Plug and play
How Lego is looking to the videogame industry to develop a new kind of physical/digital play
Lego looks to the game industry to create a whole new kind of play
For kids, building (and breaking) stuff will never go out of style. First it was Minecraft; then came Fortnite. But the foundation upon which those games were constructed was one of Danish plastic. Lego, of course, is bulletproof – well, conceptually at least – but that doesn’t mean that its designers aren’t exploring new means of developing its iconic toy for a modern audience. The roles have been reversed: Lego is looking to games as inspiration for a new way to play.
Its latest project, more than two years in the making and launching this summer, is Lego Hidden Side. It’s a series of Lego sets designed to work in conjunction with augmented reality. Scan the finished build with your smartphone camera via the free app, and Apple’s ARKit 2.0 technology will overlay animations and interactive elements. We watch a blocky graveyard spring to life on-screen – a gnarled tree flailing its branches eerily, an angel statue flapping its wings – as senior product lead Murray Andrews plays and talks us through it.
“At Lego, we’re always exploring new ways to play, and the digital side of play is something we’re interested in,” he says. “Lots of kids play videogames because they like the challenge and the social interactivity side of it. It’s about how we can bring in these elements into a physical/digital product. Many of the current AR games on the market are really just digital levels laid on a table – what we’re trying to create is a new way of playing where the physical world actually matters and affects the digital world, rather than the opposite.”
Each Hidden Side set makes up part
of the haunted town of Newbury: playing alongside the characters of Jack, Parker and app creator Professor JB, players exorcise the sets by playing minigames to find and collect various types of ghosts or ‘studs’ to upgrade ghost-hunting gear – as well as defeat each set’s boss ghost.
This isn’t Lego trying to replace the trusty brick, but rather an attempt to fuse physical and digital play in a more elegant way. “We don’t just want to create another game where kids are interacting with the screen: we always want to bring them back to the model.” Interacting with glowing ‘points of possession’ brings up a scanner on the phone for players to use while physically turning statues and lifting coffin lids in the model to uncover bricks. The app uses colour recognition on these to conjure the ghosts – if there’s one hiding there at that point, that is.
The set designers wanted to ensure that players always have “one hand in each realm”, as Murray puts it, which had its challenges. “They really had to change their way of thinking for this kind of fluid play. If you’ve got a phone in one hand, you need to be able to interact with the model one-handed, when for some functions you’d normally need two.” Playtesting proved enlightening as well: “We’re having to break some of the conventions that kids have ingrained in them. They’re always going to tap on the phone, so it was interesting to try and design flows and processes that move them away from that.” For Lego, it’s critical to champion physical play, which helps develop motor skills and emotional intelligence through roleplay – but incorporating a digital layer of interactivity and progression is a way to attract a modern audience.
And to keep bringing them back. Hidden Side is planned to be a ‘product as a service’. “It’s that ‘games as a service’ mentality where after we launch the product and the app, we’re going to continue to update the experience,” Andrews says. On Hallowe’en, for example, the app might ping an alert to tempt a player to break out their toyset again and see which limited-time ghosts have come to town.
“Games, particularly mobile games now, are a constantly evolving product,” he says. “That’s key to what we’re doing here. Traditionally, you buy a Lego set, and you build it and play with it and then you break it apart. The beauty of it is it has that evolution intrinsically, because you can continue to build new things with it. But what we’re trying to do with Hidden Side is create a mixed-reality experience that continues with the theme and story.” And while the AR tech isn’t advanced enough to support players mixing and matching sets just yet (the app will only recognise and run the game from a mostly correctly-built model), Andrews hopes that “maybe further down the line that’s something that we can bring into the experience.”
Hidden Side is part of Lego’s grand plan for the future: we’ll see it develop into 2020 and beyond as Andrews and team continue to explore their more integrated approach to physical/digital play. And while there’s certainly room for improvement on the digital side of its offering, Lego Hidden Side already has one advantage over Fortnite: you can’t discreetly hoover up a videogame if the noise starts to get annoying.
A new way of playing where the physical world actually matters and affects the digital world