> 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

> 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).