7 ms·

How Lego went from designing playthemes for creative play and building in adventurous imaginary worlds, to replicating real-world 1:1 objects like cameras, type

How Lego went from designing playthemes for creative play and building in adventurous imaginary worlds, to replicating real-world 1:1 objects like cameras, typewriters and vintage game consoles as collectible plastic pieces sitting on the shelves of bored adults...

aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
jacquesm 3y ago
Fortunately they also still sell the creative play and building blocks and not all kids built canned sets. The problem is that Lego somehow had to survive and they had some pretty tough times, this was their solution. On the one hand I'm disappointed, just like you. On the other I see my kids make the most fantastic stuff with regular bricks so I'll forgive them.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  Bionicle/Hero Factory was by far the best they had for creative play. They cancelled it many moons ago, and now we have to buy 'em used for our kids. On the whole it's a disappointing downward trajectory.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Funny, you couldn't pay my kids to play with those! But they never seem to have enough 2x4s...
    - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
      Emphasis on "creative". Bionicle was was their product line that was simple enough for a child to have a complete mental model of it, and at the same time complex enough that they could build their own "real" adult sets, something that isn't obviously a throwaway pile of bricks.
  - ryukoposting 3y ago
    > Bionicle/Hero Factory was by far the best they had for creative play. I disagree with this premise. Play comes in countless forms, and I think this statement places roleplay above other forms of youthful creativity. For some kids, the roleplay of Lego action figures was a huge draw. Other kids play in different ways. Some kids (like me) enjoyed Bionicle at first, but got bored of action figures by age ~8. Bionicle's lack of compatibility with most other Lego products meant that I was left with a bunch of parts I never really played with much (except for the ripcord disk-launcher things. I still get a kick out of those!) For me, the next chapter was Technic, because I liked making things that move. Fast forward a bit, and Technic led to Mindstorms, Mindstorms led to FIRST Robotics and Arduino, and now I'm a firmware engineer. Does Technic have less creative value than Bionicle? I think that's an impossible question to answer. It depends on the kid. Any given object has as much creative power as a child's mind projects into it. > On the whole it's a disappointing downward trajectory. Yes and no. On one hand, today's Lego action figures are pathetic compared to the Bionicle/Hero Factory heyday. It's also easy to mock cheap, commercialized dust collectors like the Brickheadz series. Part of me is sad to see Mindstorms dying off, but I also recognize that, even at its peak (NXT), it was totally inaccessible to most kids. On the other hand, some things have gotten a lot better than they were 20 years ago. Lego's "Friends" theme is by far the best girl-targeted product line they've ever made. Belleville was the "girl" product line of my youth, and it was was cynical, condescending trash that was so thematically paper-thin that even my 6-year-old little sister saw straight through it.
    - madarcho 3y ago
      Almost identical pathway here, except with some Spybotics thrown in around the same time as Bionicle. I sometimes wish Mindstorms had that level of world building...
- seb1204 3y ago
  My kids when 7 or older played more creative with Dublplo blocks than their Lego sets.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Duplo is interesting, it allows kids to quickly build pretty massive stuff if they have enough of it. But mine were done with it relatively fast and we ended up donating it to other people.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Primo and Quattro are also interesting but much more rare.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Modulex, that's rare!! If you find some keep it.
    - dsego 3y ago
      We have a large box of duplos but my three-year-old isn't interested at all, maybe showed some interest a while ago, but mostly to build the tallest tower. Now it's time for the real legos, but I'm not sure if we'll even get any if she won't play with them.
      - Auracle 3y ago
        My 2 year old daughter hasn’t really shown any interest either. It’s weird, as a kid I wasn’t really into building stuff. Lego, wood blocks, etc. The only exception was “forts” in my woods. I could play with my Power Rangers toys for hours. As an adult, though, I’m into it.
  - ochrist 3y ago
    Duplo is also from Lego. It's basically just larger blocks: https://www.lego.com/da-dk/themes/duplo https://www.lego.com/da-dk/themes/duplo
- mrweasel 3y ago
  Sadly what I see is Lego producing sets, even for kids, which consists of an endless amount of tiny bricks which is impossible to build stuff with quickly. It's absolutely wonderful when you want to build highly detailed reproductions. What you can do, as you say, is to go get sets/buckets of classic bricks and use those, but the sets are getting annoying. As a kid I have pretty large number of various Lego sets and I mostly mixed and matched to build rough castles, space stations, house whatever, but you can do that with modern sets, to many tiny tiny bricks and very few blocks suitable for a five year old who just wants to build a house. I get that Lego would have gone out of business if they had continued to produce the type of sets I played with in the 1980s, but it's barely a children's toy any more. Don't get me wrong, it's great that they can make things that brings joy to adults but I just feel that they've done it at the cost of the youngest children. Also, the display pieces are often terribly unstable and a pain to keep clean. The Lego flowers are basically junk and you shouldn't buy them. They aren't nearly stable enough to have on display and they will certainly break when you try to clean them.
