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It has frightening implications for future generations.
People who study children and how they play can’t speak highly enough about these classic Lego elements. “The thing that is so compelling about Legos is their flexibility,” says Lynn Galle, who is the director of the 75-year-old laboratory preschool at the University of Minnesota’s well-regarded Institute of Child Development. Unlike, say, a video game, says Galle, there is no right or wrong way to play with Legos.
But anyone who hasn’t looked at Lego toys since his or her own childhood is in for a rude shock. The shelves at Kmart, Target, Toys “R” Us, and Wal-Mart, aren’t stocked with bins of multicolored bricks, windows, and wheels. Indeed, the blocks sometimes can be difficult to find – crowded out by a vast array of intricate Lego kits that look more like models than open-ended play toys. Whether or not there is a “correct” way to play with Legos these days, most modern Lego kits are so elaborate that they come with a folder of step-by-step construction instructions.
Ethan, an 8-year-old boy from New England, is standing in front of a huge display of Lego kits: arctic adventurers, jungle explorers, and the Lego dinosaur adventurers – a series of toys that has particularly captivated Ethan. The boy gazes longingly at the Lego Dino Research Compound – 612 pieces. The box shows a Lego scientist in a Lego jeep in hot pursuit of a Lego T. Rex. It’s all inside the box.
Ethan is in one of Lego’s half-dozen company-run retail stores in the United States – this one in Orlando, at Downtown Disney. Ethan’s grandmother comes up holding an enormous tub of Lego bricks – 1,200 pieces. “With these,” Grandma says, “you can do whatever you want. It gives you examples right on the front.”
Grandma is funding this present. Ethan is picking. And although the dinosaur compound is $79.99, and the tub of bricks is $19.99, price isn’t the point of difference. Play is. “He and I have very different ideas about Legos,” says Ethan’s mom, Lisa Gates, a dean at Wesleyan University, who is in Orlando on vacation. “I prefer the free-form bricks, where he can make his own universe. Ethan is most drawn to the theme-based scenarios. He has an Egyptian-pyramid-dig set and some Star Wars sets. He’s fixated on the directions – when he builds it, he wants it to look exactly like it looks on the box. That introduces a note of anxiety into playing with Legos – did I do it right?”
The tug-of-war between Ethan’s view of playing with Legos and his mother’s view is a miniature of the problems that Lego itself faces – internally and in the wider world. (Ethan, for the record, goes home with the dinosaurs.) In fact, the shelves of the store in Orlando display all of the opportunity and confusion that exists in the modern world of Lego. In the beginning, there were bricks – and kids built whatever they imagined. The addition of roof tiles, windows, wheels, and trees allowed you to make more-realistic creations. Buckets of bricks are available in the store, but they attract almost no attention.
After the bricks came the themed sets – town and farm first, followed by space (almost 10 years after the moon landing), and then castle and pirate lines later. The theme sets added a dimension: You built it, the theme provided inspiration (and sometimes instruction), and you could play with what you’d built in the classic role-playing scenarios that kids dream up. The construction was less inventive, the play more so.
In 1998, Lego launched Mindstorms: programmable Lego bricks. In some ways, it was a return to the earliest roots of the company: You imagined not only what you wanted to build, but also how you wanted it to behave. You could use your computer and elegant Lego software to give your crab, your rabbit, or your robot behavior as well as a body. The heart of Mindstorms is known inside Lego as the “intelligent” brick.
At each step, the natural extension of Lego’s range is encouraged by spectacular sales. Wheels are a huge hit (and today, Lego rivals Bridgestone and Goodyear to produce the most tires in the world – making upward of 175 million tires per year). When figures, or miniature people, are introduced, they are the company’s biggest product. Even Mindstorms, with a starting price of $199, exceed expectations.
In 1999 came the biggest gamble of all: In partnership with Lucasfilm Ltd., Lego launched 14 Star Wars-themed kits. Here, Lego added a new facet to Lego play: storytelling. It was still Lego, but it was Star Wars Lego. The kits assembled into recognizable Star Wars vehicles, scenes, and characters. Kids knew the story that they were buying a kit for; the toy came not just with a design, but with a plot as well. The Star Wars products were the biggest sellers in company history.
It was Godtfred Kirk Christiansen (GKC, as he was known) who focused his father’s company on the “automatic binding bricks,” who imagined a whole system of play built around them. And it was GKC who institutionalized the value of free-form play. Each innovation tested that value.
The early space-themed sets caused some worry – space was not “real” play. Kids had experience with towns and farms, but what did they know of space? Plenty, it turned out.
Adding directions was not done lightly – how free-form could the building be if it required directions? But increasing the building challenges meant providing basic instructions.
The stories of two recent products, though, really show how Lego is struggling to figure out, and adapt to, the changed world of children. When Peter Eio, the recently retired head of Lego’s operations in the Americas, started thinking about a collaboration between Lego and Star Wars, it was late 1997. In some ways, Lego had already let the modern toy world evolve around it. In the United States, the largest toy market in the world, almost half of all toys are licensed products – from Sesame Street stuffed animals to Baywatch Barbie.