those pieces in the living room. Took like 3 days to dry out. We built so many things since then. There are lots of sets mixed together,I don't care nor does my daughter. It's still nice to build something, especially when all you do at work is sending emails and writing some code here and there.
Legos are still one of the most satisfying toys to buy your children. Yes they are expensive, yes it's annoying that a lot of them are built just once. That being said when you look out at the competition the bar is low.
I have a 5 and 3 year old and watching them patiently page through the instructions and put together something complex that they really care about is incredibly satisfying. Some of the sets have relatively complex mechanisms in them as well (I'm thinking specifically of the Lego Friends Shopping Mall and the Minecraft sets) and the kids are forced to understand them at least on some level.
I don't know that my daughter would be interested in classic Legos, it's Lego Friends that caught her and will keep her in front of a 200 page instruction manual for 4 hours and in my mind there's nothing wrong with that.
I really dislike all the bizarre "lego ain't what they used to be!" comments - they honestly come from people who haven't spent time with modern legos. For reference I was born in 1970 and played with legos probably from 1975-1985, and then seriously picked it up again in 2012 or so when my son was old enough to play with them. People paint this picture of these new legos that are made up of like 5 parts that you just click together and have a transformer or something. Reality is far from that - there are so many cool pieces that let you build things never before possible. I was going to make an analogy about it being like having 100 crayon colors instead of 1, but it is more like having a whole artist's toolbox at your disposal, including 100 crayons. People say, "but it is too complicated!" - well then just buy the classic bricks, they are easy to purchase in bulk, and you can find lots of instructions all over the place for fun ideas to learn with.
And then there's this weird idea that it is so complicated that you have to build it once and then never take it apart. Please, taking it apart was a huge amount of the fun for my son. He'd repurpose parts into his never ending scene that sprawled a 10x10 area in our family room. He (and us) would play with them literally daily for at least an hour, if not more, adding sets as they came along. Much of it stayed in bins, just because he had so much (youngest child of a youngest child, means you have lots of generous Aunts, Uncles, and cousins!).
Even now, at 13, he literally was putting a set together with is friend just yesterday. It's rarer now, since he likes the intense interactively of computer-based "legos" (People Playground, Minecraft, Garry's Mod, Teardown, and modding for other games, not to mention VR stuff).
For me, the biggest difference between Legos when you and I were kids and now is that the sheer number of different pieces makes it too often nearly impossible to find the piece you need when building something from "the pile".
My kids also have a lot of Legos (by volume, more than I ever had). When engaging in free play (i.e. not building a new set from the instructions), I find that the things they make tend to be much smaller than many of the things I built when I was a kid.
I think this makes sense. When I was a kid, for the most part I had a bunch of bricks, a bunch of girders, a bunch of plates, and a bunch of smaller, more specialized pieces, but the latter were used more for adding detail. So it was relatively easy for me to find the pieces I needed to make something decent sized and them embellish it.
When I look at my kids pile of Legos, it looks like 90% small, specialized pieces. As a kid, I remember spending a lot of time looking for that one piece that I knew I had if I could just find it. But nowadays, that situation is far, far more common.
The specialized pieces make for great looking creations on the outside of the box. In theory, they should also allow for great looking creations during free play, but in practice it ends up being too much trouble to find the pieces you need. And at that point, a new set looks even more enticing than spending all your time searching for pieces, so...
But, as much as I also dislike, like you, these bizarre comments; there's one place where I drew a red line and lego has sadly crossed it recently: lego sets that become obsoleted because lego removes some software from the app store. Previously, sets were standalone and eternal. But today you can buy an awesome technic set that will become "bricked" in a few years when they remove the controller software from the play store.
This is not a theoretical concern. It has already happened (even for sets that were still on sale!). It sucks big time and it is really sad.
If at least the apps were free software, we would have something to hang on to defend lego. But their current stance is indefensible.
I feel like a lot of people look at the intricate sets that cost hundreds of dollars, and conclude that Lego has abandoned play and creativity. In reality, there's an abundance of kid-oriented sets that are meant to be built, played with, deconstructed, and modified. But those aren't the sets that get shared through social media.
Lego has embraced the adult collector as a valuable customer. But that does not mean they have abandoned the children who just want to play with some Lego.
But you're literally admitting that legos aren't what they used to be. My exposure to legos was very similar to yours. Yes, there are more variety of pieces now, and it can be both a blessing and a curse, depending on what angle you squint at it from.