  - Tomte 3y ago
    You're looking for the Minecraft sets. If you don't especially like Minecraft, throw away the one or two figures and enjoy the cool 2 by 4 bricks, just as they were in your childhood. Bonus: every detail is printed, no stickers anywhere.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    The best way to buy Lego is just to buy bulk dumps from families that stopped playing with them. It's going to be piles of unsorted bricks of all kinds and that in itself is a stimulus for creativity. Just go on ebay or the local equivalent and search for 'pounds lego' or 'kilo lego' and you should be all set.
  - threetonesun 3y ago
    You can think of the advanced ones as more like puzzles you can display once you're done. Kids still like them. Even the finicky themed ones in our house get built then torn down to be rebuilt into fantastical mashups from my kid's imagination. I think a lot of adults have overly fond memories of using the basic blocks to build relatively basic things. Also kids today can (and do) that in Minecraft now.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
  > On the one hand I'm disappointed, just like you What exactly is the disappointment? That they also target adults?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Fortunately they also still sell the creative play and building blocks and not all kids built canned sets. Also, after being build as canned sets, the canned sets can become more distinct parts for creative building. At least, that's what happens with my kids.
loceng 3y ago
Entertained all the way to a totalitarian state.
solids 3y ago
Absolutely agree… I think in early 2000 they found a nice sweet spot where you bought a set to build a particular object, but all of them featured a fairly common set of pieces. So after a while of having it in the shelve it could be repurposed.
bena 3y ago
This is from the Ideas line where they take fan submissions and turn them into sets. Complain about what you perceive to be a change in direction, but unless you were buying older sets, you are part of the reason for that change
gyomu 3y ago
Well yeah, you gotta grow the business, as any good visitor of this site knows. You can only sell so many $30 buckets of loosely assorted pieces intended for children. There's much more money to be made in $200 sets with the popular IP of the day or $500 collector sets for adults.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > Well yeah, you gotta grow the business, as any good visitor of this site knows Well. You have to exist, which means you compete, which might mean you grow.
  - aqsalose 3y ago
    >Well. You have to exist, which means you compete, which might mean you grow. Why growth? At some point you would eventually hit perfect saturation anyway, the steady state where everyone already is buying your product to the extent anyone can buy it. I get that losing business is bad, and it's better to "overcorrect" to growth, but as long as you compete enough to keep approximately same market share against other competitors, selling inflation adjusted $30 buckets of bricks to each generation of kids with profit sounds like perfectly good business. Owner of the business would receive steady income selling the inflation adjusted $30 buckets. I'd imagine you'd hit problems when the buckets of bricks you are selling are ~eternal and number of kids is no longer growing, so nobody needs new ones.
    - Auracle 3y ago
      As long as the population is growing, if your business isn’t you’re effectively shrinking. Plus image of Megablocks did Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. They’d overtake Lego in a minute.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      You'd have to grow because there are competitors that would do your thing and the new thing, so customers would go to them instead.
em500 3y ago
The classic brick buckets are still widely available, right next to all the themed sets and the replica sets (which are explicitly marketed to adults). Not sure what the complaint is here, that the general public don't share your taste?
- manojlds 3y ago
  Nah it's just the usual cynical HN comment.
- bluetomcat 3y ago
  Even the assortment of pieces in the Classic 1000+ piece buckets doesn't allow you to build interesting custom creations resembling buildings or vehicles. Instead of a large number of doors, windows, roof elements, wheels and sidewall elements, you get mostly purple, orange, pink, cyan and bright yellow 4x2s and 2x2s, and a large number of tiny specific pieces. The themed playsets aimed at 5+ children are leaning towards detailed modeling with many tiny 1x1 pieces. The one-off nostalgia-driven sets like the Lion King's Castle, the remake of Eldorado Fortress and the Galaxy Explorer are intentionally released as one-off sets with a time distance in the release date, and not as a part of a regular play theme.
  - AlanYx 3y ago
