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>My biggest concern about modern toys is that we have dumbed them down to work for the lowest common denominator. That's why a 3 year old today can (with a bit

>My biggest concern about modern toys is that we have dumbed them down to work for the lowest common denominator. That's why a 3 year old today can (with a bit of training) assemble 12+ LEGO sets. I think Lego is the perfect example of this. I never understood the point of it as a kid. Why would I want something that comes with an instruction booklet to recreate the exact thing shown on the box? Why wouldn't I just ask for the thing pre-made instead? And furthermore the bricks were useless for actually creating things. It's nothing more than a slightly more advanced wooden block set. K'NEX on the other hand was awesome. You could actually build things. Erector too. And those came with all sorts of cool accessories like electric motors and solar panels that you could use to build crazy contraptions. Sad that those things aren't as popular anymore.

DHPersonal 4y ago
Lego are a different kind of snap-together model like those found in hobby stores.
allturtles 4y ago
There's a sort of zen pleasure in putting pre-designed Lego sets together, especially the more sophisticated ones where you discover along the way the little building tricks or "easter eggs" included by the designer. Lego bricks certainly aren't "useless for actually creating things." You can make lots of cool things with Lego, and there's lots of creativity to be found in the Lego community, beyond just following the directions. I do agree with GP that the listed ages on LEGO sets are absurd if taken as difficulty levels. My elementary age kids have no trouble with "18+" LEGO sets. I think the ages instead serve a marketing role: the 18+ rating gives adults permission to buy a toy.
yamtaddle 4y ago
> I think Lego is the perfect example of this. I never understood the point of it as a kid. Why would I want something that comes with an instruction booklet to recreate the exact thing shown on the box? 1) The same motivation as a model kit... except what you build is intended to be played with and won't be (permanently) destroyed by play. 2) Same motivation as a puzzle. 3) Modern Lego instructions do a lot more hand-holding than the ones I had in the 80s and 90s did, so I'm not sure how true this still is, but the ones back then were basically a series of sometimes-pretty-challenging spatial reasoning puzzles. So anyone who enjoys that kind of thing might enjoy assembling Lego sets. 4) Once assembled, you could customize, re-dress, and mash up the sets in ways you couldn't with other toys, and fall back on the directions to fix anything you screwed up too badly, if you wanted to get back to baseline. For example, one of the "good guys" bases from the Pirate series spent more time as a marine research base than it did hosting swashbuckling shenanigans, for me. My big castle sets would grow castle towns from a mix of smaller castle-series sets and custom builds on big flat plates. That kind of thing. 5) You could really destroy a Lego toy built from a set, then put it back together. You couldn't smash apart any bit you liked of an ordinary airplane or ship or castle toy and not ruin it permanently. With Lego sets, you can. For my part, I've never understood people who don't understand the appeal of Lego sets, because I find the appeal so multi-dimensional and obvious. [EDIT] FWIW I do find a lot of modern Lego sets worse for some of these purposes than the ones I had as a kid. They've leaned more into the "model" side of things and less into the "play". Exposed nubs get covered up (looks better on a shelf, or on the box photo, that way) so you have to tear pieces off to attach other things to it. Builds are incredibly fiddly and use tons of really tiny bricks even for basic things like a wall, so re-building from memory or a little simple reasoning after destroying a small part of a set is now far more difficult (I suspect CAD run amok is to blame for this one).
DavidPeiffer 4y ago
I also loved K'NEX. I built so many things, expanded the Big Ball Factory with additional logic gates at the top, got hands on experience playing with gear ratios, tower cranes, and built vehicles to race against my brothers down the stairs (of course the K'NEX man had to stay intact!). It was fun building chunks of a big structure and assembling them together, and inevitably having to rebuild a chunk because of some missing pieces. I do wish they built a control system akin to Lego Mindstorms though. Turning motors on and off manually was fine, but I really would have love to to be able to, for example, build my tower crane such that it could rotate via motor, and have separate controls for lowering the bucket and moving the load closer/further from the tower.
asdff 4y ago
The best experience with legos is if you had older siblings who got the legos. Then by the time you got the hand me down legos, you ended up with just a big bin of random parts, no sets, no manuals. I would create elaborate bases or freighter style space ships for playing with my other toys, play with them for a while, then take them apart and make something else. It was kind of like minecraft is with kids today, but with your two hands.

