“make, play, and discover.”

April 23, 2018 8:29 PM

Nintendo has turned cardboard into a joyful ode to creation [Polygon] “Nintendo’s Labo kits do things with cardboard and electronics that feel like practical magic, but the construction process is the equivalent of overcoming a half-dozen small mountains. Building Labo Toy-Cons isn’t stressful or scary so much as it’s mysterious. You’ll spend a decent amount of time putting pieces together while wondering what they’ll do exactly, or even if they’re going to work when completed. And then you get that moment of joy when it all clicks into place, both literally and figuratively, and you get to marvel at the cleverness of the design. You always know what the next step is, and you know what the finished product will look like, but the journey itself is often full of surprises.” [Previously.]

• An incredible learning tool that’s a blast to play [The Verge]

“The first thing you have to do, of course, is actually build something. The process of creating a Toy-Con is both intuitive and entertaining. The Switch serves as an interactive instruction manual where you can tap through step-by-step instructions. The real object in your hands is represented on the screen in astonishing detail, and you can pan around and zoom in on the digital version to check it out from every angle. This attention to minutiae is important because most of the Toy-Con kits are very precise creations that need to be put together in a very particular way. But the interactive nature of the Switch manual means that it’s easy to track what you need to be doing and how you need to do it. You can always see the position a piece of cardboard should be in, and how it needs to fold or connect to something else. I’m the kind of person who struggles to build an Ikea bookshelf, but I never found myself struggling or confused with any of the Toy-Con.”

• Inside Nintendo's Labo toy factory: 'Creating and learning are fun!' [The Guardian]

““The fundamental concept of Labo came from thinking how we could leverage the JoyCon controllers,” elaborates Shinya Takahashi, GM of Nintendo’s development division. “We wanted to see if there were any attachments that we could put on them, and cardboard was the material that came to our mind instantly. It’s a material that’s easy to modify, shape, and attach on to JoyCons – trial and error and repair are all easy. Through the experiment our development team realised that selling already created cardboard attachments may not be fun enough – the process of creating and learning the process and the mechanics behind it is rewarding in itself.” Like all of Nintendo’s products, Labo is oriented towards families and children. A six-year-old might spend three hours using pens and glue to make the perfect RC car, whereas an older child (or parent) might spend more time learning how the models work. The more complex models would be demanding for many children to assemble by themselves, but with parental help the process is collaborative and fun – reminiscent of hours spent with Airfix models or dolls’ houses in previous generations.”

• 'This is Nintendo as mad inventors' [Kotaku]

“None of the Nintendo Labo games has enormous longevity. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, you can enter the Toy-Con Garage and start inventing your own stuff and messing with the Joy-Cons’ functionality. I imagine that most players will be perfectly content making and playing with what’s in the box, but Nintendo-produced videos show tantalizing glimpses of what can be achieved: cardboard guitars and drums, simple gun games. In a few months I have no doubt that we will see some incredible creations from the maker community. Labo does not try to hide the magic that powers these models. The Discover section has unpatronizing but child-friendly explanations of everything from how the Joy-Cons work to what an accelerometer does to basic programming: a curious kid could go as deep into this as their curiosity took them. (“You don’t need to be smart to come here,” reads one of the tutorials: “It’s the things you learn here that make you smart.”)”

• Phew, You Can Buy Replacement Cardboard for Nintendo Labo [IGN]

“Nintendo Labo and its cardboard creations were announced back in January, and after some consternation over how much we'd be paying for cardboard, once the software had been factored in, it turned out that it wasn't as exorbitant as it first appeared. Nintendo has confirmed the prices and given us one less thing to worry about by revealing that all of the kits can be bought separately. With the tendency rubber bands have to go walk-abouts and the questionable structural integrity of what is essentially just very stiff paper when faced with excited children, replacement cardboard, stickers, and accessory packs are just the ticket. You can order them directly from Nintendo from $1.99 for a reflective sticker sheet to $13.99 for a partial robot kit.”

• Cats Can't Get Enough Of Nintendo Labo [Nintendo Life][YouTube]

“Labo launched last week in Japan and North America, meaning that loads of cardboard pianos, fishing rods and robots are now out in the wild. It also means that household pets are coming to terms with a Labo-filled future, and it has come to our attention (thanks, Kotaku) that cats just can't seem to get enough of the latest Nintendo craze. Before you assume that people's cats are helping them create Labo models, we should clarify - most of these cats simply want to get in the way.”

posted by Fizz (21 comments total)

I'm wondering how long until cheaper non-Nintendo™ knock-off cardboard replacements flood eBay and Amazon.
posted by Fizz at 9:05 PM on April 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Arcade Bracket
posted by unliteral at 9:08 PM on April 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Nintendo has turned cardboard into a joyful ode to creation

Ably coached by cats, kids have been using cardboard that way since cardboard became a thing.

I still have very fond memories of the gigantic box that Mum and Dad's new fridge came in when I was five.
posted by flabdablet at 9:47 PM on April 23, 2018 [10 favorites]

Nintendo Labo is what made me finally break down and get a Switch. I had both sets pre-ordered before I even had the console. I have kids that are 7 and 9 and they just Get It. The assembly instructions are absolutely perfect and the kids can put together even the most complex Toy-Cons with no mistakes. Then they play the games a bit, and that’s pretty fun (but not really the highlight). Then they get out the paint pens and go nuts making the cardboard stuff totally theirs, which I think they like the best.

Nothing is a mystery! The mechanical functions are obvious because everything is built from flat sheets of cardboard, and it’s explained what does what as you go along. And then the tech stuff about how the Joy-Cons detect what’s going on inside and outside the Toy-Con is all deftly explained in the Discover part of the Labo software.

