What Makes LEGO LEGO?: An Interview with Jonathan Rey Lee (Part One)

Sometime in the late 1960s, Santa Claus brought me my very first LEGO set. My brother and I spent hours assembling houses and other structures using its distinctive snap-on bricks. I am pretty sure those original bricks ended up in a random bucket at our family lake house where for decades to come it would be a good way to spend rainy days when we couldn’t go out and swim or boat. I was never a hardcore LEGO fan — not of the kind we’ve heard so much about since but like most children of my generation, LEGO lurks in some distant memories.

This is one of many stories one can tell about LEGOS. My old MIT colleague Eric Von Hipple has used LEGO’s relations with its most dedicated consumers as a primary example to illustrate his concept of Lead Users. We featured Matthew Shifrin on our How Do You Like It So Far? podcast not very long ago, discussing his campaign to get the company to offer braille versions of their instructions to support the wide interest the product enjoys amongst the visually impaired. And last year, I enjoyed the reality competition program, LEGO Masters, which issued a series of challenges to some dedicated brick builders.

Jonathan Rey Lee’s Deconstructing LEGO: The Medium and Messages of LEGO Play offers a number of other stories and insights, discussing LEGO as both a toy company and a media producer. This is a book that will be of much interest to my readers who are concerned with the study of play, children’s culture, transmedia storytelling, and participatory culture, and that surely covers most of you. At first, I wondered how anyone could fill a book theorizing this deceptively simple product, but the deeper we get into this substantive analysis, the more I wanted to learn. Lee writes with wit and thoughtfulness, tracing diverse conceptual frames by which we might reflect on LEGO’s impact on contemporary culture and showcasing diverse projects (commercial, artistic) to which LEGOS have been applied. I am delighted to share just a small glimpse into what you can learn from Lee’s book in the interview which follows.

An image of Deconstructing LEGO photographed by Aaron Legg, whose Storm Trippin’ brickfilms starring the two depicted minifigure characters are featured in one of the book’s Post-scripts.

Let's start with the basic question: Why write a book about LEGO?

Well, the short answer is that it was largely a series of fortunate accidents.  The long answer goes back to a transformative encounter I had as an undergraduate with J.M. Coetzee’s brilliant novel Foe, which exposed the central ideological fictions of colonialism by rewriting the classic tale of Robinson Crusoe.  This encounter inspired me to study literature and haunted me well into graduate school, where I found myself searching for critical frameworks to help articulate my feelings toward this novel. After exploring a variety of perspectives, I thought I’d see what Adaptation Studies had to offer, so I set my sights on attending the Penn Humanities Forum on Adaptation.  This was in 2012.  I really wanted to participate but didn’t feel like I had anything to contribute to discussions of literature-to-film adaptation, so I was frantically searching for a different way in.  I eventually came up with the idea of presenting LEGO Star Warsas a form of playful adaptation.  

I had such great conversations at the forum that I started thinking it would be worth trying to refine my presentation into an article, but when I started researching the topic in earnest, I was completely shocked at how little scholarship I could find (quick shoutout to the often-unheralded Maaike Lauwaert, who should be credited as an early pioneer in studying LEGO).  Even though recent years have shown a marked uptick in publications, there can’t be many pop culture phenomena with more widespread cultural impact and less published scholarship than LEGO.  

Unable to find the theoretical frameworks I needed, I ended up writing a more philosophical article on LEGO to serve as a background theory and again set out to write the LEGO Star Wars article.  I just kept collecting material and brainstorming ideas until I had maybe 60 single-spaced pages of text and no clue about how to make it cohere into a single article.  I had already started drafting the book I was intending to write on literary reference and the philosophy of language when I realized that my fun little side project had somehow become more book-like than my main project.  In the end, I just threw up my hands and decided that this seemed to be happening anyway, so I might as well just roll with it. 

I suppose I’d say that rather than making a conscious decision to study LEGO, I just kept following my intuition as a researcher until I ended up writing the book that I would have liked to have read back in 2012.  

You tell us that LEGO is a “toy medium” and a “media toy.” Explain the distinction you are making here. Why is it important to you to think of LEGO as a “toy” as opposed to others you cite who discuss it as a building material or tool?

I used that kind of mirrored language because I wanted to commit to a both/and approach (instead of an either/or approach) that could explain LEGO as a genuine hybrid that fully embodies the characteristics of both toy and medium.  The nuance between the two terms is that “toy medium” indicates how LEGO deploys its toy elements as part of a complex meaning-making system (medium), while “media toy” indicates how LEGO situates its toys within larger media franchises, including both its own LEGO brand and many licensed tie-ins.  A toy like Meccano is more toy medium than media toy and a toy like G.I. Joe is more media toy than toy medium, but LEGO fits squarely in both camps.  

I would say that much of what makes LEGO interesting comes from how it bridges toy and medium.  At the same time, I find it particularly telling that there seems to be more resistance to treating LEGO as a toy (which seems blatantly obvious) than to treating LEGO as a medium (which seems much less obvious).  Although I don’t think anyone honestly believes that LEGO is nota toy, I do see fans and scholars occasionally trying to downplay its toy status to divert attention to how LEGO functions as a ‘serious’ medium.  At its core, I believe this reflects a deeply ingrained cultural bias that trivializes everything to do with childhood, play, and toys.  This is the sentiment that the father in The LEGO Movie expresses when he argues that LEGO is ‘not a toy’ to justify his adult hobbyist play and his exclusion of his son from that play.  

