[乐高式积木] 分享今天看到的关于乐高的一篇长文

       Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

For several generations, the interconnectingplastic bricks called Lego represented not only an educative means ofdeveloping imagination but also one of developing children’s capacity oflogical thinking. The first Lego catalogues from the early 1960s praise thesmall bricks as “good toys.” The reason can be found in the preponderantheading: because Lego is the “simplest thing in the world.”

“Simple” – yes, but not for simpletons.  During the 1960s and the 1970s, Lego builtitself a reputation as a toy for people who aspire advanced levels of grammarthrough the successful combination of abstract and concrete ways of thinking.Lego helps you to master your creativity like a language: being imaginativewithout losing sight of the most basic rules of logic, you will manage toremain coherent even in complex situations. Playing with Lego does perhaps notmake you a poet, but enables you to master a practical as well as a theoretical“language” with a certain degree of sophistication. The idea must have beenthat, once we reduce the elements of our children’s games to the healthy levelof the “basic” (providing at the same time a maximum of modulability), childrenwill become imaginative without becoming insane. Their imagination will develop“reasonably well” without losing itself in the wide space of “play” whichremains, just because in this space things are only “imagined,” frighteningbecause infinite.

Then there are the primary features. The basicelements (bricks) are rectangular and not round-shaped. Deciding to reject anyamorphous shapes (you will not learn “logic” through pottery), Lego managed toforce play (together with the intellectual capacity supposed to be shapedthrough this play), into more rigorous, geometrical structures. The choice ofcolors had a similar function. Far from refusing colors straight-out (and thuskilling imagination), Lego reduced colors to shadeless “basic” ones thatremained abstract in the sense that – apart from the green for trees – they hadno relationship with anything concrete. But most obvious became the logical rigor within the organization of theplay itself. Lego bricks stick together through an invisible structure, theycreate their structure so to speak out of themselves. This means that they providethe fragile brains of 2-14 years-olds just enough logical support to follow thelaws of reason without forcing them into abstract, pre-existing rules.

Somewhere between the primary and the secondaryfeatures is settled the general quality of Lego as a “serious game.” Adultsmust have jealously looked at these children who possess a toy that permitsthem to be serious and to have fun at the same time. Soon businessmen beganusing Lego because “playing with Lego” is an “efficient, practical and effectiveprocess that works for everyone.” 1 The transcendental power ofplay, known since the ancient Greeks, is here somehow lead ad absurdum, whichmight be inherent already in the original Lego-bricks themselves. Thepopular-scientific outline of a business-studies program using Lego offerssummaries of the works of almost all major thinkers – from Huizinga to Piaget –who have analyzed the exceptional status of play, and attempts to draw linksbetween the “lightness” of play and its “usefulness” for cognitive developmentas well as social competition.

We understand very well why those people bornbetween 1965 and 1975 hated Lego. According to the German writer Florian Illies(born in 1971), this generation, raised long after the last waves of hippidomhad curled away, vehemently rejected theoretical buildings of any kind.2 Thefirst thing that this generation had to throw on the rubbish was, of course,Lego.

The alternative became Playmobil that contrasts with Lego on several levels. Playmobiloffers no spaceships, no futurism and no technology of any kind. Instead, itspecializes in traditional values like farms, Blackforest houses, andpost-offices. Contemporary brochures of Playmobil read as if they have beenwritten fifty years earlier. In Playmobil grocery stores we find several kindsof sausages, cheese, “and other heartful dainties.” The hairdresser’s salon isideal for active role-play. Kids are supposed to create their concreteplayworld as realistically and detailed as possible. Finally, play will turnout to be what it actually is: imitation, naturally creating full-fledged,atmospheric, play-landscapes in which no Martians have introduced things like“structures.”

In the 1990’s Lego changed again, and this timemore than ever. Some of the bricks became “intelligent,” interactive, and ableto move. More and more “special parts” were introduced, making “basic” partsalmost a rarity. A large part of the ambition to appear “logical” was abandonedand the initial idea of Lego as a creative toy appeared as utterly weakened.Observers expected that the entire concept of Lego as a pedagogical principleflowing out of the optimistic humanism of preceding generations had simplyceased to make sense. The use of Lego bricks would soon be restricted toalternative education programs and business courses. As a popular toy Lego wasbound to die out. Then something unexpected happened: Somebody invented“virtual reality.” In the 1980 Lego boasted to give “imagination space tosoar.” Now Lego designers recognized what Lego’s mission should really be inthe contemporary world: to spatialize imagination.

