Books – The Roohr Way

Brick By Brick (David C. Robertson with Bill Breen, 2013)

Authors David Robertson and Bill Breen have unfortunately achieved a dubious honor: they’ve taken an exciting human story and turned it into a stuffy suit.

Brick By Brick details the critical years of The LEGO Group (herafter TLG) as it lost its way, almost went bankrupt, and managed to pull off a feat of business alchemy by becoming (now) the biggest toy company in the world. As a (kid) fan of Lego during that era, I remember watching this from the outside; the Ploughman years where TLG made famous mistakes like Galidor and soaring experiments like Mindstorms are part of the contours of my memory. The inside baseball view was fun, and I’d recommend reading the book if you’re really into that sort of thing, but it’s a lot of book for a few nuggets.

It’s not written as a history, it’s written as a guide for business “innovators,” and as such object lessons sometimes crowd out the finer points. I recognize that I’m not the target audience for the book, and that it’s not the book’s fault that it’s not everything I want it to be. But I can only react to it the way I reacted, so let’s check it out!

Character based themes were nothing new

In Breen & Robertson’s telling, you would be forgiven for thinking that Bionicle was the first time TLG had shipped a theme based on original characters.¹ This is plainly incorrect though. We got lore for System themes going way back; it just wasn’t taken seriously early on, see this section from a 1996 Mania Magazine:

Does that support an action-packed space exploration theme? Would the target audience even get the joke that MST3k is a show featuring robots?

It got better though! Check this character bio page from a 1998 mag:

While clearly off-brand Indiana Jones, this takes the premise much more seriously and is trying to design characters. A few other themes from the Ploughman era went in a similar direction; some were even media tie-ins, like Rock Raiders which was launched with a strategy video game.

MindStorms also had a tie in web-game, Stormrunner, quite a high quality one as well; a full on RCX programming simulator in a world you could drive your robot around in to explore. They discussed MindStorms in detail in the book but don’t mention the connection-the online MindStorms game was created by none other than Templar Studios, the same folks that created the Mata Nui Online Game that would prove instrumental in selling Bionicle as a theme with a story.

Another thing I think the book missed about Bionicle is that the art was just far better than what preceded it. Compare this to the above marketing materials, and while you’re at it, compare it to Toy Story 2, the best CGI most of us kids would have been exposed to in 2000:

Kids weren’t used to high quality CGI like this being used to market toys to them. Galador was just a (live action) guy, but Toa were these intricate, alien robots. Unique and memorable. Bionicle does get credit, but the focus is mostly on how innovative it is. But I think not enough credit is given for points on execution; it was just a much better put together marketing package than any theme had ever been treated to. The story was more coherent, the story was consistent (ish) across media, and the story was taken seriously, rather than used as an excuse to write dad jokes. If you were a genuine fan of System Themes, the Magazine blurbs sometimes felt like they were laughing at your expense… Bionicle never felt that way; Faber and co. were clearly huge fans of the material, hell Faber is still talking about it twenty years later! I’d say it was a confluence of factors-trying some of the same things and some new things, plus bringing the quality of the worldbuilding up to the obsessive quality of the bricks.

Nonetheless, Bionicle shouldn’t be seen solely as a unique moment for Lego, but also a progression from earlier attempts, a pulling together of all of the different things TLG had tried, especially during the zany Ploughman era.

Misunderstanding Minecraft

The chapter on Lego Universe unfortunately lacks depth on Lego’s history with gaming, and maybe gaming in general. I wish they’d tapped a seasoned games journo for this one rather than their kid who plays Minecraft. I suppose to be fair, Gaming was taken quite a bit less seriously ten years ago when Brick By Brick was written.

What they don’t seem to see is that Lego was no stranger to publishing games that promote a building play style. Lego Loco (Intelligent Games, 1998) was also an open ended sandbox game, a much gentler, challenge-free take on a sort of Sim City type of game, featuring lego minifigs and trains:

In the same year, TLG also published Lego Creator, an immersive 3d Lego building simulation featuring the ability to build lego models at minifig scale. It wasn’t exactly Minecraft, but it can be easily described in terms of Minecraft, it’s like Minecraft except:

You could build drivable vehicles
Static flat ground, no mining
Not voxel based; you could build with bricks of various shapes
No enemy npcs, threats or challenges; you just kinda build whatever you want with unlimited resources
Single player; no multiplayer

Apart from that, it was comparable to Minecraft, at least for its day. The sequels may have added some challenges, I never played them. But the prior art was clearly there. Had TLG chosen to develop along that path, it’s possible that they could have shipped something remarkably similar to Minecraft before Infiniminer, which inspired Minecraft, got off the ground. And I think it’s worth asking why and laying some blame on the inability for the culture of TLG to understand the industry, but I wish the book really engaged with that question instead of just lambasting the way they engaged with MMO producers in a fairly shallow way. I agree that perfectionism was the enemy, but I think that it was also a question of seeing kids MMOs like Toontown succeed massively and wanting to replicate that success, another subject not touched on.

