Lego
18/01/20 04:28
I’m just a couple of years too old to have ben caught up on the first expansion of Lego bricks into the US market. My brother, who is two years younger, had Lego bricks and I certainly played with them as we were growing up, but I had another type of plastic bricks, known as American Bricks. You can still find the old bricks on eBay. They interlock, but don’t click together as tightly as Lego and the plastic is slightly more brittle and can be broken. I did, however, has a sufficient supply to build all kinds of structures before Erector Sets captured my imagination as I got older.
Lego bricks proved to be an extremely valuable toy as they continued their marketing as a worldwide company. By the time our children were old enough for the toys, they were the clear choice and we started investing in sets and more sets and even more sets. I build a Lego Table, with a lip around the edge, a bit like the fiddle you’d find on a boat, to keep the bricks on the table and off of the floor. Parents who’ve stepped into their child’s room barefoot in the dark know why it is important to keep the bricks off of the floor.
We have kept the Lego bricks that our son used. Several plastic boxes are stacked up in our family room ready for grandchildren. A few of the bricks have made it to our grandchildren’s collections. We have a smaller group of bricks, mostly mini figures, that travel in our camper and when the children make a creation they like, they are allowed to keep it.
There is a type of play that involves putting the bricks together according to instructions to make a precise replica of the picture on the box. We’ve also kept those instructions and our oldest grandchild will sometimes make an effort to find the right pieces to recreate a model that his father had made years ago. What I have noticed, however, is that the models made by following the instructions have limited play value. Once they are constructed, there isn’t much you can do with them. A few have moving parts and can be part of larger games, but mostly the creations sit on the shelves gathering dust while the child plays with the free pieces that aren’t currently attached to anything. Our grandson is pretty creative at making alterations and variations on the things that he has made. We have invested in specific colors and styles of bricks to help expand the play. And we have invested in storage systems to make the bricks work in a busy household with limited space.
One of the adventures of the toy is scanning the catalogues with our grandson and imagining what sets he would like to build. As the years go by and he gets older, he is drawn to more complex (and more expensive) sets. Because we are consumers who purchase Lego products both by going to retail stores and by purchasing online at the official Lego site, we have been identified by the company and we receive the catalogues on a regular basis through the mail.
What I have noticed is that Lego is now marketing directly to adults. They still have plenty of toys for children, but they have large and very expensive sets with a high degree of complexity. Even though we look at the pictures in the catalogue, our grandson is not going to receive the $800 Millennium Falcon set. It is, in the first place, far too large of a project for an eight year old in addition to being far too expensive for his grandparents. The set isn’t designed to be sold to children or to those who purchase gifts for children. It is designed for adults, who have large amounts of discretionary money and quite a bit of time to invest to make a huge set. The $700 Imperial Star Destroyer and $250 Bat Mobile are in the same category from my point of view.
If you go to the Lego web site, you can find specialized sets like the Disney Castle or the Manchester United soccer stadium, Hogwarts Castle, a giant roller coaster, the Taj Mahal, and famous buildings such as the Eiffel Tower, the White House and the Golden Gate Bridge. All of these sets cost hundreds of dollars and go beyond what one might think of as children’s toys.
Abha Bhattarai, writing for the Washington Post, published an article about adults who purchase Lego bricks and make the models as a form of stress relief. I guess Lego didn’t get to be the worlds largest and most profitable toymaker by limiting its audience. They already know how to target an audience by capitalizing on popular movies or trends. Now they’re seeing huge market in stressed-out adults and are responding with models like the apartment in the TV sitcom Friends. That one is aimed at people the ages of our children, not the ages of our grandchildren. There is even an acronym for adults who build Lego for themselves: AFOLs - Adult Fans of Lego. Fox is planning a television reality show called “LEGO Masters” which pits builders against each other in a competition.
There are articles about using Lego bricks in a form of meditation. Repetitive tasks are often used to help people concentrate on the present without being distracted by thoughts of the past or future. Called mindfulness or presentness, the practice has roots in Buddhism and Hinduism. Mindfulness is a kind of buzzword among millennials. It is also the target of marketing for companies as diverse as Apple, Nike and HBO. There are adult coloring books, crossword puzzles and craft projects marketed as mindfulness projects.
I admit that I find something soothing and relaxing about sorting the bricks back into the boxes after our grandchildren have visited. I’m not into spending any more money - we have a huge number of the bricks. And I don’t care about crafting the Empire State Building, but I don’t mind creating a bit of order out of the chaos of a tabletop covered with random bricks.