In my experience, old legos had a far more rigid feeling: idiomatically, sets relied heavily on the verticality of system (i.e. usage of the traditional tall or short bricks). Nowadays, sets come with a huge variety of 1x1 and 1x2 pieces with sideways elements, and a good portion of pieces are of the beam variety (i.e. pieces that require connectors to be put together[0], commonly found in mindstorm sets)
So with a modern mindstorms set, you can build some really elaborate things with high degrees of motion, in a way that is intended by Lego, but conversely, the traditional blocks look dull in comparison. I was building some random robots w/ my kids a while back, and the way we approached the bricks was fairly different. They largely build following the system as intended. My childhood techniques, by contrast, are distinctly "illegal" (according to what Lego considers valid/stable brick arrangements in official sets). For example, this[1] is a technique to achieve a movable joint that I used to chain together to create things like arms, animal tails, etc.
The entertainment environment for kids has also changed, through no fault of Lego itself. Despite the availability of high range of motion components, there are so many other ways for kids to entertain themselves nowadays that it would just never occur to them to exploit Legos in unintended ways the way I did.
What I've seen is that kids get that dopamine rush from putting together everything exactly according to instructions. From opening the numbered bags and methodically working through thick instruction booklets.
The problem now is that they have this expectation of gratification from making something kind of perfect and their own creations are less interesting and fulfilling.
I don't know what the name is for the idea that offering an "extra" optional path can detrimentally affect the other path. (I'd posit the same theory softly applies to Minecraft's creative mode.)
I've played with Lego (never Legos) since 1980. I love the modern sets. The branded sets, to me, make it even more fun. You can mix a Batman mini-fig and use the branded parts to make an uber-Batmobile of your own design. The Star Wars kits are fantastic. I actually bought all the Friends sets for myself because the brick colors are great.
Even today I opened my mail to find a teddy bear valentine's heart Lego set from my girlfriend that is constructed from clever use of generic bricks, none of which would have been out of place in 1970s sets. In fact, I think Lego has become 100X more creative since the advent of the Internet, where people are making the more insane and elaborate constructions from the simplest bricks. It's become competitive in the nicest way.
Lego today is thriving and is better than it ever was.
Yeah, I have been getting Legos for my kid, and man, I just don't see the complaints. I'm very happy with the modern sets, as happy as I was when I was a kid.
100% agreed. Our 5yo started getting into them about a year ago as we sunsetted the Duplo bricks and they're by far his and my favorite toys.
We have a bunch of Star Wars sets and while the builds themselves are great, 90% of the fun has been breaking them down and building our own ships and designs. I watch him completely immersed in the world when he makes and flies these ships around, it's amazing. I hope we're still doing it when he's 13 too.
> Now you don’t have regular Lego cops and robbers—you have Batman and the Gotham criminals.
You also still have regular Lego cops and robbers. Cops and robbers is still by far the largest sub-theme of the City theme. Almost every set, even some sets that aren't about cops and robbers at all, will have a cop and a robber in there.
That was a particularly weird gripe, considering some of the themes that have in fact been replaced by licensed stuff (looking at you LEGO Space/Star Wars) but the cops and robbers is definitely not one of them. The LEGO City theme has always been packed with cops and robbers and still is to this day.
I would love to know what percentage of Legos revenue is now from adults buying the incredible large, complex and expensive sets to build themselves. Lego is so associated as a toy for children just as computer games are, but gaming is a larger industry for adults than children.
My wife and I now regularly buy these large lego sets for each other (birthdays, Christmas and anniversaries) and do them together in the evenings after the kids are in bed. Its such a lovely way to relax.
I think 1980s kids who grew up and got well-paying tech jobs are their largest customer demographic now. Kids play Minecraft instead.
That's what my oldest son said, at least; he doesn't see the point in Lego now that Minecraft exists. Breaks my heart. I mean, Minecraft is fantastic, but it's not Lego.
I'd also wonder if their cost per part on the bigger sets is higher or lower.
I've been building the adult sets over the last few years and you're right it's a nice nondigital way to unwind. Unlike my job everything works, has a place, and is all neat and organizable.
Interestingly my mother who is retired has gotten into lego. Initially she got into it because she decided to resell all my childhood sets which were stored in a large bins. I had kept all the instructions so she just build lego sets one at a time and sold them off. It got her hooked, and now she regularly buys used or new sets, assembles, and then resells them. It's interesting to see someone get into lego rather late in life with no childhood nostalgia of them what so ever.
> I would love to know what percentage of Legos revenue is now from adults buying the incredible large, complex and expensive sets to build themselves.