    There are some good, versatile Classic buckets. The recently announced Creative Vehicles (11036) comes with instructions for 8 vehicles and instructions for another 10 vehicles will be available on the website. It'll be fantastic for kids who love building different types of cars, buses, etc.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    Every now and then I see a set that looks like it’s actually for kids to play with. More exposed nubs, spaces big enough for kid fingers to fit into (so many feature only tiny spaces now, even for a kid!) and builds that don’t look so fiddly that they’d be impossible to repair after rough play or accidental damage without starting over. But yeah, even like 90% of the ones that appear to be marketed to kids suck for kids to play with, now. They look nice on the box, and on a shelf, though, and I guess that’s what shifts units.
chongli 3y ago
These sets are not creative play toys, they're highly-detailed 3-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. That is their appeal, and you can make the same argument about a traditional wood/cardboard jigsaw puzzle: "Kids should be learning how to paint with oil paints or watercolours, not snapping together these pre-painted jigsaw puzzles!" I think the real difference here is that we've transitioned from more of a mixed/manual labour economy to a mental/emotional labour economy. People get off work and they just want to come home and do something relaxing and not mentally taxing. Putting together a Lego set is like that. It takes more thought than watching TV, but not much. Coming up with something interesting and creative from a bucket of random Legos is different, and most people lose interest.
- AmosLightnin 3y ago
  I think your argument in quotes is a good one. :) Following a set of pre-defined instructions is not a creative act. It's not bad to build a puzzle, but I would argue that it's not nearly as meaningful of an experience as painting - or any other creative activity for that matter.
  - bena 3y ago
    No, but building sets does have other benefits. There's some zen to the act, like model or puzzle building. But you can also observe and learn techniques to add to your own builds. Knowing all the ways Bionicles are put together can help you turn a Porsche into a full transforming Autobot Jazz.
  - chongli 3y ago
    I think learning to oil paint could be a very meaningful experience. Relaxing to watching Bob Ross videos and paint along with him. I do also feel there is this sort of "cult" of self-improvement going around. Like if you're not spending every waking minute of your life learning some new skill or marketing yourself or trying to get a promotion, then you're wasting your time. It's very toxic. Doing things that you find relaxing should be accepted, even if they don't teach you anything or improve you in any way.
  - MisterBastahrd 3y ago
boesboes 3y ago
If only they had all kinds of different product line for different people!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
SteveGerencser 3y ago
My granddaughter and I build a ton of 'boring adult sets' together, and then she gets to take them home, tear them apart, and make anything she wants with the pieces. But she also loves Minecraft (she's 8) and we buy the Minecraft specific sets as well. It is quite possible to do all the things, it's not necessarily an either/or scenario like many people like to present as their argument against something.
_fat_santa 3y ago
I don't think they went from one to the other, more like they expanded to include sets that adults would be interested in. The way I look at it, the higher end collectable pieces subsidize the lower cost sets and "brick boxes" for the younger generation.
watwut 3y ago
When kids grow up into adults, they do not always become massively different persons in their core. Oftentimes, creative kids grow up into creative adults. Their hobbies often remain or they still look back fondly on their old hobbies. And when they are bored, they sometimes go back to their old hobbies, due to nostalgia. You see it everywhere, in music people listen to, books they read, etc All of that is ok. Plus, majority of lego kits go to kids.
toxican 3y ago
Why do you think they stopped designing sets for creative play? They still sell bulk lego. They still sell non-licensed play sets like space, city, castle, etc. And even the licensed sets are great for creativity because I doubt a kid's not going to shatter their set and start making their own damn spaceship because it has "Star Wars" on the box. None of that has stopped just because they also sell display pieces that are wildly popular and intended for adults. Like seriously go to any store that sells Lego and you'll see that a good 80% of it is bulk or play sets. There are a lot of things to be critical of lego for...the pricing, the over-reliance on licensed sets, too many god-damned stickers, etc. But this really isn't one of them at all.
wigiv 3y ago
As a mechanical engineer absolutely obsessed with Lego at a young age, I’ve recently (ie, when I could afford to start buying Lego again!) had to reconcile what I previously enjoyed about building with what I enjoy now. As a child, the joy of building was in part the satisfaction of following granular directions to see something awesome emerging step by step, and in part the joy of playing with the sets. I was immersed! Now, I think of them in part as essentially 3D puzzles and, in part, just curios… I like looking at them. Perhaps I’m subconsciously craving that unbound creativity I had as a child? Thing is, in my work, I get to materialize physical, mechanical things with machining and 3D printing and welding etc. I thought I would, but haven’t found myself designing and building new creations with Lego. Perfectly content following the instructions and putting it up on the shelf to admire!

