Source: Co. Design
“We know we are taking a bit of a risk,” says Rob Lowe, Senior Director of Lego Life.
A new social network built by Lego. And like everything else about the service, it has been carefully designed to make seven-year-olds laugh and keep them safe from the worst of the internet, while paradoxically persuading them to put down their screens and go play with more Lego bricks.
Lego Life has been in the concept stage for the past three years and in intensive development for one. The platform represents a new way of thinking for the toy company, which generates $5.4 billion a year through a mix of toy sales and licensing deals with video game and film studios. Lego has enjoyed multi-platform success rivalled only by companies like Disney, but there is one thing it has failed at time and again: online platforms.
Most notably, Lego Universe launched in 2010 as Lego’s ambitious multiplayer game, allowing children to go on adventures and build Lego structures online via PC or Mac. Minecraft would launch a year later as a better-designed, but completely unbranded alternative for shared building. However, by 2012, Lego Universe would shut down its own servers, while just two years later Minecraft would be acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. Today, Lego even makes Minecraft-themed sets, the ultimate demonstration of Minecraft’s impact.
“Lego Universe was something that had been reworked so many times that it fell behind the times. Of course Minecraft came out and it was a much more compelling platform,” says Rob Lowe, Senior Director of Lego Life, who previously worked at the BBC and, before that, Nintendo. “The main difference in [Lego Life] is that we have been able to take a digital-native approach to how we launch it. What we are launching is bordering on a minimum viable product, and we have been allowed to do that in a company that otherwise only releases perfect sets of Lego bricks.”
Lego Life is not a building platform designed to digitise or replace the experience of physical bricks in the way Lego Universe was. It is a social network aimed at Lego’s core demographic—children aged 7 to 12—who are too young for Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, and whom Lego hopes it can further encourage to play with real Lego bricks, not pixelated blocks.
“Obviously, platforms like YouTube are huge and always the best way to reach children with content,” says Lowe. “But it is not exactly the best place to hang out and comment; it is like the Wild West, which is why we made [Lego Life].”
Lego Life is something of a hybrid of Pinterest and Instagram, where children can post images and videos of things they have built or places their minifigs have been, where Lego Batman has the influencer power of Kim Kardashian, where you “like” a post by tapping the standard heart icon, but if you choose not to, the app responds with a fart.
The long-term experience is intrinsically built like a game. The more you post, the more skins and items you will unlock for your personal minifig avatar. The rest of the experience is like a social network built with innocence and training wheels. Everything posted must be strictly Lego-related. And every piece of content (photo, video or text) goes through a three-step filtering process to ensure it is appropriate for children. First, a third-party company software-scans images for faces and text, while scrubbing vulgar words from the content. Anything it flags is sent to a human for review. Then, anything still on the borderline—for example, someone takes a photo of horses and sticks a few Lego stickers into the scene before posting—goes directly to human eyes at Lego to determine whether it is right for the experience. None of this is excessive. Lego Universe developers reported that scrubbing phallic images was a real problem for the game, which may be why, at launch, Lego will put eyes on everything before scaling up with more automation.
“I think there are not many companies focused on under-13s, because it is difficult,” says Lowe about all this moderation. “When that age is so fundamental to our audience, it needs someone like us to come in and do it. Because I do not think there is much incentive for Snapchat to release an under-13 version, for example, but there is for us.”
To make communication safer, Lego has developed its own set of emoji that can be used to comment without approval. Think Lego cartoon faces, stickers offering simple reactions like “Wow”, and not an eggplant or peach in sight. “We are sure children will eventually work around the emoji language and do rude things with it,” Lowe laughs. “So we are going to moderate it.” If any crude meme develops from a Lego emoji, Lego can block it or adjust the emoji.
As for using the app, there is no doubt that a combination of suggested content, group-driven hashtags, and endless images in your feed could pull Lego fans into deep, obsessive dives just like any other social network. But out of respect for limiting screen time—or an understanding that Lego’s revenue is built on selling bricks rather than social networks—Lego is trying to get children building by issuing “challenges” like “minifig on the move” to quickly take their minifig into the real world and photograph it.
“We know we are taking a bit of a risk; we are creating an app that asks children to put the iPad down for 20 minutes, but we believe building with Lego bricks is fun and enjoyable,” says Lowe. “Especially when you give a child constraints, and when it is combined with rewards and a progression system, I think it will be an interesting experience for children to get into.” In addition, in the future, Lowe says Lego Life could serve as a hub for other connected Lego apps, allowing children to share snippets of code from Lego Boost robots—like a GitHub for kids, for example.
Lego Life is out today. It is free to download on iOS and Android. And, for the record, children over 13 can still sign up. I asked.
