"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For example, they really like those tiny little inside thingies.
One of the more interesting experimentations was Lego Architecture Studio.
All white (well, some translucent for glass/windows), 1200+ pieces, no instructions, but a book discussing some general architecture and building principles particularly with respect to Lego:
https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Architecture-Studio-Building-Blo...
One of my favorite sets, though architecture in general is a particularly interest/hobby of mine.
That's exactly what was in buckets of Legos that I got as a kid in the 90s, so I don't think much has changed. It was almost entirely 4x2s and 2x2s of different colors back then, too.
I get why but it feels less timeless than it used to, perhaps with less emphasis on creativity-led play. But what do I know - I'm a grownup.
And their directions were always a ton better, for sets—though they used to be more like spot-the-difference puzzles than they are now, which I credit with my burying the needle on a spatial reasoning test in high school, so I’m kinda sad they lost that perhaps-accidental pedagogical value in the shift to the you-can-follow-them-in-your-sleep, modern style of directions.
But maybe the knockoff competitors aren’t as obviously-shit as they were in the earlier days?
I wanted to like the cheaper brands but none of them have the same Lego engineering quality. We dusted off some of my old lego and the bricks still fit perfectly with the new bricks 30+ years later!
"They're miners... in space! They mine green Energy Crystals!" That's all you need. There was a K'nex mining set about the same time. Good stuff.
Then I realized that most of the catalog was like, Lego Harry Potter. Yeah, I really am complaining about what everyone else buys. I was up to my nose in Harry Potter merch already, I owned all 7 books. I wanted more Rock Raiders and Insectoids.
Heck, my kindergarten daughter likes that formula. I'm pretty sure there is a marketable business somewhere in there, but maybe not at sufficient scale
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.
On the whole it's a disappointing downward trajectory.
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.
If you find some keep it.
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.
Newer sets look nice, but IMO are much less fun to play with. My kids still like building Lego sets, but our Duplos get played with more often.
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.
Bonus: every detail is printed, no stickers anywhere.
Just go on ebay or the local equivalent and search for 'pounds lego' or 'kilo lego' and you should be all set.
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.
What exactly is the disappointment? That they also target adults?
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.
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.
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!
There's much more money to be made in $200 sets with the popular IP of the day or $500 collector sets for adults.
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.
Plus image of Megablocks did Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. They’d overtake Lego in a minute.
All of that is ok. Plus, majority of lego kits go to kids.