Deconstructing LEGO

The Medium and Messages of LEGO Play

Jonathan Rey Lee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030536640
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030536657
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book investigates a paradox of creative yet scripted play—how LEGO invites players to build 'freely' with and within its highly structured, ideologically-laden toy system. First, this book considers theories and methods for deconstructing LEGO as a medium of bricolage, the creative reassembly of already-significant elements. Then, it pieces together readings of numerous LEGO sets, advertisements, videogames, films, and other media that show how LEGO constructs five ideologies of play: construction play, dramatic play, digital play, transmedia play, and attachment play. From suburban traffic patterns to architectural croissants, from feminized mini-doll bodies to toys-to-life stories, from virtual construction to playful fan creations, this book explores how the LEGO medium conveys ideological messages—not by transmitting clear statements but by providing implicit instructions for how to reassemble meanings it had all along.

© The Author(s) 2020

J. R. LeeDeconstructing LEGOhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53665-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Theorizing LEGO Bricolage: Medium, Message, Method

Jonathan Rey Lee^{1, 2}

(1)

Cascadia College, Bothell, WA, USA

(2)

University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Jonathan Rey Lee

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Paradoxically intertwining the freedom of a reconfigurable medium with the scripted messages of a socializing toy, LEGO is a meaning-making system whose “possibilities always remain limited by the particular history of each piece and by those of its features which are already determined by the use for which it was originally intended” (Lévi-Strauss 1966, p. 19). This quote perfectly describes LEGO, despite actually referring to the practice of bricolage from which this chapter derives its theory and methods for deconstructing the medium and messages of LEGO play as a playful practice of meaningfully mixing and remixing extant meanings.

Take, for instance, the LEGO Parisian Restaurant (Fig. 1.1a), a case study in mixed messages. Consider the oddity in how—at once architectural and theatrical, static and dynamic—this set advertises itself both as a display model and as an interactive playset. Or how this visually busy and spatially cramped model serves as a metonym for the charmingly contradictory leisurely bustle of Parisian culture. Or how this highly localized Parisian locale literally fits into (note the connections on the bottom-right side) a modular building series of other structures that are almost entirely non-localizable. Or how regular and rigid plastic elements are cleverly used to create an aura of artisanal irregularities (especially note how the chimney disrupts its regular brick patterning by strategically placing differently colored bricks and raised elements).

Fig. 1.1

a Product packaging for the 2014 Parisian Restaurant (Set #10243), part of a series of modular buildings within the LEGO Creator product line. Note the two pin connectors along the bottom right edge that allow this set to connect to other modular buildings (indicated by circles). Contextualizing this design is a blue-toned photographic background and multiple smaller images that show different angles. Of these, the lower-left also displays dimensions as an explicit reminder that this set is designed for display within the modular building series. b A magnified view showing the four white LEGO croissants (Item #33125) that flank the seashells on the cornices (indicated by circles)

Consider, moreover, the white LEGO croissants (Fig. 1.1b) deployed as architectural features on the restaurant’s cornices. Here, the croissant is essentially abstract, an atom of shape and color somewhat like a single dot in a pointillist sketch. At the same time, it is meaningful that this element is a croissant and not, say, a LEGO sausage (which would be materially interchangeable). Because LEGO elements are atoms of meaning that remain visibly distinct even as they are incorporated into constructions, the croissant features as a visual pun on a Parisian restaurant—both making and made of French fare. Reminiscent of wordplay based on the disconnect between sounds and meanings of words, this brick-play relies on the interplay of an element’s form and content. Used in this way, the croissant becomes indicative of the playful spirit through which LEGO embraces its many underlying paradoxes and contradictions, a spirit that belies the serious ideological character of its play philosophy .

More than whimsical details, the mixed messages that run throughout LEGO design history also ideologically construct LEGO play through embedded playscripts that construct and instruct the playing subject in potentially problematic ways. This project deconstructs the ideological formation of five forms of LEGO play—construction play, dramatic play, digital play, transmedia play, and attachment play. To facilitate this, this chapter advances some theoretical and methodological foundations for deconstructing LEGO derived from the phenomenon of bricolage. Deconstructing LEGO requires more than ‘reading’ LEGO meanings because LEGO does not merely ‘send’ messages, mixed or otherwise. A toy medium cannot passively transmit fixed content as it is sometimes imagined mass communication media do (although this is too simple even for such media). Instead, a toy medium offers uniquely tangible invitation to play with and play out its embedded meanings.

The croissant may seem to send a clear message because it is visually embedded in another visual medium—product packaging—that provides a built-in interpretive context for reading its meaning. The croissant is materially ‘transmitted,’ however, as a loose physical piece that can circulate through countless actual and potential processes of meaning-making as it is alternatively collected, organized, assembled, disassembled, and toyed with. LEGO, that is, at once provides fixed messages and material building blocks designed for playfully remixing those messages (or the elements of those messages) . In other words, this project deconstructs not only the mixed messages themselves but also the systematic way in which this interactive, participatory medium mediates its own construction and reconstruction. Rather than transmitted content to be passively received, the messages of LEGO are implied ideological frameworks that inflect the performance of creative play.

