Science Fiction author and bOING bOING contributor Paul Di Filippo reviewed The Cult of Lego, By John Baichtal and Joe Meno for the Barnes and Nobel Review.
When I was a child, and well into my adolescent years, I played with LEGO blocks in a curious fashion I invented for myself, and which, for all I know, might still be a unique mode. Starting with a good-sized base plate, I would construct a labyrinth of narrow corridors, inserting windows randomly into the exterior walls. There was but a single egress. When the walls were about four bricks high, I capped them with a ceiling that was unbroken except for a single hole leading to the now-hidden level. Atop that ceiling, I built a second, different labyrinth, whose sole exit was that floor hole. That second story got its own ceiling with a gap. Repeat till bricks ran out, with a final roof featuring its own entrance hole down to the top maze level.
Into this boxy affair, I would drop a marble. The object was to tilt and shift and shake the box until the marble emerged from the bottom door. The only clues one got to the marble’s progress were what one’s imperfect memory of the multilevel layout provided, and when the marble showed up in a random window.
I spent countless ecstatic hours in this hypnotic building and maze-running pastime, deriving subtle and sophisticated pleasures from the simplest bricks in the LEGO catalogue. No other toy, however complicated and expensive, could have provided the same intense fun.
