ANNALS OF INVENTION

Child’s Play: What Makes A Toy Fun?

From The New Yorker
December 15, 2003

In 1913, an Illinois stonemason named Charles Pajeau created a toy after seeing his children playing with pencils and empty thread spools-he called it Tinkertoy. In 1916, John Lloyd Wright, the son of the architect, invented Lincoln Logs, a toy inspired by watching the earthquake-proof, “floating cantilever construction” of his father’s Imperial Hotel, in Tokyo. During the Second World War, a mechanical engineer named Richard James was working on ships’ suspension systems when a torsion spring fell off his desk and flopped over, and the way it wiggled struck him as funny. His wife, Betty, paging through the dictionary, came upon a word for the toy: Slinky. In 1982, a nasa nuclear engineer named Lonnie Johnson was working at home on a high-pressure pump when a jet of water accidentally shot across the bathroom. Since then, more than two hundred million Super Soakers have been sold.

Seventeen years ago, Chuck Hoberman was a kinetic sculptor, with a degree in fine art from Cooper Union and a degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University. He and his wife, Carolyn, who was also an artist, lived in a seventh-floor walkup just below Canal Street, in a dilapidated building with a sign outside that said, “Gentleman-Please Do Not Urinate on the Door. It Is Unsanitary.” Chuck was interested in transformations-mechanical objects that could change their size without changing their shape. “I was obsessed with the idea of making objects disappear,” he told me. “Not as a magic trick, but where the object could self-transform-change itself by itself.” He tried to imagine a scissors hinge, like those you see in old-fashioned elevator doors, except in three dimensions, so that the structure could expand into a dome or a sphere. What would the geometry of such a structure look like? Early in the morning, before going off to his job at an engineering firm, Chuck would sit in his “study” (created by hanging a sheet between the desk and the bed), folding pieces of paper into triangles, pentagons, and polyhedrons. He worked on the problem for several years, but he made no progress.

The Hobermans are Buddhists, and one day in the spring of 1987 they were visiting their teacher’s retreat, at a farm in the Hudson Valley. “I was listening to a great Tibetan lama who was teaching the philosophy of mind, a kind of brick-by-brick construction of the proper view of consciousness,” Chuck recalled. “Each point was introduced, examined from the point of view of several different schools of Buddhist thought, then synthesized into a conclusion that led to the next point. I was supposed to be meditating, but I was drifting. It was a beautiful spring day, and the room was warm. Then there was a click, and in an instant I saw the solution to my obsession. I saw a linkage-a hinged loop of pieces moving in space. I could see how two, three, many linkages could be attached to one another to build up an entire transforming volume.”

Chuck took out a patent on the idea, which was described in the technical literature as a “Doubly-Curved Truss Structure.” He thought of his structure as art, but he wanted to prove that it had a practical, money-making purpose as well; utility is an essential part of Chuck’s aesthetic. He had a series of conversations with Martin Mikulas, who was then the head of structural concepts at nasa’s Langley Research Center, about developing his invention for space travel. He also spoke to a tent manufacturer about making a tent that wouldn’t require poles, a luggage-maker about creating suitcases and trunks that could fold up for easier storage, and a medical-equipment manufacturer about making instruments for noninvasive surgery. Everyone Chuck spoke to was certain that he had invented something valuable, but no one was sure exactly what it was.

The notion that what Chuck Hoberman had invented was a toy came from Anthony Gentile, who, along with his twin brother, John, is a partner in Abrams Gentile Entertainment, a firm that creates toys and brokers ideas to larger manufacturers. Most independent inventors need toy brokers in order to gain access to the industry. Hasbro and Mattel, which between them account for about thirty-five per cent of the industry’s twenty billion dollars in annual domestic sales, don’t even consider independent solicitations.

The Gentiles had read about Chuck’s invention in the Patents column of the Times, and asked him to meet them at their offices, situated across from the now boarded-up Broadway saloon Legz Diamond’s, on West Fifty-fourth Street. “John and Anthony are these intense New York guys, and they both talk really fast,” Chuck recalled. “They look exactly the same, and there was one of them on either side of me-it was like listening to them in stereo.”

“When we met Chuck, he had his sights set on outer space,” Anthony Gentile told me. “You know Chuck; he’s a big thinker. He was talking about building space stations and whatnot, and we said to him, ‘That sounds great, Chuck, but how about this-a collapsible playhouse that you can fold up small enough to fit into your back pocket!’ “

The Gentiles hired Chuck to develop that idea and several other toys, and they had a prototype of the playhouse manufactured, which they showed to Mattel in the hope of working out a licensing deal. “Mattel loved that toy,” Anthony said, “except for the price point-which was, like, fifty dollars. And, let me tell you, everything in the toy business is about price point.” In recent years, as the toy industry has seen its claim on playtime challenged by video games, toymakers have become intensely focussed on price; more than sixty-five per cent of American toys sell for twenty dollars or less. “I could make a doll levitate, with no strings-a miracle!” Anthony says. “But if I can’t do it for $19.95 they’re not interested.”

