How do you make an enduring toy? | Hacker News Reader

How do you make an enduring toy?

thewalrus.ca

45 pointsherbertl26 comments

As interesting as the article was, bringing up such things as the enduring appeal of Rubik’s cubes and he-man, I was somewhat disappointed with its focus on the corporate aspect and trademarked toys, with barely a mention of stuffed animals, teddy bears, certainly not traditional toys; it does briefly mention dolls. Many of us have or remember a special toy from our childhood, and I can’t help but wonder about people of the deeper past. Toy dolls have apparently existed since time immemorial, but my brief internet search isn’t giving many details. Dolls and pull toys go way back around the world. Otherwise many sources claim the first stuffed animal was produced by Margarete Steiff c. 1880, yet I have some skepticism around that.

I recently was at a birthday event for my niece, whose family is fairly affluent. Most of the toys were quite expensive things for a 3 year old, complex computer looking workstations made of plastic or faux kitchen accessories.

We gave her a small soccer ball (kid size, but well made). Once she opened it, she stopped unwrapping presents and wanted to play with the soccer ball. She ignored everything else the rest of the afternoon to kick the ball around the picnic tables. She threw tantrum when they had to pick up the ball to go home (even though she was still holding the ball).

Something well made, the function and form of which has proven the test of time. Buy your kid a baseball, not an apple watch. In another time and space, we used to say, style trumps fashion.

Soccer ball is probably better. A baseball requires people to have extra equipment like mits.

Interesting side-note here, "time immemorial" can mean from beyond the reach of memory/history, but in specific context in English it means from 1189AD at the end of the reign of King Henry II, who is credited with inventing English common law.

I find it strange she chose to bring in the He-Man revamp. It wasn't, to my knowledge, a particularly long lasting success (one of her criteria of successful toys) or having cross cultural appeal despite its update (another factor to the successfulness criteria of a toy). The toy lines doing worse than both of the series - though having a somewhat simultaneous launch of a more mature cartoon and a children's cartoon with accompanying toy lines did muddy the waters. The more mature cartoon's controversy eclipsing it's praises and the entirety of the children's programming and their toy lines was poor planning on the media campaign's part entirely, with Smith doing himself no favors by leaning into it. It was an OK cartoon and didn't need the apparent controversy to stir up ratings. People of a certain age would have taken the nostalgia bait they were promised in the commercials and been happy.

Not a bad read, but the reveal at the end, that it's just a submarine for a He-Man revival, was pretty lame.

No one liked the Netflix reboot and I'm not sure how you're supposed to persuade post-Zoomer kids (do we start over at A? how does that work) to play with their Dad's dressup dolls.

I believe it's now Generation Alpha.

Netflix has two different he-man: a reboot and a sequel, which one sre you talking about? . If you talk about the 3d one, our family enjoyed it.

It's stupid, but the evil guy trolls the tv show itself, which turns funny.

The sfx could be substantially better, no idea how they messed those up so bad.

Well, clearly it should have an accompanying mobile phone app. Those are clearly going to stand the test of time and be picked up by generations to come for pure enjoyment.

Sarcasm aside, this is the fundamental issue of software enhanced or required real world objects. Ten years ago the words "get the app" on some thingy-wazoo in a store basically screamed "won't work in about 4 years". I don't see how IoT will ever really take off without some form of stabilized long term interfaces, and you'd think basic IoT interfaces and support would have coalesced but... no.

Now that I have a kid, I look at toys in the amount of years they can provide fun, constructive or otherwise, and reflect on the toys I used to have. Legos, hot wheels cars, and stuffed animals are basically the top three. Everything else is basically junk.

marbleworks will always be my childhood favorite

Lego has already been invented. Why bother trying to improve on perfection?

But did you play with K’nex as a child?

I had a friend with both; I always prefered to play with LEGO at his house.

"Modern Lego" is strangely disappointing to me. Kits that are really exclusively about making a specific thing, full of unique parts. I don't remember that from my childhood. I mean, sure, a lego Saturn V is cool. But I can't see it being torn down and built into something else by typical 8 year old kids?

That was my first feeling too. But my kid is 5 and really into Lego, and I have changed my opinion and I now actually think this Lego is really, really cool, because it offers significantly more possibilities (and colors!). The pieces are actually much smaller, in general, and therefore even more versatile.

Modern lego is super boring, totally agree.

I used to love lego, but now the designs are all about big brands, which also happen to have ALREADY toys similar to those. Put on top that lego has way less generic pieces and more ad-hoc per design and it begs the question "why lego"

Without having read the article: There is no such thing.

how to make a good toy, sure. But "perfect"? For whom? In which context?

having read the article, you could sub 'enduring' for 'perfect' and maybe have a more accurate title

Nice. We'll adopt your word above. Thanks!

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks for the hint, I will follow it next time.

Appreciated!

Dang, you probably already shadow banned my account so you'll never see this anyway but why did you change the title of this post from the actual title. Dang, your editorializing and user control is getting a bit authoritarian for my liking. Please think about slowing it down, your rules are great but you don't need 100% enforce and 0 tolerance do you?

The article's title was linkbaity and the kind of thing that leads to objections like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33013413, which tend to fill up threads with shallow and offtopic stuff. We changed it because that's what the site guidelines say to do in such cases:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait"

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

A ball.

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