DHPersonal 4y ago

Lego are a different kind of snap-together model like those found in hobby stores.

allturtles 4y ago

There's a sort of zen pleasure in putting pre-designed Lego sets together, especially the more sophisticated ones where you discover along the way the little building tricks or "easter eggs" included by the designer. Lego bricks certainly aren't "useless for actually creating things." You can make lots of cool things with Lego, and there's lots of creativity to be found in the Lego community, beyond just following the directions. I do agree with GP that the listed ages on LEGO sets are absurd if taken as difficulty levels. My elementary age kids have no trouble with "18+" LEGO sets. I think the ages instead serve a marketing role: the 18+ rating gives adults permission to buy a toy.

yamtaddle 4y ago

> I think Lego is the perfect example of this. I never understood the point of it as a kid. Why would I want something that comes with an instruction booklet to recreate the exact thing shown on the box? 1) The same motivation as a model kit... except what you build is intended to be played with and won't be (permanently) destroyed by play. 2) Same motivation as a puzzle. 3) Modern Lego instructions do a lot more hand-holding than the ones I had in the 80s and 90s did, so I'm not sure how true this still is, but the ones back then were basically a series of sometimes-pretty-challenging spatial reasoning puzzles. So anyone who enjoys that kind of thing might enjoy assembling Lego sets. 4) Once assembled, you could customize, re-dress, and mash up the sets in ways you couldn't with other toys, and fall back on the directions to fix anything you screwed up too badly, if you wanted to get back to baseline. For example, one of the "good guys" bases from the Pirate series spent more time as a marine research base than it did hosting swashbuckling shenanigans, for me. My big castle sets would grow castle towns from a mix of smaller castle-series sets and custom builds on big flat plates. That kind of thing. 5) You could really destroy a Lego toy built from a set, then put it back together. You couldn't smash apart any bit you liked of an ordinary airplane or ship or castle toy and not ruin it permanently. With Lego sets, you can. For my part, I've never understood people who don't understand the appeal of Lego sets, because I find the appeal so multi-dimensional and obvious. [EDIT] FWIW I do find a lot of modern Lego sets worse for some of these purposes than the ones I had as a kid. They've leaned more into the "model" side of things and less into the "play". Exposed nubs get covered up (looks better on a shelf, or on the box photo, that way) so you have to tear pieces off to attach other things to it. Builds are incredibly fiddly and use tons of really tiny bricks even for basic things like a wall, so re-building from memory or a little simple reasoning after destroying a small part of a set is now far more difficult (I suspect CAD run amok is to blame for this one).

DavidPeiffer 4y ago

I also loved K'NEX. I built so many things, expanded the Big Ball Factory with additional logic gates at the top, got hands on experience playing with gear ratios, tower cranes, and built vehicles to race against my brothers down the stairs (of course the K'NEX man had to stay intact!). It was fun building chunks of a big structure and assembling them together, and inevitably having to rebuild a chunk because of some missing pieces. I do wish they built a control system akin to Lego Mindstorms though. Turning motors on and off manually was fine, but I really would have love to to be able to, for example, build my tower crane such that it could rotate via motor, and have separate controls for lowering the bucket and moving the load closer/further from the tower.

asdff 4y ago

The best experience with legos is if you had older siblings who got the legos. Then by the time you got the hand me down legos, you ended up with just a big bin of random parts, no sets, no manuals. I would create elaborate bases or freighter style space ships for playing with my other toys, play with them for a while, then take them apart and make something else. It was kind of like minecraft is with kids today, but with your two hands.