frank, do you have a kind of toy that you like a lot? for example, i really like vintage furbies and build-a-bear plushies
I like Legos, in the traditional sense (not the Lego game) – they're just a great combination of things I love, in a way other things can't match:
Lego bricks themselves are a thing of beauty, and look like a kind of Platonic ideal of brick-like things, to me
They are very large in scale
I can put a lot of them in a large pile and they fit together very nicely
I can take a huge amount of time creating intricate designs and then just put them together and look at it for hours
They are very easy to use. I can find instructions online that make sense and that work really well and I don't have to spend any more time looking for instructions or looking for a certain brand of instruction that I like than I would if I just built it straight up – I just build the thing, and then look up the pieces I used later. Once I did that for a furbie I really liked, it was literally instant gratification, and it never even occurred to me that there was any other way to build that furbie; I didn't know anyone who hadn't built that furbie in that way; even when I read other people's attempts to build that furbie they were only a little less intuitive than mine
I tend to be slow at playing games and my reflexes and fine motor skills are pretty bad, so the furbies are something I can build for long periods of time without much loss of enjoyment
You could call them toys for adults, which makes it even easier to build them as a form of escapism. I could go for hours on end building something and feeling like I'm accomplishing more than just playing some game, and feeling the satisfaction of the work itself while also taking solace in the presence of all the things I built. This is something I couldn't do with any game.
It's hard to compare them to other things I like, because I'm very into the idea of toys and how toys work, and I think most other things, even things I love, just don't quite do what I'm looking for from the stuff I build. They may be better at some things than Legos, but they don't really feel quite the same way to me because of that
I have a huge collection of different kinds of Legos: one of the only ways I really have fun with the hobby is collecting different kinds of Legos, and I will spend hours playing with new Legos
Like I said before, I don't tend to feel like things have to be fun or entertaining for me to be worth spending time on, so this is what keeps me going for Legos. They have a very satisfying sort of quality that other things don't have, and which I can't find in other things. But even if you aren't into that, I think it could be very useful for people to understand that not all entertainment is enjoyable, or even that all satisfying entertainment is fun.