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

jacquesm 3y ago

Fortunately they also still sell the creative play and building blocks and not all kids built canned sets. The problem is that Lego somehow had to survive and they had some pretty tough times, this was their solution. On the one hand I'm disappointed, just like you. On the other I see my kids make the most fantastic stuff with regular bricks so I'll forgive them.

otabdeveloper4 3y ago
Bionicle/Hero Factory was by far the best they had for creative play. They cancelled it many moons ago, and now we have to buy 'em used for our kids. On the whole it's a disappointing downward trajectory.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Funny, you couldn't pay my kids to play with those! But they never seem to have enough 2x4s...
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
    Emphasis on "creative". Bionicle was was their product line that was simple enough for a child to have a complete mental model of it, and at the same time complex enough that they could build their own "real" adult sets, something that isn't obviously a throwaway pile of bricks.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  > Bionicle/Hero Factory was by far the best they had for creative play. I disagree with this premise. Play comes in countless forms, and I think this statement places roleplay above other forms of youthful creativity. For some kids, the roleplay of Lego action figures was a huge draw. Other kids play in different ways. Some kids (like me) enjoyed Bionicle at first, but got bored of action figures by age ~8. Bionicle's lack of compatibility with most other Lego products meant that I was left with a bunch of parts I never really played with much (except for the ripcord disk-launcher things. I still get a kick out of those!) For me, the next chapter was Technic, because I liked making things that move. Fast forward a bit, and Technic led to Mindstorms, Mindstorms led to FIRST Robotics and Arduino, and now I'm a firmware engineer. Does Technic have less creative value than Bionicle? I think that's an impossible question to answer. It depends on the kid. Any given object has as much creative power as a child's mind projects into it. > On the whole it's a disappointing downward trajectory. Yes and no. On one hand, today's Lego action figures are pathetic compared to the Bionicle/Hero Factory heyday. It's also easy to mock cheap, commercialized dust collectors like the Brickheadz series. Part of me is sad to see Mindstorms dying off, but I also recognize that, even at its peak (NXT), it was totally inaccessible to most kids. On the other hand, some things have gotten a lot better than they were 20 years ago. Lego's "Friends" theme is by far the best girl-targeted product line they've ever made. Belleville was the "girl" product line of my youth, and it was was cynical, condescending trash that was so thematically paper-thin that even my 6-year-old little sister saw straight through it.
  - madarcho 3y ago
    Almost identical pathway here, except with some Spybotics thrown in around the same time as Bionicle. I sometimes wish Mindstorms had that level of world building...
seb1204 3y ago
My kids when 7 or older played more creative with Dublplo blocks than their Lego sets.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Duplo is interesting, it allows kids to quickly build pretty massive stuff if they have enough of it. But mine were done with it relatively fast and we ended up donating it to other people.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Primo and Quattro are also interesting but much more rare.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Modulex, that's rare!! If you find some keep it.
  - dsego 3y ago
    We have a large box of duplos but my three-year-old isn't interested at all, maybe showed some interest a while ago, but mostly to build the tallest tower. Now it's time for the real legos, but I'm not sure if we'll even get any if she won't play with them.
    - Auracle 3y ago
      My 2 year old daughter hasn’t really shown any interest either. It’s weird, as a kid I wasn’t really into building stuff. Lego, wood blocks, etc. The only exception was “forts” in my woods. I could play with my Power Rangers toys for hours. As an adult, though, I’m into it.
- ochrist 3y ago
  Duplo is also from Lego. It's basically just larger blocks: https://www.lego.com/da-dk/themes/duplo https://www.lego.com/da-dk/themes/duplo
mrweasel 3y ago
Sadly what I see is Lego producing sets, even for kids, which consists of an endless amount of tiny bricks which is impossible to build stuff with quickly. It's absolutely wonderful when you want to build highly detailed reproductions. What you can do, as you say, is to go get sets/buckets of classic bricks and use those, but the sets are getting annoying. As a kid I have pretty large number of various Lego sets and I mostly mixed and matched to build rough castles, space stations, house whatever, but you can do that with modern sets, to many tiny tiny bricks and very few blocks suitable for a five year old who just wants to build a house. I get that Lego would have gone out of business if they had continued to produce the type of sets I played with in the 1980s, but it's barely a children's toy any more. Don't get me wrong, it's great that they can make things that brings joy to adults but I just feel that they've done it at the cost of the youngest children. Also, the display pieces are often terribly unstable and a pain to keep clean. The Lego flowers are basically junk and you shouldn't buy them. They aren't nearly stable enough to have on display and they will certainly break when you try to clean them.
- Tomte 3y ago
  You're looking for the Minecraft sets. If you don't especially like Minecraft, throw away the one or two figures and enjoy the cool 2 by 4 bricks, just as they were in your childhood. Bonus: every detail is printed, no stickers anywhere.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  The best way to buy Lego is just to buy bulk dumps from families that stopped playing with them. It's going to be piles of unsorted bricks of all kinds and that in itself is a stimulus for creativity. Just go on ebay or the local equivalent and search for 'pounds lego' or 'kilo lego' and you should be all set.
- threetonesun 3y ago
  You can think of the advanced ones as more like puzzles you can display once you're done. Kids still like them. Even the finicky themed ones in our house get built then torn down to be rebuilt into fantastical mashups from my kid's imagination. I think a lot of adults have overly fond memories of using the basic blocks to build relatively basic things. Also kids today can (and do) that in Minecraft now.
the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
> On the one hand I'm disappointed, just like you What exactly is the disappointment? That they also target adults?
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Fortunately they also still sell the creative play and building blocks and not all kids built canned sets. Also, after being build as canned sets, the canned sets can become more distinct parts for creative building. At least, that's what happens with my kids.