When Lego invented the universe of the Bionicles,children began to desire Lego again. However, this time, kids (and it was only them because adults do not understandmuch of these new Lego) were not so much fascinated by what could be identifiedas the traditional Lego-logic but byLego-space.

Human bodies wrapped in technology orexoskeletons, hybrids of skin/chrome, flesh/metal, organic/inorganic, etc. arenot new; but so far, they did not necessarily enter the rooms of youngwell-educated Lego-engineers. Still, Lego decided to invest in this kind ofimaginary – though not without undertaking some changes. The Bionicles’existence is based on a story that takes place somewhere “in space” far awayfrom earth. The plot comes along as a mixture of Polynesian mythology, Africanreligion, Eastern philosophy and Greek polytheism, which distances itcompletely from the Japanese animé world.The story itself is simple and trivial which seems to reconfirm the Spartanaesthetic of Lego as the “simplest thing in the world.” The spiritual mixtureof exotic cultures that is woven into the good-vs-evil-story, on the otherhand, remains strangely alien to the spirit of Lego.

In any case it is utterly opposed to the idyllic,hedonistic world of Playmobil. Empathy and simple identification are stillforbidden. The characters being robots, their facial expressions are metallic,and display emotions only with much difficulty. What is more important thanemotions are powers – and thesepowers define the basic data of a certain spatial environment.

The patterns of the plot as well as the spacewithin which the plot develops, follow the logical lines dictated by thisspatial grammar. All“metaphysical”powers that are beyond control are clearly defined in a non-spatial way. Thebad god Makuta for example, negates even the most abstract spatial qualitieswhen he declares that he appears as what cannot be imagined: “You cannot destroy me, as much as you cannot destroy thesea, the wind, the void… I am nothing.” Though the Toas hasten to explain theyhave emerged from the water, Makuta insists that also they have “come out ofnothing.”

Compared to the old, organic Lego-space, spacehas here become more abstract and more “logical” than ever. But there is moreto this space than simply its logic: the logic applied in this game has itself becomespatial. The Bionicle-world still appears a typical Lego product because itprovides a well-structured, abstract space of an imagination that advances,uninspired by elements from the concrete world, solely through the power ofintellect. New, however, is that here a spatial universe is created through alarge number of abstract indications. These indications remain dynamic at everyinstant because they correspond to the rules of a game. This means that to“play” with Lego has a meaning different from the one it had before. True,children still reconstruct objects, build new ones and act out certain parts ofa game. However, the kind of empathy orimagination required, is now muchmore spatial than it has been intraditional Lego. Children no longer create abstract-organic spaces with bricksinto which objects can be inserted. On the contrary, they look at the Bioniclesand are aware of their spatial capacities. In other words, the space theyproduce through the game is no longer the manifestation of a constructivistlogic developed through the combination of some pieces, but space is contained in these Legos. Inthis sense, the new Lego-space looks much more like a Greek chôra.

All this accords very well with the fact that theBionicle story is distributed on the internet (it is also available on DVD). Toplay with these Legos is absolutely uninteresting if one has no possibilityfollowing the cartoons that provide, so to speak, the space for these Legos.“Play” takes place, to a large extent, on the internet: it takes place in thecorresponding Mata Nui online game as well as on the buzzpower site on whichBionicle fans discuss potential plotlines, construction projects, andphilosophical questions related to the Bionicle civilization. The buzzpower sitegathers one of the largest brandname communities in the world. Here again,“Lego-space” stretches over an abstract sphere and playful imagination has toadapt to this fact.

In a way, the Bionicle-game is a play so perfectthat Huizinga could have dreamt of it. In this world, the lightness of play isso absolute that it has become purely spatial. While conventional Lego-brickscan be stuck together in order to form a structure on their own, in the newLego universe one sticks together abstract quantities of space in order to forma virtual play-space that produces space in the form of a spatial grammar.While in traditional Lego, space developed organically out of a para-logicalactivity, and in Playmobil it developed out of imitation, in the Bionicle-worldspace is “virtually” given like a grammar that is not applied to language butto space. We no longer move around, as humanist Lego-engineers or practicallyminded Playmobil players, in the wide space of imagination, painstakinglytaking care not to transcend the most basic rules of linguistic logic. Withinthe new Lego-space we are freer thanever. We no longer need to take for granted the organic structure of the mentalspace that develops out of logical patterns, that is, of those patterns thatare supposed to exists “somewhere in the mind” and which make us believe that“play” is beneficial for the development of such mental, linguistic,structures.