The main difference is that the sets and instructions got way more complicated and elaborate. So much so that they stifle and discourage the creativity instead of feeding it.
There were 6-step instructions [2,3] AND there was a separate page with what else was buildable from the set [4]. That was the Lego magic ingredient, the most crucial part. It forced one to look and think and imagine how those extra models were put together. That, in turn, kick-started the process of trying other things. Above all, all of it was simple. So when you got more sets you'd look at the instructions as a starting point only and then dive right into building the alternatives.
Modern sets have none of that. If anything, they basically demonstrate that you can't possibly come up with the thing you are building on your own. No way. And whatever you can put together will be so inferior in comparison that it's not even worth trying. It's really sad what Lego did to itself, because it was something magical :-/
A more interesting comparison would be to put the core themes of the 1990s (Castle, Pirates, Space, Town) against the modern popular themes (Ninjago, Creator, Star Wars, City). The old sets had less specialised parts and less colour variety, which allowed kids to combine sets from the same theme easily. The buildings (castles, fortresses, harbours) almost always had a big baseplate (flat or 3D). Minifigs were themed and textured, but weren't cartoonish with facial expressions.
Nowadays, most of the sets are some imaginary vehicles with Creator-style builds. You can probably build a new vehicle out of the same set, but combining different sets from the same theme is much less enjoyable. The few sets with buildings rarely have baseplates and feel very airy and unharmonic.
Honestly I think people also underrate how fun it is to add on to existing sets. This is harder to do with technic sets, but for the traditional block stuff it was easy enough to build the set to instructions and just keep building.
I've been doing more of this recently as I picked up some knock off mech based lego sets and adding more arms/building them more weapons/other things is fun way to make them look better.
> I still broke down all the elaborate sets, put them all together in a big box [..]
In a box?!!
Our kids store piles of bricks on more or less every horizontal surface in their rooms.
> the elaborate sets
Our kids will always build each elaborate set once, according to the instructions, wait a day or three, then it's fair game to be cannibalized for their latest homespun supermegagiga-jet, -spaceship, -car or -house.
That dark pattern where a website gives you the next article it thinks you should read does not work well here on this older article. Below the Lego article I get “Hate math? Then don't help your kid with their homework” — which it proceeds to load hundreds of times (a search for the word 'homework' yields over 1000 hits now) below each iteration just because I tried to scroll to the bottom. Somehow its recommendation engine ended up recommending the same article, recursing endlessly.
Stupid me, why would I expect to be able to just scroll to the bottom of the article for the website's footer?
Are your surfing without protection? Scrolling to the bottom for me works perfectly. I tried disabling uBlock, then I got the behaviour you mentioned.
I always have uBlock on to disable scripts and fonts. Quite a lot of sites work perfectly well that way and I enable the minimum scripts and fonts for those that don't.
Some of the items here read less like lego changing, and instead as the person growing from a child to a parent, and their point-of-view changing (#2 and #3). Also the "now" in #5 does not even mention the modern advertising in it.
All in all, this article from 2014 seems have not other reason to exist but to attract hate-clicks.
In this day and age, I would be surprised if the Lego Friends line, which was created with girls in mind, were marketed explicitly to girls. My guess is that the girls stratify themselves by what type of toys they are attracted to. There's evidence that the preference is biological:
That study doesn't show what most people think it does. Monkeys have no idea what a firetruck is, so how could a monkey have any preference towards it? The only thing they managed to show is that there is a flaw in the experiment. In a sense it is the ideal control question: do the monkeys distinguish based on something they cannot know? A more charitable reading which is mentioned is that male monkeys prefer hard shapes with wheels, but I doubt that is very relevant.
And yes, companies absolutely do market towards boys and girls. They don't write "for girls" on the box, but they consciously produce two product lines. Often it is one unisex line and one that is "forbidden for boys", i.e. it has pink and glitter and you would be teased as a boy of you bought it. This way, they can create artificial market separation and increase sales.
> I would be surprised if the Lego Friends line, which was created with girls in mind, were marketed explicitly to girls. My guess is that the girls stratify themselves by what type of toys they are attracted to.
Lego themselves talked about lego friends being meant for girls, publicly and loudly. Also, all characters are girls. The kids in ads for lego friends are all girls too. It could not have been more clear that it is for girls.
The other legos at that time and few years before were very very clearly for boys. They used colors used for boy toys. Toy stores are clearly separated to boy and girl section by color. They also used themes that literally any kid over 2 identify as boys.
