Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

sinker.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 289 posts

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#51

Post by cschmidt »

dgabriel wrote: post #30
bryanlarsen wrote: post #18

I'm having trouble understanding the backlash against the new Lego for girls initiative. As the father of a couple of pre-school girls, I'm loving the new initiative. It appears to consist of 3 things: - realistic looking minifigs. Not square and not oversexed. - additional brick colors, and not just pink. - sets not based on movie tie-ins, but in real-world locations like an inventor's workshop, a café, an animal ho…

It's the hard gender division. Why are there "girl legos," and "boy legos"? And it also seems like they're offering the same "girl themed" play sets that all the other toys offer, except you have to put it together first. Who plays with lego that way?

I think my 4 year old girl is going to greatly prefer their new legos. Right now, she plays with Duplos, and all is well. However, I can see a day when legos are "too boy". That's just what they reported happening in the Lego studies. Duplo works, and then the girls doen't make the transition to regular lego.

We have an older boy as well, and so our house has every lego you can imagine, plus lots of really cool vehicles, trucks, etc. Our daughter never goes near them. If this can make them more attractive to her, that's fantastic.

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#53

Post by nostromo »

When I see these stories taking companies to task over why they sell what they do, I always wonder why nobody holds consumers to task.

For example: why doesn't Lego sell to girls? Why doesn't Barbie have more realistic features? Why don't car manufacturers offer an electric vehicle? Why doesn't McDonalds sell salads instead of fries? Why do record labels offer such crappy music?

It's easy to blame the companies -- but in reality it's very hard for a single company to change the macro culture that informs their product decisions. If you want to find the root cause, look at the users and ask why they demand the products they do. In this case: "why are so few parents buying Legos for their girls?" or "why do girls feel a stigma about playing with Legos?"

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#55

Post by sliverstorm »

dgabriel wrote: post #4
javanix wrote: post #2

Look: I will fully admit that these sets are really, really cool. My son is getting a gigantic Millenium Falcon set from Santa this year (DON’T TELL) and both my wife and I are excited to play with it too. But it’s a model kit. We will put it together once and we will play with it a lot and that will be that. It won’t get remixed, won’t get hacked. Eventually it’ll come apart and be put away and not rebuilt because 1…

I think what he's saying is that he won't rebuild the Millenium Falcon, that the pieces will get scattered and used for other stuff. That's how it goes in our house. The set gets built very quickly, and just as quickly is dismantled and used for bigger, more creative projects. Wait -- no I see that he won't hack it. I wonder why not??

As a kid I found with some of the predesigned kits, the result was distinctly cooler and more sophisticated than anything I'd ever be able to come up with. As a result I was always loathe to dismantle them. Darth Vader's Tie fighter, for example.

It was much easier to tear apart my own creations because I could make something better.

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#56

Post by CountHackulus »

amirmc wrote: post #8
javanix wrote: post #2

Look: I will fully admit that these sets are really, really cool. My son is getting a gigantic Millenium Falcon set from Santa this year (DON’T TELL) and both my wife and I are excited to play with it too. But it’s a model kit. We will put it together once and we will play with it a lot and that will be that. It won’t get remixed, won’t get hacked. Eventually it’ll come apart and be put away and not rebuilt because 1…

I've noticed that some of new Lego sets have very specific pieces. Not really the kind you can mix and match between sets as in the 'old days'.

This kind of thing was popular during the LEGO "dark ages" in the early 2000s but has really died out as of late. The Millenium Falcon that's being referred to has very few, if any, unique parts. LEGO has really gone back to its roots in the past 2 or 3 years, especially with the AWESOME creator series.

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#57

Post by cschmidt »

javanix wrote: post #2

Look: I will fully admit that these sets are really, really cool. My son is getting a gigantic Millenium Falcon set from Santa this year (DON’T TELL) and both my wife and I are excited to play with it too. But it’s a model kit. We will put it together once and we will play with it a lot and that will be that. It won’t get remixed, won’t get hacked. Eventually it’ll come apart and be put away and not rebuilt because 1…

It is hard psychologically to realize you can never built the set as intended again. You end up lots of sets in big ziplocs. We've finally moved most of our son's legos into a single big bin, but he was opposed to it for a long time.

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#58

Post by pbreit »

nostromo wrote: post #53

When I see these stories taking companies to task over why they sell what they do, I always wonder why nobody holds consumers to task. For example: why doesn't Lego sell to girls? Why doesn't Barbie have more realistic features? Why don't car manufacturers offer an electric vehicle? Why doesn't McDonalds sell salads instead of fries? Why do record labels offer such crappy music? It's easy to blame the companies -- bu…

It's much easier for a single company to make some changes than it is for a single or even very large group of consumers to drive a change.

It stinks, but every complaint about products asks for an Apple comparison. I would say both Apple and Pixar have demonstrated that sticking to the purity of your craft can be both fulfilling and extremely lucrative.

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#60

Post by DarkShikari »

ericabiz wrote: post #3

As a girl geek who grew up on Legos, this makes me really, really sad. From the NPR article linked to from the article above: "Lego also consciously aimed for boy customers when it embarked on its stunning turnaround. Boys were easier to sell to than girls." headsmash "The new Lego girl minifigures have names like Stephanie, Olivia, and Emma, and the building sets include a veterinary clinic, a hairdressing salon, a…

(By the way, if you ever want a conclusive argument that girls being raised to love pink and hate math is societal

The most staggering thing about these assumptions is not merely how they contradict current scientific understanding, but they contradict reality. Pink used to be a boys' color: the idea of pink as "girly" didn't exist 100 years ago. Ironically, this commonly-given-example is itself a fantastic example of how wrong such assumptions about gender differences actually are.

It's rather laughable -- and sad -- how almost every single "scientific study" (often evolutionary psychology, a popular pseudoscience) claiming such absurd biological gender differences just happens to support 1950s stereotypical American gender roles, as opposed to gender roles anywhere else in history, anywhere else in the world.

The reality is that the biological differences are negligible in most regards, at least mentally -- claiming "girls naturally prefer pink" is just as absurd as insisting that blacks are genetically predisposed to like playing basketball. It denies the vastly greater importance of societal and cultural effects, dumps blame for problems -- such as gender bias in STEMS -- on biology instead of humans, and is pretty much flat-out sexist.

Post reply on HN