LEGO Friends and Gendered Play

January 20, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

LEGO® Friends stands as one of the LEGO Group’s most successful themes to date. The construction toys theme was designed primarily for girls and introduced in 2012.

Today it includes more than 250 sets, a range of books, an animated series, and even a video game.

But more than a decade before the theme was launched, the LEGO Group created a different sort of LEGO Friends.

The 1999 LEGO Friends computer game was created as a sort of experiment, the byproduct of research conducted by Elena Catón in 1997 for the LEGO Group into some concerns the company had about the demographics of its toys.

Catón said the goal of her research was twofold.

“First, it was to bridge the gap with the girls’ market because research shows that whereas the LEGO brand was very much used by boys and girls up to the age of eight, from eight onwards boys continued to be involved with the LEGO brand, whereas girls dropped off completely and disassociated from it,” she said in a recent episode of LEGO podcast Bits N’ Bricks. “The second aspect was that the LEGO Group was conscious that in the mid to late ‘90s the computer games market was widening and taking up a lot of playtime that was not being used in with LEGO bricks.”

So, Catón looked into how girls over the age of eight related to software and video games and then used that research to help produce a game that focused on things like creative collaboration and communication, she said.

Another catalyst for the game was the existence of the Scala theme that had been relaunched in 1997 and targeted young girls by introducing jewelry and a set of non LEGO brick dolls.

The result was a computer game that used hand animation – created by Danish animation studio Tiny Film – to deliver a story built around the concept of a group of girl friends forming a band to perform. The game has children creating their own songs by dragging and dropping sounds and notes from different instruments, choreographing dances by combining a collection of moves, and even creating a stage light show. 

While the game wasn’t the biggest hit released by the LEGO Group, it did contribute to the LEGO Group’s evolving examination of gender and play. 

The 2012 release of the LEGO Friends theme sparked an international debate around the topic because some felt that LEGO sets shouldn’t be gendered. The result was the LEGO Group creating internal gender marketing guidelines and pushing to be more inclusive in all of its sets. 

“I think in terms of the kind of play that the LEGO Group promotes,” Catón said, “it’s genderless. I think we are victims of marketing, really, and commercial moves from the toy industry from the ‘80s onward where toys were marketed to boys and girls differently.”

Licensed properties, too, she said, added to a sense of gendered themes or sets.

“I think from that point of view, yes, LEGO Friends is quite a gendered product. I don’t think it’s per se bad to devote spaces for girls and to create products for girls specifically. I think what is wrong is to assign, you know, specific colors and specific modes of play based on gender.”

This article originally ran on LEGO.com as a summary of episode one of the weekly Bits N’ Bricks podcast, which you can listen to here.