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As side note, claim that they are less about building then other lego sets for same age brackets is untrue. I dont know why the article felt the need to claim the difference is character vs building.
Actual differences against other themes are colors, fight vs life, indoor vs outdoor, gender of characters.
I have a boy and girl, I purposefully made the effort not to push them into gender specific things, but hell they still ended up pretty stratified.
They even play minecraft differently!
I'm convinced there is a major biological underpining after watching these two grow up.
I think the point is capitalism gives people what they crave. Not necessarily what they need. But any alternative is unimaginable in individualized minds of modern people.
I have some issues with Legos, but a lot of these criticisms do not at all match my experience.
For example, there are a crazy number of Lego shapes these days, but the degree to which they fit together satisfyingly — even in unexpected ways — is amazing. And I love this about Legos, and it's so much more interesting than just blocks. My kid builds whole scenes and detailed models thanks to the wide variety of little "unique" pieces.
And from what I've seen, sets these days are big idea factories: My kid will build what's in the instructions a couple of times to learn it, and then will take things apart and do his own thing with it, make his own creations. I love that he gets an example and learns new techniques with these big sets and then applies that to his own ideas.
The branded Lego stuff I don't care for — I'd rather kids think about actual space exploration rather than Star Wars, for example — but I appreciate how Legos are designed and sold right now.
title correction: 9 ways lego has researched and expanded it's product line to increase profits while continuing to sell less popular traditional products
Legos are like coding. The simplicity of Lego yesteryear was like some of the simpler programming languages out there. Approachable and rewarding, but limited. Over the years, the language of Lego has added new programming constructs and is inherently more complex, more capable, and harder to approach.
The evolutions the article describes may be deplorable to some, but it was adapt or die. Anyone playing with Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, or Erector Sets anymore?
I am 51 and still collect Lego. I realized some years ago, that my own four kids were not getting the same enjoyment out of them that I had. Chagrineldy I realized that in my attempt to help them love them, I had over glutted them. Two large bins (the kind you put in the back of pickup trucks), an explosion of piece types, and an explosion of color, made it too difficult to find the piece you wanted.
So I sorted them. Today, I have more than 200 clear Sterilite storage containers with the whole collection sorted by basic shapes or types. Some are very specific (2x4 bricks), some more of a category (all technic gears). I had tried sorting them by color in the past, but all that led to was very mono color creations.
When I build something, I use the whole set. But when grandkids and nephew/nieces come, I just get a few of them out. With about 20 boxes, it returns to that simple approachable phase and they do the coolest things. You can get a lot of mileage out of just the plates and bricks, plus one or two of the “specialty” boxes thrown in for grins (e.g. two of my nephews just love the big box of wheels).
The most popular boxes are still the minifig boxes: heads, hats, vests, torsos, legs, tools, animals, foods, weapons. They’ll “play dolls” with those all day. They generally push the few Friends pieces out of the way. When the kids were younger, we used to do a monthly bricklink order as a group. My 3 girls always opted for more female hair pieces.
Soda was sweeter when I was a kid. The playgrounds were taller. I never needed money. Cartoons were so good I could sit and watch them for hours after school everyday, and the advertisements never bothered me. My computer had a 4MB hard drive, and that was enough for everything I ever needed. My Dad still loved my mom...
I started reading disagreeing with many points of the article, I did realize that she is from a different generation then me, so her "then vs now" is very different from my "than vs now". But still, when I look at what sets were available when she was a child I would say that her points "1. The instructions", "2. The sets", and "The building method"; were based mostly on what specific sets she happened to have, and no on what sets were available at the time.
Yes, up until the 60s (before even that author's time), Lego sets were mostly generic bricks with just a small set of specialized pieces (just some wheels, doors and windows), for example sets of the "Universal Building Set" family [0] like the one pictured early in the article. But by the time of most of our childhoods (the 70s or even 80s), Lego had already introduced sets with plenty of specialized pieces. Also at that time they already introduced some more complex sets tailored for a specific build, some of them, the kind of set some people may chose to build only once (as if it was a glue-on plastic model kit).
The thing is, most rants about old Lego being better more generic, are just misguided rose-tinted nostalgia talking. Lego still sells awesome generic sets, even better than the ones we used to have when we were kids. They just happen to also sell some hobbyist sets. For example, my son's big box consists of a mix of my old 80s era (e.g. [1]) plus my niece's 00s era (e.g.[2]) Legos, and I have to say that the 00s era is much more generic and full of bricks, allowing for much more varied imaginative play, than my old 80s spaceship sets full of large single-use pieces.
