“what is this i don’t even”

and it still is now they’ve hit the magical 10,000. I just don’t understand why they don’t go out and buy green and brown 2×2 bricks and build their low detail worlds out of regular bricks. Oh wait, that’s cos they can do it using virtual blocks in Minecraft!

wait, what is this i don’t even??

What’s going to sell better… A big bucket of “Lego bricks”, or a big bucket of “Minecraft Lego bricks”? I think the bucket that says Minecraft is going to sell more. Brand names sell. Mega Blok building sets were a joke before they started snatching up desirable franchises like Marvel, Halo, Need for Speed, Warcraft and Starcraft, now they are hugely popular because they reached out to a knew customer base. Lego now has the opportunity to reach out to a like-minded customer base, gamer’s who like to build things with blocks, why wouldn’t these people buy up the Minecraft branded sets? Why wouldn’t people who normally bought the big buckets (people only buy these for the bricks) buy a Minecraft branded bucket?

Of course this is assuming Lego sells this theme in place of the big buckets, which I feel would be a reasonable thing to do.

I mean, for starters, what’s so different from Minecraft and LEGO right now? Minecraft is a voxel based building game, identical to LEGO except for the aspect ratio. Though of course that hardly a limitation for the even remotely skilled among us (a skilled example seen here http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtbin/5520729043/). In nearly every article and review introducing Minecraft when it first came out described the game using some variation of “a simplified version of LEGOs where you have to gather them before you can use them.” However, Minecraft doesn’t come with instructions: it’s all about sandbox creativity. So, when LEGO produces these sets, you will first build the sets as LEGO intended, and then, POOF, when you take them apart to be “creative,” they reduce to simple bricks. So, yeah, LEGO Minecraft kits will be nothing more than a set of bricks. Though, in a way, I guess that could be useful, because it would reintroduce the current generation to basic brick-based building.

I also agree with Andrew: this support isn’t coming from the AFOL or the LEGO community. This is coming from the Minecraft community.

The fundamental problem with it is that it reinforces some of the worst stereotypes of what you’re limited to creating in Lego–the kind of excessively pixellated, blocky shapes typical of 8-bit graphics and Duplo. As Lego artists and enthusiasts, we spend a lot of time trying to transcend those limitations where they exist, and disperse the misconceptions of the ones that don’t.

At best this doesn’t help, and at worst it could hurt our efforts to educate the public that Lego is more than “just blocks”.

Either way I am intrigued, not excited, to see what comes of this.

The way Minecraft is typically described to people who aren’t familiar with it, is ‘it’s like virtual LEGO that you dig out of the ground and then build with.’ If you assume the two components are ‘dig stuff out of the ground’ and ‘build stuff with it’, I can’t see how the first component would be productive (no pun intended) and the second component is fundamentally /the LEGO building system/.

There’s nowhere to go with this, short of lego producing perfectly square bricks. If this goes the distance, it’ll be LEGO, replicating a computer game, replicating LEGO. And that’s why I don’t think it’ll go anywhere; it would mean TLC producing a facsimile of a poor copy of its own product.

Ho-hum.