Chuck worked for the Gentiles for two years, developing ideas for toys, but none of them sold, and when his contract ended he was ready to return to his career as an artist. A curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art asked him to create a piece for a moma show, and Chuck made a dome that could open from the center, like an iris. He also built the two-story-high transforming sphere that visitors to the Liberty Science Center, in Jersey City, encounter just inside the main entrance. These projects didn’t earn Chuck much money, but they did bring him artistic credibility, and that was what he really wanted.

Carolyn had a different vision. “I had been going to toy fairs, meeting people, and I found the toy world to be very interesting,” she told me. She persuaded Chuck to focus on making a toy sphere. What Chuck came up with was an unlikely toy, a transformer that changes its shape as it expands, from a sea-urchin-like bundle of hinges into a sphere of delicately attenuated struts. Each hinge unfolds while at the same time pivoting, so that its relationship to the other hinges remains the same. The struts inscribe a series of triangles and pentagons that intersect with each other, and the points of intersection form geodesic circles that are similar to the shapes described by Buckminster Fuller, who was an inspiration for Chuck.

Carolyn found a manufacturer in New Jersey that could make the parts for the toy sphere, and together they raised money to pay for the materials and the production costs. Carolyn also designed the packaging for the product, which they called the Hoberman Sphere, and which consisted of more than four hundred acrylic pieces that required assembly at home. The Hobermans took it around to the major toy fairs, including those in New York, San Francisco, and Nuremberg. They didn’t get many orders from retailers, but they did get invaluable advice from other toymakers, notably Dennis Binkley, the founder of Geospace International, in Seattle. He convinced the Hobermans that, for financial reasons, their product should be made in China. “He also told me our packaging was terrible,” Carolyn says with a laugh.

In May of 1995, Carolyn accompanied Binkley on his next trip to China. “The factory said to us, ‘Do you need the toy to snap together?’ ” she recalled. “And we said, ‘No, I guess not.’ And they said, ‘Could we make it out of polypro?,’ and we said, ‘Sure.’ ” Samples of this new Hoberman Sphere-a lightweight, polypropylene thirty-inch toy that now required no assembly at home-came back from China later that year. In 1997, the Hobermans brought out a twelve-inch version, and the Store of Knowledge, a high-end retail chain, bought practically the entire supply.

The Hobermans’ big break came on August 16, 1998, when the Reverend Walter Shrophire, Jr., of Foundry United Methodist Church, in Washington, D.C., used a Hoberman Sphere as a visual aid in a sermon that he was giving about the big bang. Bill and Hillary Clinton were in the audience; the President was scheduled to give his grand-jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky matter the following morning. After the sermon, Hillary Clinton asked the minister where he had found that marvellous toy, saying she was looking for something to give Bill for his birthday. The minister offered his sphere, and Hillary passed it along to the President as they stood in the church. Outside, reporters were shouting questions about Monica Lewinsky. People watching the news that evening saw the President, ignoring the press, smiling cryptically as he stared into the Hoberman Sphere, slowly opening and closing it.

“We had no idea what had happened, because our daughter had been born on August 11th and we were oblivious to everything,” Chuck says. “When we finally checked our messages, we heard all these people saying, ‘Congratulations! You’re famous!’ “

Today, the Hoberman Sphere can be found everywhere, from science-museum gift shops to Wal-Mart and Toys R Us. The Hobermans run Hoberman Designs, which is based in a large, high-ceilinged loft in lower Manhattan, employs some twenty-five people, and does ten million dollars’ worth of business a year. With nearly five million units sold, the sphere seems well on its way to becoming a classic toy, a twenty-first-century Slinky, and one of the few toys of recent vintage that are likely to be popular for a long time.

That might have been the end of the story-and it would be a happy ending, more or less, like the story of Richard and Betty James, the inventors of the Slinky. (Richard abandoned the business and his family to join a religious cult in Bolivia, but his wife took over, moved the Slinky factory near the Jameses’ home town of Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, where it remains one of the town’s largest employers, and made Slinky the world-famous toy that it is today. Now eighty-six, Betty James was inducted into the toy industry’s Hall of Fame three years ago.)