> Lego did extensive research and found that girls preferred to play with the characters rather than build sets. So they created the Lego Friends line where the characters own beauty salons, pet boutiques and can be news reporters working on stories about cakes. The sets do not come with hundreds of pages of instructions because most of them are fairly simple to build. The Lego Friends line is immensely popular.
1.) Majority of lego sets kinds have characters in them. That includes Star Wars sets, Ninja go sets, knights sets and what not. Lego Friends having characters in them is not something unique.
2.) Also, lego sets marked for similar age brackets have similarly complex manuals. It is just not true that Lego Friends for 7 years old would be much less complex them Minecraft for 7 years old or City for 7 years old.
3.) The actual study lego made and wrote about distinguished "indoor vs outdoor" as differing preference between boys and girls. And I think "a lot of details" in that indoor (not sure about this one). This is the first time I hear about the difference being "character vs building". Which does not even match what sets lego makes. Knights series are all about characters.
> Last year, Lego created a female scientist set on a limited run. It sold out quickly.
The special thing about this was that they were based on actual real world scientists. It was very much collector item.
[+] [-] cestith|4 years ago|reply
Kit 10698 is a decent value for building toys and comes with its own storage container. Hasbro has multiple brands of brick building sets, but under their Kreo line there's A4585 or A4584 value buckets. I have a 759-piece Zuru Max bucket that's like $20 - the pieces fit but the quality/durability feels a little less than Lego or MEGA.
[+] [-] altacc|4 years ago|reply
My kids have a mix of classic & branded sets and the play area is a mix of designed builds and improvised creations. The favourite and larger sets stay in their own bags when deconstructed but most others are added to the common boxes, which are sorted by rough shape based on what we’ve seen stimulates free building. There are a lot of complex shapes but many of those are useful in free building. I’ve purposely bought some sets with multiple complex flats & bricks as they allow more creativity than just the basic bricks.
But I know other children who just like to follow build instructions or just like to play with the characters and that’s OK. That’s the flexibility of modern Lego.
[+] [-] cosmodisk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eru|4 years ago|reply
Though that route can only take quite a bit less than 10kg at a time.
[+] [-] rnernento|4 years ago|reply
I have a 5 and 3 year old and watching them patiently page through the instructions and put together something complex that they really care about is incredibly satisfying. Some of the sets have relatively complex mechanisms in them as well (I'm thinking specifically of the Lego Friends Shopping Mall and the Minecraft sets) and the kids are forced to understand them at least on some level.
I don't know that my daughter would be interested in classic Legos, it's Lego Friends that caught her and will keep her in front of a 200 page instruction manual for 4 hours and in my mind there's nothing wrong with that.
[+] [-] gilbetron|4 years ago|reply
And then there's this weird idea that it is so complicated that you have to build it once and then never take it apart. Please, taking it apart was a huge amount of the fun for my son. He'd repurpose parts into his never ending scene that sprawled a 10x10 area in our family room. He (and us) would play with them literally daily for at least an hour, if not more, adding sets as they came along. Much of it stayed in bins, just because he had so much (youngest child of a youngest child, means you have lots of generous Aunts, Uncles, and cousins!).
Even now, at 13, he literally was putting a set together with is friend just yesterday. It's rarer now, since he likes the intense interactively of computer-based "legos" (People Playground, Minecraft, Garry's Mod, Teardown, and modding for other games, not to mention VR stuff).
Modern legos are awesome.
[+] [-] usefulcat|4 years ago|reply
My kids also have a lot of Legos (by volume, more than I ever had). When engaging in free play (i.e. not building a new set from the instructions), I find that the things they make tend to be much smaller than many of the things I built when I was a kid.
I think this makes sense. When I was a kid, for the most part I had a bunch of bricks, a bunch of girders, a bunch of plates, and a bunch of smaller, more specialized pieces, but the latter were used more for adding detail. So it was relatively easy for me to find the pieces I needed to make something decent sized and them embellish it.
When I look at my kids pile of Legos, it looks like 90% small, specialized pieces. As a kid, I remember spending a lot of time looking for that one piece that I knew I had if I could just find it. But nowadays, that situation is far, far more common.
The specialized pieces make for great looking creations on the outside of the box. In theory, they should also allow for great looking creations during free play, but in practice it ends up being too much trouble to find the pieces you need. And at that point, a new set looks even more enticing than spending all your time searching for pieces, so...
[+] [-] enriquto|4 years ago|reply
Indeed they are!
