Toy Wisdom and Lego Wars

As a kid I spent a lot of time on my own. Introverted by nature, only child, physically hindered, etc.

Like any other boy with loving middle class parents I had toys. I preferred figures and Lego.

I did the same thing with both of them.

Being a male product of The Company training program, or at least enrolled in it as all children were forced to be in my day, competition was the order of the day.

My figures fought wars. From ninja turtles to GI Joes my figure box was backstage to an epic arena of hand to hand combat.

The cliche bashing of figures together with crude explosion sound effects was not to be found at least not if one looked closely.

I preferred figures with points of articulation or “joints” as I called them. How many joints a figure had was in large part a measure of its quality when choosing new figures.

In my day 10 POA on anything other than a GI Joe was like a faceted jewel. Today that’s easy to find and beat.

Transformers were different, they had many POA but they didn’t always move in useful directions, or have sufficient range of motion. Prior to the ball and socket revolution it was a rare transformer that could perform an axe kick.

Now of course throughout this time I had Lego. The urge is strong to call them Legos, as I did when I was a kid, which is a tautology apparently since Lego is the plural already. Old habits die hard.

Anyway, I always had Lego and my collection was always growing. Big family, generous parents.

Over time I grew frustrated with my figures and other monoform toys. My imagination was growing. And the scale of hand to hand combat was starting to feel like a constraint.

My mind was beginning a life long push towards the large scale. I began to prefer characters that could fly. I had discovered evolution in a way. It seemed silly to have a figure with rocket feet or something fight an earth bound figure like Donatello. Seemed unfair and pointless.

I had seen aliens, and real genius, and I was aware of snipers. So I figured flight plus rifle equals no more hand to hand. Sure I could deus ex machina my way around it, but in doing that I felt like I was cheating, and I felt like I wasn’t being realistic with the characters.

Like would Donatello just stand there and let himself be sniped from 50 feet up? Of course not, but he’s not the type to pick up a rifle and fire back either, but… He would build something to solve the problem.

I have no specific memory of this but I suspect my Lego system had its infancy in being equipment for figures. I do recall building rifles, and then gun emplacements, figure sized. Then I tried to build exoskeletons, but my Lego collection didn’t have sufficient parts/skill to really pull that off.

This triggered an arms race. Soon both figures had Lego weapons. And I found that those fights were far more satisfying. For one they were equal scale. (GI Joe vs Mutant Turtle seemed silly.) And though I didn’t think of it consciously they were more perfect because they were polyform. This is probably where my life long fetish for options, consolidation, and multitasking began.

Plus by this time I had turned into a SciFi space geek. Star trek had introduced me to artificial life and space ships.

As such the Lego weapon systems evolved into autonomous weapon systems. As I explained before flight was a serious advantage so it didn’t take long for rockets to find their way to the bottom of gun emplacements.

But then I encountered the same feeling of cheating. I mean just adding rockets seemed silly. Why retro fit a gun when you can purpose build a drone? then the fights became hopelessly mismatched, which ever was most recent won because it had been purpose built to destroy the other.

The seeds of my “Lego Wars” system were in place.

I had a large but limited collection of Lego. Only certain pieces seemed like weapon system pieces, and they were in short supply.

The newer creations had less parts to choose from and I started to cannibalize older models for parts. This exacerbated the feeling of unfairness. If I could just decide to destroy a model for parts the whole idea of them fighting was pointless. (This taught me the economic basis for all conflict, and planted the seeds of my understanding of disruptive technology.)

So I figured I’d have the ships fight for parts in addition to whatever arbitrary goal their stories demanded. It quickly evolved into something akin to Total Annihilation, (which I absolutely adored because it looked like little Lego robots anyway) People vs machines.

Then I injected a real world economic demand into the game world war. Those weapons were rare and coveted. But again, inequity, pointlessness, old enemies I now know well.

I always knew who would win and it was always who I wanted to win. The solution? Dice.

And so I invented Lego Wars. ( http://underlore.com/TBA/?p=771 )