Lego Research Paper

749 Words2 Pages

A problem that is of personal importance to me is an issue that the Lego Corporation has seemed to have for a while now. Lego, a company that makes little plastic building bricks, has always emphasized the ‘creation’ aspect of their products. Their mission statement, “Inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow, (Mission and Vision)” is testimony to that. Recently, certain sets and themes have been shying away from that mission statement. They have been less about the creation, and more about storylines that can be translated to non-Lego merchandise. As a fan, I view this as a problem that strikes not at the facade of Lego, but one that hits close to the core of what makes Lego Lego. The Lego of yesteryear had simple sets, using few bricks …show more content…

Most of these themes have a story tied to them that is materialized in various non-Lego Brick merchandise. Because of this odd shift in focus away from the set and to the story, the whole experience just feels scripted, as shown with Legend of Chima set #70224, which in the description says: “Sir Fangar’s Saber-tooth army seems unstoppable as it freezes the kingdom of Chima and steals all the CHI. Team up with the elite Tiger warriors to launch a roaring counter-attack with their mighty Mobile Command vehicle! (Tiger’s Mobile Command)” There is a blatant move from letting builders decide their own story to telling the builder how to play with the set through the use of super-specific product descriptions. This choice goes against Lego’s main ideas of creativity, and it shows, as all their original play themes nowadays include some aspect of forcing …show more content…

The most extreme route would involve toning down heavily on the non-set merchandising, re-evaluating the core values, and making new sets that blend old open-endedness and new construction. However, I respect Lego as a company, and I certainly do not wish to cause harm to their profits and as such this is not the ideal route. So if Lego cannot easily revert to their old business model without a lot of shuffling, something else might need to happen. Perhaps they make their theme design less story-based, and any stories don’t bind to any individual set. This would allow them to continue theme-based merchandising, but let builders make their own stories. Perhaps Lego does what they did for their Bionicle theme, where the story is there, and it is bound to the characters and their interactions, but the sets themselves are merely figures, not story instances, and the storywriting itself is mature and not just a bunch of click-bait aimed at 6 to 8 year

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