But, as much as I also dislike, like you, these bizarre comments; there's one place where I drew a red line and lego has sadly crossed it recently: lego sets that become obsoleted because lego removes some software from the app store. Previously, sets were standalone and eternal. But today you can buy an awesome technic set that will become "bricked" in a few years when they remove the controller software from the play store.
This is not a theoretical concern. It has already happened (even for sets that were still on sale!). It sucks big time and it is really sad.
If at least the apps were free software, we would have something to hang on to defend lego. But their current stance is indefensible.
[+] [-] ARandumGuy|4 years ago|reply
Lego has embraced the adult collector as a valuable customer. But that does not mean they have abandoned the children who just want to play with some Lego.
[+] [-] lhorie|4 years ago|reply
In my experience, old legos had a far more rigid feeling: idiomatically, sets relied heavily on the verticality of system (i.e. usage of the traditional tall or short bricks). Nowadays, sets come with a huge variety of 1x1 and 1x2 pieces with sideways elements, and a good portion of pieces are of the beam variety (i.e. pieces that require connectors to be put together[0], commonly found in mindstorm sets)
So with a modern mindstorms set, you can build some really elaborate things with high degrees of motion, in a way that is intended by Lego, but conversely, the traditional blocks look dull in comparison. I was building some random robots w/ my kids a while back, and the way we approached the bricks was fairly different. They largely build following the system as intended. My childhood techniques, by contrast, are distinctly "illegal" (according to what Lego considers valid/stable brick arrangements in official sets). For example, this[1] is a technique to achieve a movable joint that I used to chain together to create things like arms, animal tails, etc.
The entertainment environment for kids has also changed, through no fault of Lego itself. Despite the availability of high range of motion components, there are so many other ways for kids to entertain themselves nowadays that it would just never occur to them to exploit Legos in unintended ways the way I did.
[0] https://img.brickowl.com/files/image_cache/larger/lego-dark-...
[1] http://www.publishyourdesign.com/design/102080
[+] [-] ballenf|4 years ago|reply
The problem now is that they have this expectation of gratification from making something kind of perfect and their own creations are less interesting and fulfilling.
I don't know what the name is for the idea that offering an "extra" optional path can detrimentally affect the other path. (I'd posit the same theory softly applies to Minecraft's creative mode.)
But might just be my experience.
[+] [-] kingcharles|4 years ago|reply
Even today I opened my mail to find a teddy bear valentine's heart Lego set from my girlfriend that is constructed from clever use of generic bricks, none of which would have been out of place in 1970s sets. In fact, I think Lego has become 100X more creative since the advent of the Internet, where people are making the more insane and elaborate constructions from the simplest bricks. It's become competitive in the nicest way.
Lego today is thriving and is better than it ever was.
[+] [-] pnathan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewgioia|4 years ago|reply
We have a bunch of Star Wars sets and while the builds themselves are great, 90% of the fun has been breaking them down and building our own ships and designs. I watch him completely immersed in the world when he makes and flies these ships around, it's amazing. I hope we're still doing it when he's 13 too.
[+] [-] MomoXenosaga|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axbytg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WheatM|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mcv|4 years ago|reply
You also still have regular Lego cops and robbers. Cops and robbers is still by far the largest sub-theme of the City theme. Almost every set, even some sets that aren't about cops and robbers at all, will have a cop and a robber in there.
[+] [-] wmeredith|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samwillis|4 years ago|reply
My wife and I now regularly buy these large lego sets for each other (birthdays, Christmas and anniversaries) and do them together in the evenings after the kids are in bed. Its such a lovely way to relax.
[+] [-] mcv|4 years ago|reply
That's what my oldest son said, at least; he doesn't see the point in Lego now that Minecraft exists. Breaks my heart. I mean, Minecraft is fantastic, but it's not Lego.
[+] [-] MivLives|4 years ago|reply
I've been building the adult sets over the last few years and you're right it's a nice nondigital way to unwind. Unlike my job everything works, has a place, and is all neat and organizable.
Interestingly my mother who is retired has gotten into lego. Initially she got into it because she decided to resell all my childhood sets which were stored in a large bins. I had kept all the instructions so she just build lego sets one at a time and sold them off. It got her hooked, and now she regularly buys used or new sets, assembles, and then resells them. It's interesting to see someone get into lego rather late in life with no childhood nostalgia of them what so ever.
[+] [-] Fiahil|4 years ago|reply
Small enough that I still can drive envy from every child in the store when I buy big Technic sets. Like the huge CAT Bulldozer (https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/app-controlled-cat-d11-bu...) from last year.