The book I want someone to write

A book more focused on the Ploughman era specifically, with a deeper look at what TLG tried and when, when it worked and when it didn’t, and how the things that worked culminated in Bionicle and subsequent themes. I’d love to hear the inside story of TLG working essentially as a video game publisher, something Brick By Brick basically skated over! I want to know how we went from seemingly goofy after the fact ideas like Ann Droid to intentionally created stories like Johnny Thunder. This was clearly a gradual process, and one that’s as responsible for saving the company as a particular fire truck model was!

What I’m asking for, in other words, is a history of Lego Themes.

But how does it compare to The Lego Story

I gave both the same rating on Goodreads, but in retrospect, I enjoyed Anderson’s story a lot more. It also lacked a lot of theme-level coverage I crave, but it did attempt to tell a story and ground that story in research instead of fitting the narrative to instruct on some specific lesson (besides of course being a hagiography of Kjeld Kristiansen.) If you absolutely loved Anderson’s book you might find additional insight by comparing the two. If Anderson wasn’t for you, or if you were only mildly enthused, I’d give this one a pass.

Footnotes:

Actually they do bring up Fabuland for some incomprehensible reason. I dunno.

Sex on the Moon (Ben Mezrich, 2013)

The premise held promise, but I think Mezrich fumbled this one. Sex on the Moon is too excited about telling convicted moon rock thief Thad’s story and not interested enough in informing the reader about anything in particular. If the story had enough juice to support a novel, it might have been worth it, but Thad is a poor fit for a hero and his story isn’t a heroic journey, or even a very good yarn.

The initial promise of a moon rock heist as a heist story is dashed fairly quickly; this seems like as much as an insider threat crime of opportunity committed by a habitual swiper as it is a proper caper. To summarize it: A couple of NASA Interns showed up at NASA with a dolly, stole a safe full of tiny moon rocks from a favorite processor’s office, and proceeded to try and sell them to an FBI agent. You don’t want to read a book about a bank robbery committed by a bank teller unless it’s told in a particularly compelling way (it isn’t) or it tells us something interesting about our world (I would argue that this does not.)

It’s written like a novel (interspersed with absolutely atrocious blank verse-presumably excerpted from Thad’s returned-to-sender jailhouse love letters to his accomplice) but heroes are usually expected to change or grow in some way. He starts the story casually stealing from his employer and ends the story after a jail sentence for stealing from another employer. There’s no sense that he has learned anything about right and wrong or trust or greed. His apology in court was barely a step from ‘it’s just a prank bro.’

It’s important for true crime writing, if it wants to be remotely tasteful, to make sure there’s empathy for the victims of the crime. There’s very little here. I wish he’d gone into what the effects were on the culture of NASA after the heist. Did interns still enjoy the same level of access? Is it still a viable pathway to an Astronaut career? Did they implement new security procedures? The scientist who’s safe NASA Intern thad and his co-conspirators stole testified in court that he left precious notebooks that represented thirty years of work in the safe and they were never recovered, but we don’t hear that in Thad’s telling. His co-conspirators told the FBI that Thad insisted they throw the notebooks out!

And that’s really the crux of the problem. The story puts us in the Perp’s head for the most part. The book is interesting enough when he’s describing how fun it is to be a NASA Intern and barely worth reading when he’s describing his head over heels plunge into adultery with a coworker. We don’t get a whole lot of empathy for his wife either, just his side of the story about how her… career was getting in the way of their relationship? Despite the fact that he of course moved out of state to chase a highly unlikely dream of becoming an astronaut and then threw it away for a life of crime. I suppose the book is trying to answer the question “what would drive a man with so much going his way to risk it all?” But the best answer we get is ‘he is very bad as gauging risk and engages in lots of risky behavior’ or ‘Thad, who seems to be telling the story, doesn’t want you to think that he was just greedy.’

I don’t believe Thad. He tells an improbable story of using a Hollywood chemistry trick to steal the keypad combination to gain access to the facility he stole from. I suspect one of the conspirators was leaked the code, and Thad lied to the author to protect that source. Why the author pointed it, I don’t know. We don’t know if there was any physical evidence for this story. The names of the co-conspirators are changed even though they’re a matter of public record. What journalistic purpose did that serve, besides (I assume) help assuage the guilt of the perpetrator? These make it difficult to take any of the facts in the book at face value. As a work of journalism it’s frightfully compromised.

