The figures of Legoland run the gamut: yellow, blue, bearded, mustachioed, man, woman, alien, dinosaur, and more. Itās a diverse society. On an emotional level, however, the data on their joy is looking grim.
At just over one and half inches, Lego figurinesāāminifiguresā as theyāre knownāserve as a mascot, and business card for the eponymous Danish company. When Lego first produced minifigures in 1974, the cylindrical head had no face. The demure smile was only added four years later in 1978. The Lego minifigure was happy.
The Minifigure populationĀ has recentlyĀ exploded. Driven by licensing deals to create toy sets based on movie plots and characters, there are more thanĀ 10,000 unique minifigures, each with their own precious expression.
To see how those expressions are changing, we constructed the survey below. It will show you a random Lego head out of a set of about 1,600 released between 1975 and 2016. Select the emotion you see in it and rank the expressionās intensity.
Editorās Note: Due to a change we made in technology providers, the charts above no longer update with every reader response. The charts reflect a limited set of responses we collected in October 2018.
We based our survey on the work ofĀ Dr. Christoph Bartneck, aĀ researcher and AFOL (Adult Fan of Legos). He took 3,655Ā photos of the Lego minifigures and identified 628 unique expressions. With this database, his team asked participants to choose an emotion fromĀ six classic categoriesĀ rating it in intensity from a scale of one to five.
Bartneckās study found that over time, happy faces became less common, making way for other many other emotions. Since the 1990s, anger is the fastest growing expression, according to his research. Bartneckās team concluded the shift comes as more Lego kits embrace themes of conflict, be it āthe good knights against the skeleton warriors or the space police against alien criminals.ā The facesā emotions do not always map to good and evil. Hermione Granger can be scared, and Batmanās nemesis, The Joker, can be ecstatic.
Denise Lauritsen, a spokesperson for Lego, says that the ābroad variety of minifigure emotions is to help encourage different kinds of role play; adventure, exploration, friendship, action, nurture, storytelling, mission, conflict play and so onā¦ā
In other words, the decline of joyous Legos is by design, and the company is happy about it.