[+] [-] huhtenberg|4 years ago|reply
The first set I had was a minuscule "mineral detector" from the space set - https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/001.jpg
There were 6-step instructions [2,3] AND there was a separate page with what else was buildable from the set [4]. That was the Lego magic ingredient, the most crucial part. It forced one to look and think and imagine how those extra models were put together. That, in turn, kick-started the process of trying other things. Above all, all of it was simple. So when you got more sets you'd look at the instructions as a starting point only and then dive right into building the alternatives.
Modern sets have none of that. If anything, they basically demonstrate that you can't possibly come up with the thing you are building on your own. No way. And whatever you can put together will be so inferior in comparison that it's not even worth trying. It's really sad what Lego did to itself, because it was something magical :-/
[2] https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/002.jpg
[3] https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/003.jpg
[4] https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/004.jpg
[+] [-] tills13|4 years ago|reply
third-party extra models: https://rebrickable.com/sets/alternates/
[+] [-] watwut|4 years ago|reply
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/bricks-and-houses-11008
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/creative-suitcase-10713
[+] [-] k__|4 years ago|reply
I still broke down all the elaborate sets, put them all together in a big box, and built my own things later.
[+] [-] bluetomcat|4 years ago|reply
Nowadays, most of the sets are some imaginary vehicles with Creator-style builds. You can probably build a new vehicle out of the same set, but combining different sets from the same theme is much less enjoyable. The few sets with buildings rarely have baseplates and feel very airy and unharmonic.
[+] [-] MivLives|4 years ago|reply
I've been doing more of this recently as I picked up some knock off mech based lego sets and adding more arms/building them more weapons/other things is fun way to make them look better.
[+] [-] logifail|4 years ago|reply
In a box?!!
Our kids store piles of bricks on more or less every horizontal surface in their rooms.
> the elaborate sets
Our kids will always build each elaborate set once, according to the instructions, wait a day or three, then it's fair game to be cannibalized for their latest homespun supermegagiga-jet, -spaceship, -car or -house.
[+] [-] Freak_NL|4 years ago|reply
Stupid me, why would I expect to be able to just scroll to the bottom of the article for the website's footer?
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|4 years ago|reply
I always have uBlock on to disable scripts and fonts. Quite a lot of sites work perfectly well that way and I enable the minimum scripts and fonts for those that don't.
[+] [-] tommica|4 years ago|reply
All in all, this article from 2014 seems have not other reason to exist but to attract hate-clicks.
[+] [-] insickness|4 years ago|reply
In this day and age, I would be surprised if the Lego Friends line, which was created with girls in mind, were marketed explicitly to girls. My guess is that the girls stratify themselves by what type of toys they are attracted to. There's evidence that the preference is biological:
Male monkeys prefer boys' toys https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...
[+] [-] captainmuon|4 years ago|reply
And yes, companies absolutely do market towards boys and girls. They don't write "for girls" on the box, but they consciously produce two product lines. Often it is one unisex line and one that is "forbidden for boys", i.e. it has pink and glitter and you would be teased as a boy of you bought it. This way, they can create artificial market separation and increase sales.
[+] [-] watwut|4 years ago|reply
Lego themselves talked about lego friends being meant for girls, publicly and loudly. Also, all characters are girls. The kids in ads for lego friends are all girls too. It could not have been more clear that it is for girls.
The other legos at that time and few years before were very very clearly for boys. They used colors used for boy toys. Toy stores are clearly separated to boy and girl section by color. They also used themes that literally any kid over 2 identify as boys.
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As side note, claim that they are less about building then other lego sets for same age brackets is untrue. I dont know why the article felt the need to claim the difference is character vs building.
Actual differences against other themes are colors, fight vs life, indoor vs outdoor, gender of characters.
[+] [-] OscarCunningham|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuckinhell|4 years ago|reply
I'm convinced there is a major biological underpining after watching these two grow up.
[+] [-] scotty79|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasing|4 years ago|reply
For example, there are a crazy number of Lego shapes these days, but the degree to which they fit together satisfyingly — even in unexpected ways — is amazing. And I love this about Legos, and it's so much more interesting than just blocks. My kid builds whole scenes and detailed models thanks to the wide variety of little "unique" pieces.
And from what I've seen, sets these days are big idea factories: My kid will build what's in the instructions a couple of times to learn it, and then will take things apart and do his own thing with it, make his own creations. I love that he gets an example and learns new techniques with these big sets and then applies that to his own ideas.
