If you want to look at how a toy evolves over time, Legos are probably your best bet.
It’s the largest toy manufacturer in the world, for one. It has its ownmovie and theme parks, as well as books and video games that supplement its iconic building block sets. Plus, it’s been making those bricks since 1949, allowing the researchers to trace the evolution of a single genre of toy over decades.
“There are very few toys that have been continuously on the market,” Christoph Bartneck, a professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, told me in an email. “One could try to take a sample of all toys each year, but that would be difficult. Lego products are extremely well-documented.”
In a new study published in PLOS One, Bartneck and his colleagues sifted through that documentation and found that Lego toys have had “significant exponential increases of violence over time.”
[For more of this story, written by Julie Beck, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...more-violent/484286/]
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