I Am Disappointed With LEGO

This is kind of a sister post to the one I posted at Levelcapped regarding the demise of LEGO Universe.

I got to thinking about the target demographic for LU, and why it didn’t click with enough people who thought it was a decent enough adaptation of a well loved product like LEGO.

I’m a long time user of LEGO products. My brother and I received many a LEGO set for Christmas and birthdays, back when they cost a fraction of what they’re going for today. Sadly, the integrity of the sets were never maintained; our parents always threw the contents into a massive cardboard box, mixing everything into a LEGO stew that would later demand several minutes of raking pointy-cornered bricks around like a plastic rainbow Zen garden in the hunt for the smallest pieces manufactured by the LEGO company. But it was OK, because we preferred to make our own creations, and every set added to the mix was just more materials to use for the next, great creation.

That’s what always made LEGO great: the ability to create whatever you wanted. It was brick and mortar for the pre-teen set, where the limited selection of geometric blocks were combined to make a starship, a futuristic home, or a motorized model of K-9 from Doctor Who (I kid you not. I was really proud of that one). Sadly, I think LEGO has lost sight of that, and I’m not sure why.

I look at the LEGO sets now, and I see a lot of the same kinds of sets that we had as kids. City sets with fire stations and airports, or futuristic sets with spaceships and aliens, and more. But when I look at the pieces, I’m appalled. There are far less “general purpose” pieces, and more “specialized” pieces, parts that can only be used for the things that they’re designed to be used for. Maybe it’s a wing for a bird, or a single piece wall of a castle. These pieces can’t ever be used for something they’re not, because a bird wing will always be a bird wing, and a castle wall will always be a castle wall.

The way I see it, LEGO has moved from a company that makes something that is about the sandbox aspects of free building to a company that makes something that is trying to provide a structured and specific themed experience in every box. They’ve stopped making “building blocks” and are now offering “playsets”.

I also believe that this is the rotten wood that was propping up LEGO Universe. I tried LU and it wasn’t what I expected or wanted. I wanted to play with LEGO bricks. What I saw was a translation of their “action universe” mentality that we see in their current playset offerings. It had LEGO sensibility, along with made their console titles so popular (Star Wars, Batman, Indiana Jones), but in order to build, I had to earn bricks. Each and every one. It wasn’t a matter of unlocking one brick and having an unlimited supply of it; one unlock meant one piece, period. The meat of the game was all about adventuring in a pre-built world where the most expression you could have was to destroy enemies in a shower of bricks (which you couldn’t pick up), or to build something very specific from a pile of jittery blocks on the ground. To say that it was disappointing would be an understatement. I suspect that I am not alone in this assessment.

LEGO can take their product any way they want to, of course, and it seems that they believe that the best way forward is to give their customers a specific, guided experience. I suppose that’s OK, but it’s not going to fly in my house. Sadly, my daughter isn’t as into the blocks as I was at her age, but I did bring my massive box of LEGO up from my parent’s basement for her to have. She’s very creative, and when she does get to urge to play with the LEGOs, I’d rather she have the formless, undetermined blocks to work with instead of someone else’s notion of what she should be building.