As a yarn it’s frayed. It certainly kept me turning the pages to see what stupid mistake Thad would make next, but the sympathy left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s salaciousness wasn’t offset by any other qualities; it reads, partly, as a really weird love letter to a person who clearly no longer wants anything to do with the narrator. Skip this one and read the Atlantic article linked above instead.

The Cybergypsies (Indra Sinha, 1999)

If you were to list the great popular historical books of the computer world, you’d probably hear The Cuckoo’s Egg, Soul of a New Machine, and then a smattering of books by Wired Magazine regulars, like Cyberpunks and Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Fire In The Valley maybe, though I imagine Cromemco gets less relevant every day. What I rarely see recommended, however, and what I think belongs on the podium along with Kidder and Stoll, is Indra Sinha’s The Cybergypsies.

The gibsonian flair of the first few chapters creates the impression of a novel, and I think this confused some readers. I had to check out several facts and, low and behold, they turned out true. Eventually I realized “Bear,” the narrator, was Indra, and it’s a memoir. Shades was a real place; you can see a YouTube video playing back a recorded (and very chaotic) session. What else confused people? The terminology is probably period, but it’s a period that was over when the book was published-it’s a story of the modem world and what we would now call BBSs running MUDs.

The characters are drawn with attention to their humanity. It would be easy to turn this story into a people zoo, but Bear never does, instead opting for empathy even when he’s relating outrageous behavior and hilarious drama. In a different era, with a different pen, it might have been delivered as a very long forum post. Nowdays, perhaps as the sort of YouTube essay Folding Ideas produces. Because it really gets to the heart of what it means to be terminally online. Sinha was terminally online before that was even a thing.

You also need to realize that Bear’s got a truly fantastical imagination, and this may have rubbed literal-minded hackers the wrong way. He describes playing online MUDs with a richness that helps justify the outrageous price tag of being online in those days. There’s one scene where you suddenly realize he’s playing Colossal Cave Adventure and you almost don’t recognize it because his vivid description doesn’t betray the spartan description actually given in the game. Indeed, it’s a really interesting appraisal of text adventure games in general and the power of imagination.

So why don’t we hear about it now? Well, for one thing, it’s got a slur in the title. That makes it a bit awkward to bring up. In 1999 the dot-com crazy world wasn’t interested in a book about BBSing; compare similar books and they’re associated with favored technologies like Unix and TCP/IP. It wasn’t associated with any big exciting well known company either. Also, the original dust jacket (NSFW) features a pixelated, suggestively posed woman. It is a mature adult story but not lurid; the cover probably didn’t do it any favors in getting a more serious audience. Oh, and it’s not entirely optimistic, indeed showing the dangers of being terminally online, but again it’s not sensationalized. A lot of reviews at the time latched on to this, selling it as a bit of a horror or anti-tech story. But I really don’t think it earned that appraisal, I just don’t think we had the words we now have to describe what he was writing about.

(Bonus: interview with the author https://in.rediff.com/news/2007/aug/22inter.htm)

The Modem World

When I was younger, I occasioned to write an essay about the history of the internet. I don’t have a copy in front of me, but I do recall that it ended up being practically a book report on the classic Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner and Lyon. It gave a strong account of the technical and social factors that took us from ARPANET to TCP/IP. But apart from an excellent digression into Email, it’s sparse on the question of what factors outside of the specific technology BBN was building lead to the internet we knew in the aughts. It was a fine enough essay, I’m sure I received a passing grade for it, but I think my teacher actually had the right idea that I should have instead focused on the movie War Games.

But now, a student in a similar situation wouldn’t have to settle for inferring people’s understanding of computer networks from a movie; now they could pick up The Modem World and get a serious historical account and analysis of the proto-internet, the internet shaped thing that existed before TCP/IP became the dominant communication protocol.

While the notion of BBSs isn’t new to me (I watched the BBS Documentary, read a bunch of Textfiles.com, and frequent SDF which is BBS adjacent) The Modem World was fresh in two important ways: insight and rigor.

Most accounts of the BBS world tend to be primarily sources; people telling their own stories. You’ll find them in the pages of 2600 and the like. The Modem World goes many steps further in teasing out the statistics, explaining how affordances shaped culture, and related the history to present concerns. In this regard it’s a standout book, comfortably sitting alongside a good Platform Studies volume, or Exploding The Phone.

As far as Rigor goes, look no further than the absolutely lavish end notes for a bibliography of BBSing. Never satisfied to rest on a hand wave, the author is relentless in finding actual contemporary sources for so many assertions. I thought that it was going to rely much more heavily on the BBS Documentary than it ultimately did, because the Author dug up so much contemporary material! I appreciate the serious treatment as opposed to what frequently is the type of rose-tinted retro tech light journalism you see out of outfits that shall remain nameless.