loceng 3y ago

Entertained all the way to a totalitarian state.

solids 3y ago

Absolutely agree… I think in early 2000 they found a nice sweet spot where you bought a set to build a particular object, but all of them featured a fairly common set of pieces. So after a while of having it in the shelve it could be repurposed.

bena 3y ago

This is from the Ideas line where they take fan submissions and turn them into sets. Complain about what you perceive to be a change in direction, but unless you were buying older sets, you are part of the reason for that change

gyomu 3y ago

Well yeah, you gotta grow the business, as any good visitor of this site knows. You can only sell so many $30 buckets of loosely assorted pieces intended for children. There's much more money to be made in $200 sets with the popular IP of the day or $500 collector sets for adults.

robertlagrant 3y ago
> Well yeah, you gotta grow the business, as any good visitor of this site knows Well. You have to exist, which means you compete, which might mean you grow.
- aqsalose 3y ago
  >Well. You have to exist, which means you compete, which might mean you grow. Why growth? At some point you would eventually hit perfect saturation anyway, the steady state where everyone already is buying your product to the extent anyone can buy it. I get that losing business is bad, and it's better to "overcorrect" to growth, but as long as you compete enough to keep approximately same market share against other competitors, selling inflation adjusted $30 buckets of bricks to each generation of kids with profit sounds like perfectly good business. Owner of the business would receive steady income selling the inflation adjusted $30 buckets. I'd imagine you'd hit problems when the buckets of bricks you are selling are ~eternal and number of kids is no longer growing, so nobody needs new ones.
  - Auracle 3y ago
    As long as the population is growing, if your business isn’t you’re effectively shrinking. Plus image of Megablocks did Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. They’d overtake Lego in a minute.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    You'd have to grow because there are competitors that would do your thing and the new thing, so customers would go to them instead.

em500 3y ago

The classic brick buckets are still widely available, right next to all the themed sets and the replica sets (which are explicitly marketed to adults). Not sure what the complaint is here, that the general public don't share your taste?

manojlds 3y ago
Nah it's just the usual cynical HN comment.
bluetomcat 3y ago
Even the assortment of pieces in the Classic 1000+ piece buckets doesn't allow you to build interesting custom creations resembling buildings or vehicles. Instead of a large number of doors, windows, roof elements, wheels and sidewall elements, you get mostly purple, orange, pink, cyan and bright yellow 4x2s and 2x2s, and a large number of tiny specific pieces. The themed playsets aimed at 5+ children are leaning towards detailed modeling with many tiny 1x1 pieces. The one-off nostalgia-driven sets like the Lion King's Castle, the remake of Eldorado Fortress and the Galaxy Explorer are intentionally released as one-off sets with a time distance in the release date, and not as a part of a regular play theme.
- AlanYx 3y ago
  There are some good, versatile Classic buckets. The recently announced Creative Vehicles (11036) comes with instructions for 8 vehicles and instructions for another 10 vehicles will be available on the website. It'll be fantastic for kids who love building different types of cars, buses, etc.
- wharvle 3y ago
  Every now and then I see a set that looks like it’s actually for kids to play with. More exposed nubs, spaces big enough for kid fingers to fit into (so many feature only tiny spaces now, even for a kid!) and builds that don’t look so fiddly that they’d be impossible to repair after rough play or accidental damage without starting over. But yeah, even like 90% of the ones that appear to be marketed to kids suck for kids to play with, now. They look nice on the box, and on a shelf, though, and I guess that’s what shifts units.