And then! There’s the semi hidden Toy-Con Garage which I didn’t even know about before we got the game – it lets you code up your own interactions from scratch in a drag and drop, Scratch- like programming environment. Which is brilliant since Scratch is the big way kids are being introduced to fun simple coding these days.

Nintendo Gets It. The kids Get It. Nintendo Labo for game education software thing of the year!
posted by zsazsa at 10:31 PM on April 23, 2018 [15 favorites]

I'm wondering how long until cheaper non-Nintendo™ knock-off cardboard replacements flood eBay and Amazon.

...or more hopefully - - how long until it awakens the maker in our kids.
posted by fairmettle at 10:37 PM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yeah zsazsa, I thought this was a great idea from the moment it was announced, but the Garage stuff really makes me love it. I'm a big fan of any toy or game that gets kids building stuff, and the way the Garage encourages you to take what you learned from building the Toy-Cons and what you now know the controllers can do and make whatever weird thing you can think up while teaching some basic programming principles is just wonderful.

As far as the actual Toy-Cons themselves go, I think the piano is almost worth the price of admission by itself. I haven't seen the robot kit in action, but the variety pack just seems like amazing value for anyone with kids and a Switch.

I love the fact that Nintendo is still doing crazy things, and that they're not just out there competing with Sony and Microsoft over who can push the most polygons. Sometimes the ways that Nintendo seems to be disconnected from the rest of the industry can be frustrating (for example, the way that they do everything involving the internet), but if that's the price we have to pay for the weird brilliance of things like the Switch and Labo I'm fine with it.
posted by IAmUnaware at 1:40 AM on April 24, 2018 [6 favorites]

Shit, that looks cool.
posted by wenestvedt at 3:13 AM on April 24, 2018

I was wondering what use Nintendo would have for cardboard, but this makes so much sense. I had a lot of fun building things out of cardboard when I was little.
posted by mantecol at 3:41 AM on April 24, 2018

We have the just-teen niblings staying for two weeks over the summer. Maybe we should upgrade the ancient Wii (which they love: "it's so retro!") to a Switch. Have cardboard and giant laser cutter. Hmm …

If they think the Wii's retro, I also have an Apple IIgs and an unused copy of Brøderbund's The Toy Shop …
posted by scruss at 5:10 AM on April 24, 2018 [4 favorites]

I had a functional equivalent of this back in the 50's. I believe it was from Edmund Scientific, one of those things advertised in the back of Boys' Life. Every few months a mysterious box would appear in the mail with a new project in it. A radio, a metal detector, a telescope, etc. Much soldering, sorting, reading and re-reading and assembly required. And they all eventually worked, after a fashion. The weirdest thing I built was my own cloud chamber complete with a radium source on the head of a pin. I learned a lot from it, but mostly that I had no aptitude for electronics...
posted by jim in austin at 6:32 AM on April 24, 2018 [5 favorites]

There is a small part of me that wants to object that using a black-box computer to optically sense when piano keys have been pressed is a very remote and non-intuitive approach to exploring the world.

There is a far larger part of me that believes encouraging kids to interact with the mechanical objects is a great thing and that this is fantastic and should be celebrated.

I do hope they've made it possible to build new things, though. Turning the piano kit into a drum set seems like the real opportunity for adventure. (Perhaps I missed it in the articles.)

And, to be fair, 98% of us who played with spring-clip circuit kits from Radio Shack in the 80s never spent time figuring out how the ceramic-encased crystal oscillators actually worked. It was just a magic box with terminals on each side. It didn't make the experience less fun or worthwhile.
posted by eotvos at 7:50 AM on April 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

Toy-Con Garage is the "build new things" part of the system. It hasn't received nearly enough attention in the press about Labo, I don't think.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:07 AM on April 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

Toy-Con Garage is the "build new things" part of the system. It hasn't received nearly enough attention in the press about Labo, I don't think.

Indeed, which is why I appreciated that the Kotaku review went a bit more into how there's so much potential for the maker community to innovate and invent with this particular part of the Labo kit.
posted by Fizz at 9:15 AM on April 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's going to be fun to see what the mad scientists come up with 6-12 months from now.
posted by Fizz at 9:15 AM on April 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

Anybody else hung up on the terrible name? ‘Wii’ took some getting used to but ‘Labo’? Aside from the back-of-a-magazine-from-the-1950s-‘Wham-O’-‘Whizz-O’ feel, it’s spelt incorrectly for the pronunciation to be ‘lab-oh. If it’s ‘layb-oh’ it sounds like an invention to improve the well-being of an intimate part of the female anatomy.
posted by stanf at 12:36 PM on April 24, 2018

I'm guessing the name is simply a transliteration of the Japanese name, ラボ, pronounced "rabo" or "labo", meaning "laboratory." I'm fine with it.
posted by zsazsa at 12:53 PM on April 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

That's what I recall from the press around the initial announcement, zsazsa.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:35 PM on April 24, 2018

“Nintendo Labo VS Grown Man: Is it fun for adults too?”—The Wulff Den, 24 April 2018
posted by ob1quixote at 9:21 PM on April 24, 2018

The Verge has a neat round-up of stuff people have made using Toy-Con Garage. It's all fairly simple stuff so far, but I'm honestly impressed given the short amount of time the tools have been available. This should hopefully lead to some really wild stuff in a couple of months.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:08 AM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

Anybody else hung up on the terrible name?

Nah, but I wish they'd spent more time on the localization of the pun names for the lab characters. Or I could just be annoyed that I can't customize the software to change the supremely terrible "Gerry Riggs" to my brilliant idea of "Tabin Slott".
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 8:30 AM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

IIRC "Labo" is just the Japanese version of "lab", since ending syllables in consonants other than N isn't really a thing in Japanaese.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:27 AM on April 25, 2018