The idea of creativity through building with wooden blocks goes way back to the 1930s when Danish toy maker Ole Kirk Christiansen started his toy company in 1934, which he called LEGO (from the words "leg godt" or to "play well"). The company leveled up to plastic toys in the late 1940s, and by 1958, the LEGO brick as we know it today was patented and released.

Aside from LEGO, the idea of interlocking plastic bricks as a toy was presented by Harry Fisher Page, a British toy maker working along the same line in the development of toys. Both their efforts (and others like them) established what we would know today as the brick building toy genre, which culminates in the modern-day digital age as games like Minecraft.

Building With Bricks

Before the era of the home computer and digital games, those of us who were already around had to contend with the toys available to our disposal. In my case, as a kid growing up in the 70s, and watching TV shows like UFO and The Six Million Dollar Man, one had to have a really vivid imagination when playing with the toys of the time.

Building toys were a blast in the 70s (although electronic handhelds were introduced by the end of the decade), and LEGO and other similar toys were what kept us busy and immersed for hours on end. Me and my cousin used to spend afternoons (after school and weekends) building our own space bases with these plastic bricks, only to topple down and blow up each other's bases at the end of the session. Social and competitive gaming was quite well and alive even at the time.

Electronic Games

The thing about electronic, video, and computer games is that the machine did the imagination part for you. We were building structures with plastic interlocking bricks of various shapes and sizes to create original structures of our own, but the environment, game world, or biome, and in-game events, we had to pull from our own imagination. With video games, all you have to do is watch the screen and interact with the game, and an entire game world is presented to you.

No need to imagine space dogfights and providing gun and missile effects with your mouth, while waving your toy fighter all over the place. Sounds super funny for kids today, but that was all that we had back then. With the advent of computerized gaming and today's modern infusion of AI into the gameplay, these are just things we couldn't fathom during our own childhood days.

Simulated Digital Brick and World Building

Physical LEGO and other brick building games are still very much alive and around today, and trying one's hand at building things brick by interlocking brick is not a bad idea to fully grasp the after effects and potential that the video game variants like Minecraft have done in changing and molding the gaming lives of today's young. Even playing has become "automated" in its own way with both its pros and cons, but humanity has to keep up with evolution, and the modernization in playing is but one important aspect of it.

Minecraft is currently the most complete brick-building video game today in reference to the core gaming principles of LEGO and Fisher's Self-Locking Building Bricks. The sky's the limit in gamer creativity and what the bricks (or in Minecraft, blocks) can build. It's an open-world sandbox environment just like the physical toys, and the gamer can create their own narratives of the creations they make.

Closely looking at a Minecraft creation and gameplay, the game functions a lot closer to the initial interlocking blocks (not bricks) of Harry Fisher's toy. Minecraft uses blocks (square, not rectangular), whether of wood, stone, soil, and grass, or whatever can be chopped, sliced, and diced in the game environment, and put together similarly as you would in LEGO and its variants. You can collect resources and craft necessary items as well, an added plus to the mere brick building scenario.

The advantage is that Minecraft is a fully functional simulated sandbox environment with biomes or areas that have unique environmental properties of their own. As mentioned, we poor old chaps had to content with that feature inside our heads as we worked our way brick-by-brick, creating whatever structural models that came to mind wherever in the real world we were. What's more, Minecraft has player avatars and NPCs that can interact to create a realistic microcosmic miniature world.

Also, with Minecraft, not only can you build, but you can also go adventuring and either take an available quest or create an original storyline of your own, not to mention surviving the game as your main priority. Just like LEGO has toy characters of its own, there are also a lot of beings in Minecraft both good and bad, and interacting with them can be quite interesting if not enjoyable at times. Wonder of wonders, you can see such things as Pink Sheep that go meh at you in the middle of a field.

Imagine if we had that way back in the 70s, where all you needed were these gaming machines, and you could experience gaming beyond any child's imagination. What's more, the building orientation of Minecraft is available to everyone interested, regardless of age. Children, teens, adults, and the elderly take to Minecraft as a hobby the way the older generations took to building and assembly hobby kits like LEGO or Tamiya to play, reduce stress, or make good use of their free time.

Indeed, Minecraft is the LEGO and brick/block building generational toy of today, albeit in video game format, and it continues the core gameplay tradition and legacy that kids of yesterday experienced and began with. After all, back then, we never thought we would see the day that building with blocks and bricks would be so ... realistic!