One of the saddest and strangest developments of my lifetime has been the gradual replacement of the generic Lego smiley face with those displaying fixed cartoonish expressions of various kinds. OK, it's not quite the invasion of Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis or rising inflation. But you know what I mean.
Let's take a step back for a moment in order to explain. I would like to coin a new word for you now: the word I am going to coin is genericism.
genericism, n.
The favouring of the standard, or the general; the avoidance of the specific, or the varied.
Genericism has its benefits and its pitfalls - it is not a virtue in itself. But when it comes to toys which are to be used in imaginative play, it is important, because it allows the child (or the grown man or woman, indeed) to project whatever he or she wants into the toy in question. If all Lego faces are blandly smiling, then that is tantamount to them having any facial expression whatsoever, or none at all. They can therefore be angry, sad, happy, upset, tired, or whatever, depending on how they are being imagined in the moment. The fact that they are all generically blandly smiling means they can all readily be something else in the mind's eye.
However, when some or all Lego faces have distinctive facial expressions - when genericism is repudiated - this has the effect, perversely, of making them harder to play with. It is not impossible, of course, to imagine that this Lego figure with the permanently angry/scared/tired face is not angry/scared/tired in any given moment within the context of imaginative play. But it nonetheless feels awkward. It requires more of an imaginative leap. Within the mind's eye, the angry-faced Lego figure is angry. And it is harder to picture them as being scared, tired, or anything else.
Another way of putting this is that while the Lego creators seem to have deliberately walked down a path towards what they think of as creative variance, what they have actually really done is blandify their product. They have stopped thinking about it as a toy and instead chosen to focus on what looks good. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is deliberate - that the 'faceification' of Lego figures, if I can call it that, is part of a wider shift away from imagining Lego as a toy and re-conceiving it as a collectable that mostly sits on shelves looking nice. If so, it is perhaps to be expected, but rather a shame. And it is connected to something that I think is rather sad about modern childhood itself: all around me I notice that children's opportunities to use their imaginations are being squeezed. Lego ought to be one at the forefront of the battle against this. But the company seems not particularly to care.
Perhaps it goes without saying that this ties directly to the OSR preference for systems that allow players and DMs to improvise within the (to use the Forge term) “fertile void” left by the rules. The more a designer defines an aspect of play (whether with Legos or elf games), the less room there is for players to actually engage in imaginative play within and around that aspect.
ReplyDeleteCompletely!
DeleteThat ressonates strongly on me.
ReplyDeleteBack when I was a kid I had these generic Taiwanese Lego-like pieces which I used to create little dudes; no expressions whatsoever, just a plain yellow/red/black piece representing their faces. (They would have been great miniatures, had I not let them go long before knowing tabletop.)
Unfortunately, Lego has become a franchise aimed at collectors. Sparkling children's imagination has taken a back seat.
I'm pretty sure that in the oldest Lego sets the heads didn't have any printed faces either, they were just those yellow drum shapes.
DeleteThere's something of this in the development of D&D over the decades too - the move away from eg Fighting Man to more specific classes.
ReplyDeleteI would agree.
DeleteAs a Lego enthusiast myself, and a parent of Lego enthusiasts, I really don't have a problem with the faces. My kids regularly swap heads around to get the character they want.
ReplyDeleteThere was a time when most of my faces were still the basic smiley, or some of the early common faces, and I really treasured the special faces. Now they mostly blend in, yet, as I am making up figures to use in my creations, I look through all my heads and actually rarely grab a generic smiley.
I don't feel like this is any creative limitation.
But this has been an age old problem from when Lego first started introducing specialized parts. More and more, people argue the sets remove creativity. But again, that doesn't stop my kids. They keep many of their sets built per instructions, but they also have torn some apart and build new things with the pieces or they steal my pieces.
But the more and more I build, the more I appreciate the special pieces.
Heck, one of my favorite things to build is Lego trains. And those just plain don't work without pieces that are hard to use for anything other than trains, sure, the old blue and grey straight rail pieces can be used for non-train things with some ease, but while I have seen creations use curved track in creative ways, for most, and curved or switch track pieces are only ever going to see use as train track.
Yea, over the years, I have accumulated pieces I will never use. But they are really in minority compared to my vast collection.
Also, yea, for many folks, a set is just a model they build and display, but for others, the set is an initial inspiration. I have slowly been modifying sets because I like buildings with 4 walls and a roof for my big displays. But the sets are cool enough to build from. But I also build things from scratch.
So keep coming with the new heads.
And actually, to some extent, because there is so much variety in heads, they also just disappear. What is more interesting is the final character built, and how it's used, whether in a static display (my case) or in active play (my kids).