We suspect every parent reading this is fighting the same quiet war: keeping a child’s eyes on something — anything — other than a glowing screen. It is a battle waged in living rooms from New Delhi to New York, and one that governments are increasingly trying to legislate. Hence, we were delighted to read this piece from Robbie Whelan in The Wall Street Journal, on a toymaker that has decided to fight screens on their own turf — by putting a chip inside the brick.
Mr Whelan opens at home. His “8-year-old Lego-maniac son waited with bated breath for two new Lego Smart Play Star Wars sets—Luke Skywalker’s X-wing and Darth Vader’s TIE fighter—to come in the mail,” having seen the television commercials for sets “powered by ‘smart bricks’ that light up when laser blasts are fired and emit a chorus of zooming spacecraft engine sounds.” He “built the sets excitedly and diligently charged his smart bricks overnight, waking up early to play with them.” The chip, Mr Whelan notes, is by now everywhere — “smartphones, car dashboards, the FIFA World Cup game balls, even your toaster. Add Lego to the list.”
Lego is making no small claims for the launch, “hailing Smart Play, launched in March, as the biggest upgrade of the Danish toy maker’s vaunted ‘system of play’ since 1978”— the year that “marked the debut of minifigures, the tiny Lego people that ‘opened the door to role-play’,” in the words of senior vice president Tom Donaldson. Smart Play, he says, is another “generational change,” and the company plans to introduce hundreds of interactive sets.
The mechanics will be familiar to anyone who has tapped a card at a checkout: “At the heart of the new system are rechargeable smart bricks and microprocessors that can read digital tags inscribed inside other Smart Play pieces. It uses NFC, or near-field communication, a technology found at your local grocery: The powered bricks are like the store’s card readers, while the tagged pieces are like the chip-imbued credit card you tap to pay.” The bricks “also detect motion, light up, produce sound effects that change based on play and, in some cases, sense and communicate with other smart bricks.”
None of this is cheap — the Star Wars sets “range in price from $70 to $160, along with lower-priced ‘Smart Play compatible’ sets with digital-tag pieces,” and a Pokémon-themed line reaches stores in August. As a parent, though, Mr Whelan “found Lego’s use of chip technology in service of something other than a videogame or other digital activity to be refreshing,” noting that there are “plenty of screen-based temptations lying around the house already, and my kids don’t need another.”
Lego, he writes, “is walking a tightrope: The company wants to innovate to compete for children’s attention with platforms like YouTube, Roblox and Minecraft, but doesn’t want technology to upstage its core offering.” Not everyone is reassured. Josh Golin, who runs the watchdog group Fairplay, worries that “from a creativity standpoint, kids’ play will be fundamentally changed by these smart bricks. They will be playing in order to get the smart bricks to do the cool thing and make the noises,” and lands the piece’s sharpest line — “Every time the brick does more, the child’s imagination does less.”
Mr Whelan can “see this point. The sound effects that Smart Play produces replace the crash noises and pew-pew sounds that ordinarily come out of my son’s mouth.” And yet, he reasons, “keeping intact the sense of building something, of taking the time and care to follow instructions and of feeling proud of the outcome, while adding an exciting tech flourish, seemed like a good thing.”
For the investors among our readers, the origins of Smart Play are the most instructive part of the story. Back in 2018, Lego was stagnating, with sales in the prior year down 8%. This was their first decline in revenues in over a decade. The company had also cut 1,400 jobs and the then chief executive, Niels B. Christiansen, made it clear that their main priority was to stabilize the business. What followed was not a boardroom brainstorm but old-fashioned fieldwork: a team of designers “took a summer 2018 road trip through the American Midwest, visiting dozens of homes in and around Madison, Wisc., and Minneapolis, Minn.,” watching young children play and coming “away with three conclusions.”
“First, children were thirsty for social experience,” says Lego vice president Sam Coates. “Second, children wanted ‘player agency,’ the idea that their actions change what happens. And finally, children indicated they wanted ‘delightful surprises.’” In other words, they “wanted to be able to craft a new narrative each time they returned to their Lego sets.” A child, Mr Coates says, should feel like “the director of the new ‘Star Wars’ movie that you’re creating,” with the bricks and tags there to “get the action going, get the inner movie going, and prime and prompt the kid to keep going.”
Lego had dipped “its toe in the interactive waters in 2024 with Super Mario sets,”whose bricks “would play snatches of the theme song and emit coin-collecting sound effects as Mario characters moved around.” Smart Play, the company says, is “more technologically elaborate and broader in scale,” functioning as a “platform” in which “smart bricks are interchangeable between sets, and can adapt to different functions.”The new Pokémon sets “will detect each other, so children can ‘battle,’ complete with light-up effects and creature-appropriate roars and fight sounds.”
There is a danger, though, that “Lego’s light touch might backfire, and parents won’t be thrilled about paying premium prices for a toy that essentially has a few extra beeps and boops.” The caution that lingers comes from Dan Klitsner, the toy inventor behind the Bop-It, who argues that what has “kept Lego successful for so long is the hands-on nature of the toys, not any novel tech that’s in them.” “Kids really like things that move and that are physical,” he says. “What’s important is that it doesn’t replace the physical play. You want the technology to animate the player and to be shareable. If the Smart Play technology achieves that, it’ll be very sustainable.”
Whether it does may be a question no executive can answer — only a living room can. During a playdate, Mr Whelan reports, “my son and his Lego-loving friend mounted an epic space battle with the Smart Play spaceships. It lasted about half an hour and was cute to watch. Since then, he’s hardly touched the sets, though they sit displayed prominently on his shelf.”
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