The mixing of messages in LEGO is rarely incidental and never insignificant, as these mixed messages speak to forces that inflect the creative possibility spaces that define LEGO play, suggesting a constitutive tension between freedom and constraint. Thus, while one LEGO Foundation research report asks, “How do we innovate if we also conform to socially shared and inherited conventions?” (Alsdorf and Gravel 2018, p. 58), another concludes that precisely by establishing such social conventions, “the LEGO Group can play an active role in … better highlighting the value of free play, tinkering, exploration and discovery,” as “The growing social dimension of play also calls for more action to connect phases of the play and creation process socially, supported by platforms and ecosystems where all members can contribute and find value in participating” (Gauntlett et al. 2010, p. 5). As imagined by the LEGO Foundation, creative play demands a supportive context that socially organizes and thereby ideologically inflects creative development.

Just as the LEGO System facilitates creative possibilities tied to material constraints, this LEGO culture attempts to facilitate creative play precisely by constraining it. Here LEGO draws from psychological research¹ that argues: “Not all play is created equal. Guided play in particular, where an adult scaffolds a situation toward a specific learning goal, may be especially helpful at maximizing engagement, particularly for younger children who are more susceptible to distraction” (Zosh et al. 2018, p. 5). Guided, scaffolded, and scripted, LEGO play offers possibilities for mixing and remixing messages within an implicit structuring context that strongly suggests what LEGO play can and should mean.

Unraveling this system of mixing and remixing messages requires some critical foundations—even a deconstructive analysis plays off the distinctive ways LEGO makes meaning. Outlining even a few basic elements of these foundations is a substantial task for a toy medium and media toy that neither fits neatly into existing critical paradigms nor has quite yet established a large critical discourse of its own. To this end, this chapter sketches a few relevant theoretical and methodological threads that might inform such an analysis.

The first section frames the study of LEGO within some key ideas from Media Studies, posing bricolage as a central metaphor for the media-specificity of LEGO. The following section theorizes the medium of LEGO by unpacking how the material design of the LEGO System facilitates a distinctive process of bricolage that synthesizes the material paradigms of atomism and plasticity. The third section explores the messages in and around the medium by delving further into the symbolic economy of LEGO to show how its meaning-making elements engage larger cultural ideologies. And finally, the fourth section lays out some methods for analyzing the elements, sets, and paratexts that make up the LEGO media landscape.

Mediating Bricolage

Although media scholars often emphasize how our contemporary media culture increasingly encourages media consumers to also become producers, there is often a clear material separation between media consumption and production. Most media texts available for mass consumption—books, films, artworks—have fixed content that cannot be easily edited. Conversely, most tools for producing these media—pen and paper, video cameras, art supplies—contain no consumable content whatsoever. This kind of material separation of production and consumption is unimaginable for LEGO, whose products are at once media texts and toolkits for producing media texts. Thus, one could picture the croissants in the Parisian Restaurant set as if each brush stroke in “Starry Night” could be peeled off and stuck onto other paintings. Any media theory of LEGO will, therefore, have to account for how this medium intertwines production and consumption through the constitutive mixing and remixing of extant meanings. To express this, the following media theory of LEGO is built upon the concept of bricolage, a form of creative practice based on the creative reassembly of already-significant elements.

While any metaphor distorts even while it lends insight, the one I have found most helpful for conceptualizing LEGO is bricolage, a French term for the humble yet creative practice of the bricoleur or “handyman.” The closest parallel to this practice in English is tinkering, which derives from the similar profession of the tinker (itinerant repairman) in the Middle Ages. Tinkering is a compelling image for modern and especially postmodern creative subjects who often create with and within an expanding collection of scraps scrounged from consumer society. Among other things, tinkering is material, quotidian, tactical, creative, transformative, resourceful, recuperative, constructive, and playful.

Reflecting these traits, bricolage commonly names artistic styles and techniques based on assemblage, such as sculptures pieced together from found objects and jumbled-together architectural styles. Similarly, without coalescing into any single consistent use, the metaphor of bricolage has been appropriated by quite varied theorists² to refer to cultural or media practices that appropriate and remix items in surprising, creative, or non-linear ways—for the sake of clarity, I synthesize these various usages into a single theoretical formulation: the creative reassembly of already-significant elements. This formulation is particularly well-suited to analyzing LEGO, a system for mixing and remixing its elements through playful tinkering. Thus, whereas any medium can be marshaled for bricolage, LEGO is a medium of bricolage—material play in LEGO is entirely oriented around bricolage as creative practice .

To adapt this concept of bricolage to the study of LEGO, it will be helpful to first situate this theory within several approaches to media scholarship that themselves need to be creatively reassembled to account for this medium of mixed messages. The first approach, dubbed media-specific analysis by N. Katherine Hayles (2004), considers how the distinctive characteristics of any medium inflects its messages. This more localized approach encourages interpreting media texts to account for the specific materiality of the textual object. This means not only interpreting the visual effect of the Parisian Restaurant as if it were any other miniature object but also interpreting how this set plays off...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Theorizing LEGO Bricolage: Medium, Message, Method
• 2. Housing Play in LEGO Construction Toys
• 3. Playing House with LEGO Friends
• 4. Digital Analogs: Bricks, Worlds, and Dimensions
• 5. Story Toys: Transmedia Play in LEGO Star Wars
• 6. Toy Stories: Attachment Play in The LEGO Movie and The LEGO Movie 2
• 7. After Words: The LEGO Sandbox
• Back Matter