chongli 3y ago

These sets are not creative play toys, they're highly-detailed 3-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. That is their appeal, and you can make the same argument about a traditional wood/cardboard jigsaw puzzle: "Kids should be learning how to paint with oil paints or watercolours, not snapping together these pre-painted jigsaw puzzles!" I think the real difference here is that we've transitioned from more of a mixed/manual labour economy to a mental/emotional labour economy. People get off work and they just want to come home and do something relaxing and not mentally taxing. Putting together a Lego set is like that. It takes more thought than watching TV, but not much. Coming up with something interesting and creative from a bucket of random Legos is different, and most people lose interest.

AmosLightnin 3y ago
I think your argument in quotes is a good one. :) Following a set of pre-defined instructions is not a creative act. It's not bad to build a puzzle, but I would argue that it's not nearly as meaningful of an experience as painting - or any other creative activity for that matter.
- bena 3y ago
  No, but building sets does have other benefits. There's some zen to the act, like model or puzzle building. But you can also observe and learn techniques to add to your own builds. Knowing all the ways Bionicles are put together can help you turn a Porsche into a full transforming Autobot Jazz.
- chongli 3y ago
  I think learning to oil paint could be a very meaningful experience. Relaxing to watching Bob Ross videos and paint along with him. I do also feel there is this sort of "cult" of self-improvement going around. Like if you're not spending every waking minute of your life learning some new skill or marketing yourself or trying to get a promotion, then you're wasting your time. It's very toxic. Doing things that you find relaxing should be accepted, even if they don't teach you anything or improve you in any way.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago

boesboes 3y ago

If only they had all kinds of different product line for different people!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

SteveGerencser 3y ago

My granddaughter and I build a ton of 'boring adult sets' together, and then she gets to take them home, tear them apart, and make anything she wants with the pieces. But she also loves Minecraft (she's 8) and we buy the Minecraft specific sets as well. It is quite possible to do all the things, it's not necessarily an either/or scenario like many people like to present as their argument against something.

_fat_santa 3y ago

I don't think they went from one to the other, more like they expanded to include sets that adults would be interested in. The way I look at it, the higher end collectable pieces subsidize the lower cost sets and "brick boxes" for the younger generation.

watwut 3y ago

When kids grow up into adults, they do not always become massively different persons in their core. Oftentimes, creative kids grow up into creative adults. Their hobbies often remain or they still look back fondly on their old hobbies. And when they are bored, they sometimes go back to their old hobbies, due to nostalgia. You see it everywhere, in music people listen to, books they read, etc All of that is ok. Plus, majority of lego kits go to kids.

toxican 3y ago

Why do you think they stopped designing sets for creative play? They still sell bulk lego. They still sell non-licensed play sets like space, city, castle, etc. And even the licensed sets are great for creativity because I doubt a kid's not going to shatter their set and start making their own damn spaceship because it has "Star Wars" on the box. None of that has stopped just because they also sell display pieces that are wildly popular and intended for adults. Like seriously go to any store that sells Lego and you'll see that a good 80% of it is bulk or play sets. There are a lot of things to be critical of lego for...the pricing, the over-reliance on licensed sets, too many god-damned stickers, etc. But this really isn't one of them at all.

wigiv 3y ago

As a mechanical engineer absolutely obsessed with Lego at a young age, I’ve recently (ie, when I could afford to start buying Lego again!) had to reconcile what I previously enjoyed about building with what I enjoy now. As a child, the joy of building was in part the satisfaction of following granular directions to see something awesome emerging step by step, and in part the joy of playing with the sets. I was immersed! Now, I think of them in part as essentially 3D puzzles and, in part, just curios… I like looking at them. Perhaps I’m subconsciously craving that unbound creativity I had as a child? Thing is, in my work, I get to materialize physical, mechanical things with machining and 3D printing and welding etc. I thought I would, but haven’t found myself designing and building new creations with Lego. Perfectly content following the instructions and putting it up on the shelf to admire!