This concept art for the forthcoming online game, 'Lego Universe,' is from a player zone of that virtual world.
(Credit: Lego)
SAN FRANCISCO--On a regular basis, two of the things I most like to write about are Lego and virtual worlds. So when I first heard about Lego Universe, a Lego-themed virtual world, well, I was more than a little interested.
Lego Universe, which, sadly, is still about two years from public release, will be a full-scale MMO (massively multiplayer online game) aimed at Lego's core audience, kids ages 8 to 12. But in keeping with the company's awareness of the millions of adults who are utterly devoted to the iconic toys, there is expected to be something for the big kids, too, said Mark Hansen, Lego director of business development and a guiding force behind the game.
In fact, Lego Universe is being developed by a Denver company called NetDevil, and not long ago, Lego flew 50 "partners" to the Colorado capital for some in-depth discussions about what the game should entail.
Exactly what came out of those meetings, of course, is secret, but it's safe to say they were about creating the types of environments the adults would like to see the game include and which would be suitable for children.
A big part of the game is expected to be building--as in letting players build houses, vehicles, and so forth, all out of the famous plastic bricks. Well, at least digital versions of them.
Another piece of concept art from 'Lego Universe.'
(Credit: Lego)During a meeting Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference here, Hansen explained to me that Lego Universe is very much a part of the, er, Lego universe. That is, the game will be just the latest part of the huge ecosystem. Practically, Hansen said, this means that players--or their parents--will be able to order actual, physical, sets of their creations.
And that means that Lego is in the process of developing a logistics team, Hansen said, that would be able to put such sets together, package them up and send them off to their eager recipients.
Lego Universe players will start out with a fully customizable "mini-figure," the little Lego people that are so well known from all our many years of play. From there, they'll explore the virtual world, building, interacting with other players and potentially engaging in the kind of make-believe that kids the world over have been doing with Lego bricks for many, many years.
That is to say, they can build a castle, and then get invaded by a friend. Or vice versa.
"As you go through the game," Hansen told me, "you gain accessories and you gain bricks...You earn points through play. As you do that, you get more property, more property to build on (and) you get to explore more."
As the game development process moves on, Lego will work hard to get parents involved because it is very aware that to build a game aimed at kids but which will put kids in the same environment as adults, safety must be a major concern.
But Hansen said that Lego also wants parents' input on how to make the game a good place to work on the kind of child development and learning processes that the physical toys are good at.
Whether I really see a game like this as a tool for child development is not clear to me. But I can understand their point. Still, I view it much more as a tool for getting kids to demand that their parents pull out their credit cards so they can buy the real-world versions of their in-world creations.
The 1971 German edition of the Lego catalog included suggestions for how to build a Lego tunnel using things other than the iconic plastic bricks. It was an early example of a company promoting a do-it-yourself philosophy.
(Credit: Chris Hecker)
With Web 2.0 in full ascent and the widely accepted view that do-it-yourself, or DIY, is the way to get users or audiences engaged these days, we tend to forget that it's a relatively new phenomenon, at least from the corporate perspective.
For every Second Life or YouTube that exists today, that encourages users to create their own content and to potentially do so without spending any money on their corporate parents' products, there are endless examples of companies going out of their way in the past to make sure you do anything but that.
But way back in 1971, when most people had never even heard the term "do-it-yourself," a little paragraph hidden in the middle of the German edition of the Lego catalog promoted that very concept.
On page 43 of that catalog, according to Chris Hecker, a technologist who currently works for Electronic Arts, there was a tidbit that seems oh-so-juicy to someone with today's perspective.
It was instructions for building a tunnel. But as the translation from German below indicates, Lego wasn't interested solely in customers spending their hard-earned Deutschmarks on their product:
"You can...build a tunnel from Lego bricks. But you'll need quite a few of them," the catalog reads. "Maybe you better use them for a train station or other buildings that are part of a real railroad. Take a shoe box or a similar card board box and cut out two holes, and there you've got your tunnel already."
True enough: Lego was saying that you could use something besides its bricks to make something. Today, this is a common instruction. But back in 1971, it was hardly so.
As Hecker puts it on his personal site, "Yes, this catalog for a commercial product just told you not to buy more of its product, it told you how to conserve, improvise, Do It Yourself, and work around a problem with a shoe box. Those were the good old days."
Indeed. Now I can only wonder what the world would look like today if more companies had fostered that approach in 1971. We'd probably be well on our way to Web 4.0 by now.
If you happen to have seen my work in the past, you may have noticed that I am a big fan of all things Lego.
Jarad Barkdoll participating in the San Francisco regional of the 2006 national master Lego model builder competition. Barkdoll is one of millions of regular Lego users. The iconic plastic brick turned 50 Monday.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)Over the years, I've covered two national master Lego model builder competitions, visited Microsoft headquarters for a demonstration of Lego robots, written about the communities behind Lego robotics, and much more. Oh, and played with the bricks a lot myself, though certainly not nearly as much as some of the people I've met while writing about this wonderful toy.