Now if you really want to move beyond stress, I suggest getting down on the floor and playing with your grandchildren whatever game they choose, or pursuing the reputation of always having time to read a story whatever else is going on.
Lego bricks proved to be an extremely valuable toy as they continued their marketing as a worldwide company. By the time our children were old enough for the toys, they were the clear choice and we started investing in sets and more sets and even more sets. I build a Lego Table, with a lip around the edge, a bit like the fiddle you’d find on a boat, to keep the bricks on the table and off of the floor. Parents who’ve stepped into their child’s room barefoot in the dark know why it is important to keep the bricks off of the floor.
We have kept the Lego bricks that our son used. Several plastic boxes are stacked up in our family room ready for grandchildren. A few of the bricks have made it to our grandchildren’s collections. We have a smaller group of bricks, mostly mini figures, that travel in our camper and when the children make a creation they like, they are allowed to keep it.
There is a type of play that involves putting the bricks together according to instructions to make a precise replica of the picture on the box. We’ve also kept those instructions and our oldest grandchild will sometimes make an effort to find the right pieces to recreate a model that his father had made years ago. What I have noticed, however, is that the models made by following the instructions have limited play value. Once they are constructed, there isn’t much you can do with them. A few have moving parts and can be part of larger games, but mostly the creations sit on the shelves gathering dust while the child plays with the free pieces that aren’t currently attached to anything. Our grandson is pretty creative at making alterations and variations on the things that he has made. We have invested in specific colors and styles of bricks to help expand the play. And we have invested in storage systems to make the bricks work in a busy household with limited space.
One of the adventures of the toy is scanning the catalogues with our grandson and imagining what sets he would like to build. As the years go by and he gets older, he is drawn to more complex (and more expensive) sets. Because we are consumers who purchase Lego products both by going to retail stores and by purchasing online at the official Lego site, we have been identified by the company and we receive the catalogues on a regular basis through the mail.
What I have noticed is that Lego is now marketing directly to adults. They still have plenty of toys for children, but they have large and very expensive sets with a high degree of complexity. Even though we look at the pictures in the catalogue, our grandson is not going to receive the $800 Millennium Falcon set. It is, in the first place, far too large of a project for an eight year old in addition to being far too expensive for his grandparents. The set isn’t designed to be sold to children or to those who purchase gifts for children. It is designed for adults, who have large amounts of discretionary money and quite a bit of time to invest to make a huge set. The $700 Imperial Star Destroyer and $250 Bat Mobile are in the same category from my point of view.
If you go to the Lego web site, you can find specialized sets like the Disney Castle or the Manchester United soccer stadium, Hogwarts Castle, a giant roller coaster, the Taj Mahal, and famous buildings such as the Eiffel Tower, the White House and the Golden Gate Bridge. All of these sets cost hundreds of dollars and go beyond what one might think of as children’s toys.
Abha Bhattarai, writing for the Washington Post, published an article about adults who purchase Lego bricks and make the models as a form of stress relief. I guess Lego didn’t get to be the worlds largest and most profitable toymaker by limiting its audience. They already know how to target an audience by capitalizing on popular movies or trends. Now they’re seeing huge market in stressed-out adults and are responding with models like the apartment in the TV sitcom Friends. That one is aimed at people the ages of our children, not the ages of our grandchildren. There is even an acronym for adults who build Lego for themselves: AFOLs - Adult Fans of Lego. Fox is planning a television reality show called “LEGO Masters” which pits builders against each other in a competition.
There are articles about using Lego bricks in a form of meditation. Repetitive tasks are often used to help people concentrate on the present without being distracted by thoughts of the past or future. Called mindfulness or presentness, the practice has roots in Buddhism and Hinduism. Mindfulness is a kind of buzzword among millennials. It is also the target of marketing for companies as diverse as Apple, Nike and HBO. There are adult coloring books, crossword puzzles and craft projects marketed as mindfulness projects.
I admit that I find something soothing and relaxing about sorting the bricks back into the boxes after our grandchildren have visited. I’m not into spending any more money - we have a huge number of the bricks. And I don’t care about crafting the Empire State Building, but I don’t mind creating a bit of order out of the chaos of a tabletop covered with random bricks.
Now if you really want to move beyond stress, I suggest getting down on the floor and playing with your grandchildren whatever game they choose, or pursuing the reputation of always having time to read a story whatever else is going on.