A novelty shirt that quotes the father from The LEGO Movie arguing that LEGO is “not a toy.”

While I understand the temptation to overstate things when cultural pressures trivialize what you care about, this kind of thinking can damage pop culture scholarship by reinforcing the misguided notion that some parts of culture are worthy of study and some are not.  However, when we recognize that popular culture phenomena are always worthy of study because they are meaningful to people, we can better understand the depth of our cultural practices.  While people have certainly done many ‘serious’ things with LEGO, I believe the most serious thing about LEGO is how its toys have shaped generations of children’s play.  

You write, “While I believe LEGO has incredible potential for promoting creativity, being a product of a capitalist system means that LEGO is necessarily branded and commodified in ways that ideologically inflect the kinds of creativity it promotes.” What do you see as the potentials and what do you see as the constraints that come with LEGO?

LEGO has many ways of promoting creativity, so I’ll answer this first from the material perspective and then again from the ideological perspective.  Materiality matters for any toy or medium because that’s where creative thinking becomes real.  So, the creative potential of LEGO starts with its well-designed material system—how the bricks click together.  I am constantly amazed by how LEGO makes such a wide, flexible possibility space so accessible and fun.  Children build genuinely creative things with LEGO bricks, while dedicated artists and fans build things of jaw-dropping beauty and complexity from the same pieces. 

Of course, like any medium, LEGO has material limitations.  But many of those limitations only add to the unique creative problem solving needed to build with LEGO.  So, I’d say the main material detriment is just that LEGO is extremely expensive. Ink and paper (and word processing) are extremely cheap, so my creative vision for novel-writing will run out long before my material resources will.  Most LEGO builders experience the opposite—their collection runs out long before their creative vision.  So, our ability to be creative in LEGO is directly impacted by our ability to participate in LEGO consumption, which raises vital questions of economic access.  

 Ideologically, LEGO genuinely values creativity but also has a branded vision of what creativity looks like.  In something of a spin-off article in the Cultural Studies of LEGO, I deconstruct how LEGO Foundation research reports on creativity and The LEGO Movie construct a particular vision of creativity again tied to capitalist consumption.  This is symptomatic of a larger trend in consumer culture toward thinking that the best ways to promote educational or creative development in children are to buy more and more of the ‘right’ products.  So, the issue here is not that LEGO stifles creative expression but rather that LEGO sells particular visions of creativity that strongly suggest certain potentially problematic values.  

 No toys are entirely neutral, so there’s not much point in arguing against ideological content in toys altogether. Nor do I think the LEGO ideologies are uncomplicatedly bad.  Still, I want to challenge some of these ideologies because—let’s face it—we live in a culture where corporate authorship plays a major role in children’s ideological formation, and even benevolent corporations are not always rewarded for promoting more ethical ideologies over more profitable ones.  I believe my responsibility as a media scholar is to deconstruct corporately-authored media products—not necessarily so that we can change a company’s trajectory as consumer activists (although it’s great when that happens), but because nuanced critical understandings are some of our best antidotes against being captivated by corporately-constructed ideologies.  

You place LEGO alongside Froebel’s gifts, building blocks (and I might add, erector sets and Lincoln Logs). What distinguishes LEGO from earlier generations of construction toys? In other words, what makes LEGO LEGO?

“Construction toys” is already an odd, somewhat fuzzy category.  It might make more sense to think of “construction toys” as naming several parallel histories, including that of abstract educational/developmental toys like building blocks, that of engineering-oriented toys like Meccano and Erector Set, and that of architectural toys like Richter Blocks and Lincoln Logs.  And even within these particular histories, each different construction system has its own unique material characteristics that provide highly distinctive play experiences.  In particular, one of the most distinctive things that makes LEGO LEGO is how it draws a little bit from each of these three traditions, simultaneously promoting abstract, engineering-oriented (especially TECHNIC), and architectural thinking.  

And more than mixing different construction toy traditions, LEGO is also a hybrid between construction toys and other toy genres such as dolls, action figures, and playsets.  Consequently, LEGO promises distinct and sometimes contradictory kinds of play in ways that sometimes send mixed messages about what kind of toy it is.  For example, one core LEGO strategy is the “hard fun” mentality of advertising the implicit developmental benefits of a construction toy masked within bright, thematic, consumer-oriented play.  A big part of what this book is about is deconstructing the sometimes strange, sometimes questionable ideological formations that arise when LEGO tries to hold all these types of meaning together.  

 Jonathan Rey Lee researches material play media, especially toys and board games. He has published articles on LEGO, Catan, and the Star Wars CCG. His book Deconstructing LEGO: The Medium and Messages of LEGO Play was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. Jonathan received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Riverside, where he studied nineteenth-century realist novels and philosophy (especially Wittgenstein). He currently teaches interdisciplinary humanities and writing courses for the University of Washington and Cascadia College.