The branded Lego stuff I don't care for — I'd rather kids think about actual space exploration rather than Star Wars, for example — but I appreciate how Legos are designed and sold right now.
[+] [-] bil7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilikerashers|4 years ago|reply
I went looking for a spaceship lego set. Just a simple rocket or something.
Instead it's heaps of adult themed/Star Wars/NASA licensed stuff. The alternative seems to be a bucket of standard bricks.
The adult orientation of LEGO these days makes me hesitant to buy it.
I don't mind Adults having LEGO sets, I do mind if that becomes so lucrative it stops kids being able to enjoy it.
[+] [-] mmustapic|4 years ago|reply
https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/space-shuttle-adventure-3...
[+] [-] mcphage|4 years ago|reply
I've got 3 young kids, and trust me, that's nowhere near happening. Kids love lego.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] travisgriggs|4 years ago|reply
The evolutions the article describes may be deplorable to some, but it was adapt or die. Anyone playing with Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, or Erector Sets anymore?
I am 51 and still collect Lego. I realized some years ago, that my own four kids were not getting the same enjoyment out of them that I had. Chagrineldy I realized that in my attempt to help them love them, I had over glutted them. Two large bins (the kind you put in the back of pickup trucks), an explosion of piece types, and an explosion of color, made it too difficult to find the piece you wanted.
So I sorted them. Today, I have more than 200 clear Sterilite storage containers with the whole collection sorted by basic shapes or types. Some are very specific (2x4 bricks), some more of a category (all technic gears). I had tried sorting them by color in the past, but all that led to was very mono color creations.
When I build something, I use the whole set. But when grandkids and nephew/nieces come, I just get a few of them out. With about 20 boxes, it returns to that simple approachable phase and they do the coolest things. You can get a lot of mileage out of just the plates and bricks, plus one or two of the “specialty” boxes thrown in for grins (e.g. two of my nephews just love the big box of wheels).
The most popular boxes are still the minifig boxes: heads, hats, vests, torsos, legs, tools, animals, foods, weapons. They’ll “play dolls” with those all day. They generally push the few Friends pieces out of the way. When the kids were younger, we used to do a monthly bricklink order as a group. My 3 girls always opted for more female hair pieces.
[+] [-] flerchin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onpensionsterm|4 years ago|reply
https://blog.hobbydb.com/2018/11/05/the-evolution-of-lego-mi...
[+] [-] SkeuomorphicBee|4 years ago|reply
Yes, up until the 60s (before even that author's time), Lego sets were mostly generic bricks with just a small set of specialized pieces (just some wheels, doors and windows), for example sets of the "Universal Building Set" family [0] like the one pictured early in the article. But by the time of most of our childhoods (the 70s or even 80s), Lego had already introduced sets with plenty of specialized pieces. Also at that time they already introduced some more complex sets tailored for a specific build, some of them, the kind of set some people may chose to build only once (as if it was a glue-on plastic model kit).
The thing is, most rants about old Lego being better more generic, are just misguided rose-tinted nostalgia talking. Lego still sells awesome generic sets, even better than the ones we used to have when we were kids. They just happen to also sell some hobbyist sets. For example, my son's big box consists of a mix of my old 80s era (e.g. [1]) plus my niece's 00s era (e.g.[2]) Legos, and I have to say that the 00s era is much more generic and full of bricks, allowing for much more varied imaginative play, than my old 80s spaceship sets full of large single-use pieces.
[0] https://brickset.com/sets/theme-Universal-Building-Set
[1] https://rebrickable.com/sets/6971-1/inter-galactic-command-b...
[2] https://rebrickable.com/sets/31025-1/mountain-hut/
[+] [-] watwut|4 years ago|reply
1.) Majority of lego sets kinds have characters in them. That includes Star Wars sets, Ninja go sets, knights sets and what not. Lego Friends having characters in them is not something unique.
2.) Also, lego sets marked for similar age brackets have similarly complex manuals. It is just not true that Lego Friends for 7 years old would be much less complex them Minecraft for 7 years old or City for 7 years old.
3.) The actual study lego made and wrote about distinguished "indoor vs outdoor" as differing preference between boys and girls. And I think "a lot of details" in that indoor (not sure about this one). This is the first time I hear about the difference being "character vs building". Which does not even match what sets lego makes. Knights series are all about characters.
> Last year, Lego created a female scientist set on a limited run. It sold out quickly.
The special thing about this was that they were based on actual real world scientists. It was very much collector item.