I really like Lego*. What I don't understand though, is adults who buy Lego for themselves or each other. It just seems rather odd.
As a child I adored Lego and played with it constantly, as far as my memory can be relied on. Back then - I mean the early-mid '80s - Lego firmly had a place in the child's play space. Toys were toys. Today Lego has a strange cultural position. Consider the Lego store. Here we can find toys apparently designed and marketed at all ages. It must be 'all' ages because there are simple blocks for the under 5s across the aisle from massively complicated huge kits that are surely aimed at adults. And these kits can be priced well over £100.
But what is the adult desire that leads to buying Lego, I wonder? Do adults buy it for themselves or is it a gift-giving economy where people mutually feed the play-desires of their friends? I honestly cannot work out what is going on here. An anecdote: a high-level academic where I'm studying recently had her 40th birthday and was bought a Lego R2D2 by colleagues - a kit that retails for something like £150.
What will she do with this? Build it, I suppose. I can kind of see the attraction myself, yet, I can't get away from the nagging feeling that about 30 minutes in I would feel a deep-seated, cold shock that I was doing something utterly silly. I mean, it's just Lego! More than this, my cherished Lego memories are not of building the kit and simply leaving it at that. The true joy of Lego is surely building - crafting - your own creations. Monsters, spacecraft, buildings, anything, springs forth from the creative maelstrom of the child's mind and feeds their play, either alone or with siblings or friends.
I cannot imagine someone giving an adult a jumbled bag of random Lego pieces. The adult Lego is all about building the kit 'properly', so presenting someone with what would amount to a child's Lego collection - all pieces heaped in an inviting, tempting pile - would be out of place. It's this disconnection that makes adult Lego such a hollow prospect for me: it is Lego as nostalgia, as a 3D jigsaw puzzle, with the real joy of Lego miserably absent.
Or perhaps I've got it all wrong and all adult Legoists are sweating over amazing creations, such as this Lego version of Rivendell. But I doubt it.
*Americans please note, the plural of Lego is Lego, not Legos.
Is Lego really that different to miniatures? As a child I stuck 40k bits together randomly creating my own masterpiece and revelling in the "real joy" of modelling. Now I have airbrushes, casting kit etc etc and painstakingly assemble my models with huge attention to detail much like "adult Lego is all about building the kit 'properly'".
ReplyDeleteAm I missing /sarcasm to this post?
No sarcasm at all, I find it genuinely baffling and hugely different to a miniatures hobby. For me, the reason why my hobby now is so enjoyable is that I am able to do the very thing that seems missing in adult Lego - I kitbash and convert models, which I then paint however creativity takes me: I also populate my gaming with narratives. I think that is close to the delight and imagination of childhood play, which I venerate, while I think adult Lego is the antithesis of this. Unless that is, people really do play with their Lego.
DeleteI recently restarted collecting lego now I'm in my thirties and it's rather like when you buy models for display only with no intention of gaming. for me the main draw is the minifigs there is something about the styling that appeals to me. and when it comes to it a stormtroopers portrayed through the medium of lego is just cool! I don't play with it like I did as a child but have also started experimenting with animating it as well.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree the styling of the kits - minifigs in particular - is cool. They're design classics, no doubt. So do you display them then? I'd be interested to know. I suppose for me that the creativity of doing animation with them is playful and imaginative, and that sounds like a (positively) non-adult think to do.
Deleteyes I display. the along with my other geeky collections including my minis my fossils and a few other things. I wouldn't consider doing stop motion animation in itself childish. I started experimenting with doing it with lego.as the nature of lego makes.it easy. but the animations can end up childish due to the fact that lego is still a toy. to me lego is part of my wider geekdom that includes my wargaming.
ReplyDeleteI don't mean childish as a pejorative thing to say, I mean a specifically 'non-adult Lego' thing to do - as in, be really creative with it. Creative geekdom is what it's all about!
Deleteah ok I think I see what you're getting at now. I think the adult lego geekdom is broader than you think it is.
Delete"The adult Lego is all about building the kit 'properly', so presenting someone with what would amount to a child's Lego collection - all pieces heaped in an inviting, tempting pile - would be out of place"
ReplyDeleteNot really. Some people like to build models and display them. Other people - adult people - like a big pile of Lego from which they can create things. I do. As a hobby/interest it's no more different, or unusual, than my others (toy soldiers, photography, crossdressing).
Well hooray for people doing creative things with adult Lego. The idea really does please me. I can only imagine though that such people are in the minority - a positively geeky minority at that.
DeleteBut I have to disagree that it's the same as a fantasy wargaming hobby. That's not to say that I'm judging one way of having fun as being superior to another. They're just different (as is a proclivity for transgenderism).
Lego can be collected and endlessly rebuilt. Simple fun.
The fantasy wargaming hobby involves collecting plus a range of craft skills involving modelling and painting. Then there is the gaming, which involves rules - their interpretation, augmentation and transgression - a community of gamers, and if it's done properly (to my tastes), a background of RPG-type narratives.
As a budding MoC'er myself, I mainly got back in it because the LotR range is cool to display, AND while I build things with my old (and new) bricks to tell tales (see it as forum based solo wargaming convention of all kinds of solo wargamers together), the 8 year old enjoys 'doing his thing' with his lEGOs, but feeling it as me and him doing stuff together
ReplyDeleteOw, and you might take a look at sites like this
Deletehttp://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?act=idx
and be amazed at how much bigger the LEGO minority is then the wargaming one, and I dabble in both so I saw the convention numbers ;-)
Can't beat MCM numbers though 88k last edition is huge
Thanks for the comments and the link. It seems as if Lego geekdom is a little larger than I thought, although I don't think I've ever met a genuine Lego geek (as far as I know...).
DeleteAll due respect to the Lego geeks. I still find it a little odd, so I think I'll stick to my toy soldiers :-)