Why I’ve Started Playing With Legos
A surprisingly great way to pull your brain away from your keyboard
See that car above?
I just made that.
With my new Lego set.
Which I now carry around town. I am in my mid-50s, by the way.
I should maybe unpack this a bit.
The other day I was in a Barnes in Nobles getting some books, and I wandered past the section that has kids’ toys. I gotta hand it to Barnes and Nobles: They stock some pretty kickass toys — a truly great selection of Euro-style board games, and lots of weird arty creative sets.
They also stock Legos. Most of them are the “kits” — i.e. you buy a kit to build the Eiffel tower, or the Death Star, or a scene from Harry Potter or something. I’ve never much liked that whole movement towards the kit-i-fiation of Lego. It feels like a devolution: Taking a toy that was originally the epitome of open-ended play, and turning it into the rote following of instructions.
As an aside, I suspect the shift of Lego into “kits” is part of why Minecraft took off so profoundly in the lives of elementary-school kids in the last decade and a half. With infinite blocks and zero prescribed “kits” to build, Minecraft neatly stepped into the cognitive role that Lego…