I even have a friend whose car is covered in the colored bricks.
So when I found out last week that Monday is the 50th anniversary of the Lego brick--defined by the date, 50 years ago, when the patent for the brick was filed--I have to admit I was excited.
The Lego company plans to celebrate the anniversary with, among other things, a worldwide contest to discover the best kid Lego builder. Each country will have its own national champion, Lego promises, and these lucky kids will get the right to come to headquarters in Denmark to fight it out for the world title.
Having, as I said above, covered two adult U.S. national model builder competitions, I can tell you that these things are great. I don't know what Lego plans for the kids, but if it's like the adult version, they'll get some time to pull bricks from endless bins, and then a few hours to build something magical. They'll also have to all craft the same object, with the best models getting a leg up for later in the competition.
But this is just a way for the company to celebrate its anniversary. The real point is that the little plastic brick has meant something significant to endless millions of people around the world. And it all had to start somewhere. It happens that it started, by one measure, 50 years ago today.
I hope to be around to play with them for 50 more.
If you're the kind of person for whom every year is centered around Burning Man, then there's a certain problem you have with the calendar: you can't go to other Labor Day weekend events.
Not that I would know anything about this, of course, because I only go to Burning Man some years, and it's only coincidence that it's happened 10 years in a row.
But anyway, I noticed today that there's going to be a great Lego fan festival in Washington, D.C., next year, called BrickFair. "Fantastic," I thought, as I love attending Lego events.
And, then, sadly, I noticed that it was scheduled for Labor Day weekend. Sigh.
It turns out that there are always so many great, geek-friendly events planned all over the country during that weekend, and if you're a burner, you can't go to any of them. The same is true if something is scheduled immediately before or after Burning Man.
I think to myself any time I come across one of these things, "What were these people thinking? Don't they know that means that burners can't go?"
Well, I suppose the reality is that there is a whole world outside of Burning Man, and that there are even a few geeks who don't go, or at least who don't go every year, but who still want to do something fun that weekend.
Who knew?
Still, as someone who regularly finds myself in the sad position of having to skip one great event after another in order to go to Nevada's Black Rock desert, I'd really like to urge the folks organizing these gatherings to consider the calendar.
I mean, already from what I gather, we've managed to convince the organizers of at least two events I can think of, the Austin Game Developers Conference and the Second Life Community Convention, to move to different places on the calendar.
That wasn't that hard, right? Who's next?
A camera ad that pays homage to geeks.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)When I was in high school, all those years ago, being a nerd, or a geek, was a painful thing. We were the outcasts, the forgotten ones who couldn't get a date to save our lives, and for whom the future seemed certain to be a blur of solitary days and nights spent coding.
Over the years, as my lot in life improved, it occurred to me from time to time that I should go back to that school, take a few of these unfortunate souls aside, and give them the good news: Sure, today you're alone and miserable, but someday the world will be yours. Someday, those jocks who stuffed all those freshman boys in garbage cans and lockers or who laughed at the girls with big glasses and awkward hairstyles will be the ones writing out the insurance policies on your BMW.
But today, I don't have any need to go and deliver this message of hope. Today, the geeks are absolutely owning. If it's not a 21-year-old founding Facebook, it's a teenager figuring out how to untether an iPhone from AT&T's grasp and getting worldwide attention for it.
And don't get me started on how rich, famous and popular the Google guys are.
These days, in fact, geek men can even get dates. And lots of them. In my crowd, it's the guys with brains--not looks--who attract the most desirable women. If you can program Linux--and can carry on a conversation--I know a dozen women who would love to spend time with you.
And it definitely works the other way, too. Women like Violet Blue, Irina Slutsky, Xeni Jardin and others are waving the geek flag loudly and proudly, even as they surely must have to fend off an endless stream of suitors enamored of their understanding of tags and blogging and programming.
I'm not trying to say that the benefits accruing to being a geek today are all about love, money or popularity. Rather just that geeks now have a place in the world like never before and the culture that has sprung around us is exciting.
Basically, and if you're reading this you've probably already come to this conclusion, this is the best time ever to be a geek. Maybe it's because technology and mainstream culture are now married, where they used to be only the most formal of acquaintances.
Whatever the reasons, this blog is going to be a celebration of geeks and the culture that surrounds them. (I mean us.)
And what is "geek culture"? Well, it can be anything, and will be. LEGO communities? Check. Fire art collectives? Definitely. Video game and virtual-world developers? Natch. LOLCats, airplanes, Cirque du Soleil, Rubik's Cube, Google Earth, mashups, Segway polo and do-it-yourself anything and everything? Absolutement!
And if you're interested in any of those things, this blog is for you. I invite you to send me suggestions of things you'd like to see covered here, and I hope you will return again and again to see what trouble I'm getting into, and to join in the conversation.
Of course, this is not really new, for you or for me. I've been writing about geek culture for more than two years for CNET News.com, and this merely is the formal labeling of the beat.
- prev
- 1
- next
