Legos are everywhere these days. And there are lego sets for everything. Starwars, Minecraft, Harry Potter, Super Heroes (both DC and Marvel), the list goes on and on. Legos are great. Legos are awesome. But legos are way different than when I was a kid. Lego sets in the “olden day” were freeform. There were no instructions. No movie tie-ins. You just built stuff. Sometimes just a wall, sometimes four walls that you could use to hold other things, sometimes things so magical that they transported you to a different world. You’d jump in head first not knowing where the next piece went. Trying and pulling apart and then trying again. You could play legos for hours and hours. Snap, snap, snap. What a wonderful sound. And if you did get frustrated, it was usually because you didn’t have enough pieces.
Nowadays (yes, I’m trying to sound old) the experience if completely different. Not necessarily worse but definitely different. The sets are quite amazing. The detail, the ingenuity, the creativity. It’s dazzling! But the thing is, it’s someone else’s detail, ingenuity, and creativity that has been prepackaged, mass produced and shipped around the world. It’s formulaic. It’s passive. Open bag one and turn to page one. Follow the instructions. Legos have become a great tool for learning how to following instructions. And I mean you have to follow them to a T. One piece out of place and you’re done for. Everything is off. It won’t look like the picture!!! Now, it’s really advanced model building without the glue. And because there’s no glue when you do try to play with them you really just have to go through the motions. Play too hard and it falls apart. Usually in some spectacularly complex fashion that no instruction manual could help you repair. All is lost. You either have to start all over from page one or scrap the whole thing and move on.
This comes up every time my daughter or son gets a new set, or when we give one as a gift. The parent all talk about how it was different when we were kids. How we could just sit there for hours and build. And yet, we all do it. Buy the next and newer and bigger set. And follow the instructions.
So here’s what I say. Do it. Follow the instructions. Build the sets. Play with them hard. They are cool. But when they do break, and they will because they always do, go all the way. Pull every piece apart and put them in a bin. Don’t look back. Throw the instructions out. If this is done enough, you will have the most elaborate freeform lego bin known to man. Then, crack it open, put it in the middle of the floor, and build. Freeform.