But the toy industry has changed since the Second World War, and the difference between the Jameses’ and the Hobermans’ experience is one way of measuring just how much. Toymakers have always created toys that appealed to parents. The Erector set (1913) and Monopoly (1935) were products that parents could fondly believe were preparing their children to be builders and bankers. In the years after the war, though, toymakers began to make products that appealed exclusively to kids-toys that, in many cases, parents actively disliked, which was the principal source of their appeal. Toys like Rock’em Sock’em Robots, from 1966 (the ad’s tagline, “You knocked my block off,” taught me how to intimidate my younger brother), were the heirs to toys like Gooey Louie (1995): “Pick his nose until his brain explodes.” Dolls such as Shirley Temple (1934) and Ginny (1951)-which, in their infantile appearance, were meant to elicit a maternal response from the children who played with them, and thus to begin preparing girls for motherhood-gave way to Barbie, a doll that was not the child’s baby but her role model, the girl she longed to become.

John Brewster, a toy historian, has written of the early-twentieth-century toymakers, “They were marketing a particular social morality-one that stressed industry, probity, and individual endeavor.” Play was the work of children, and building blocks and baby dolls were the tools that children used to become adults. But by the mid-nineteen-seventies toys had stopped trying to prepare children for anything other than a perpetual childhood. As David Elkind, a professor of child development at Tufts University and the author of the classic book “The Hurried Child,” told me recently, “Many toys no longer perform a socializing function, as they used to. Toys are no different from any other consumer product-it’s all about selling something.”

This evolution in the design and marketing of toys marked the first time that children younger than twelve were explicitly targeted as consumers. The toy industry taught the makers of other kinds of consumer products that children were a potentially lucrative market, and that “aspirational age marketing” (selling the charm of feeling older) could be used to sell not only Barbie dolls but clothes, fast food, cosmetics, and electronics. Meanwhile, as fashion and trendiness became the driving concerns of the toy industry, the notion of a classic, a toy made to last, all but disappeared. (Even Binney & Smith, the makers of Crayola crayons since 1903, has seen the need to spruce up its choice of colors with Tickle Me Pink and Macaroni and Cheese crayons.) For the contemporary toymaker, it is less important to invent one classic toy than it is to invent a toy that can be up-dated regularly with new colors, styles, models, and related products. “What retailers are impressed by is how much real estate you take up on the shelf,” Anthony Gentile told me. “You want that whole wall of pink that you see when you get to the Barbie section.” By inventing a timeless toy-one that didn’t need to be improved-Chuck had limited himself to a tiny piece of retail real estate.

In the years since the introduction of the original sphere, the Hobermans have developed an entire line of spheres, from a twelve-inch, glow-in-the-dark model to a fifty-four-inch megasphere. They have also extended their patented linking concept to other toys, including Flip Outs (a sphere that changes color when you spin it) and Growbots (structures that transform into robotic-looking creatures). So far, none of Chuck’s newer concepts have caught on like the original toy, but the Hobermans have high hopes for their new product for this holiday season, the Sonic Sphere.

The Hobermans introduced the toy at the 2003 American International Toy Fair, which was held at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, in New York, last February. I went to the fair to see the toy for myself, joining the crowd of toy inventors, producers, distributors, packagers, retailers, and journalists who were poking around hundreds of exhibitors’ booths. As I wandered the aisles of the vast space, I felt a sense of wonder at all the amazing things that toys can do these days (sing, dance, teach, work out), but, at the same time, I failed to find, among the many thousands of gewgaws, a single item that I wanted to take home to my four-year-old son. Toys must be two, often contradictory things in order to succeed. They have to be fun to play with, but they also have to look, while sitting on the shelf of the toy store, as if they would be fun to play with (the industry refers to this as “playability”), which, in many cases, results in an emphasis on superficial, attention-grabbing attributes. The only toys I saw at the fair which appealed to me were those I had played with as a child. (The toy industry has accommodated this desire, regularly bringing back toys in twenty-year cycles, like oldies on the radio, so that parents can duplicate their own Toyland experiences through their children. This season’s retro toys include Strawberry Shortcake, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and My Little Pony, all of which were originally popular in the eighties.)

One reason so many sophisticated modern toys are less compelling than their humble forebears is the technology itself. Twenty years ago, the advent of electronics was hailed as “the greatest thing in our industry since the development of plastic,” in the words of Arnold Greenberg, the former chairman of Coleco. This year, for the first time, more than half of the toys produced by United States toymakers will have an electronic chip inside. But so far technology has resulted in a striking dearth of good toys. Although this new generation of toys are advertised as “interactive,” they’re actually less interactive than traditional toys. Mitchel Resnick, a professor of learning research at the M.I.T. Media Lab who studies technology and toys, told me recently, “The question I ask about tech toys is, Does the technology keep the agency of play with the child, or does it shift the agency to the toy?” High-tech toys are so sophisticated that they’re almost capable of playing by themselves-children aren’t required.

I found the Hobermans on the mezzanine level of the Javits Center, under a large banner that said “Hoberman Designs.” The sound of a steel drum was coming from a nearby exhibitor’s booth. The music was supposed to be fun and wacky, but in the cavernous hall it sounded tinny and sad; Chuck said it was driving everybody crazy. “But the drummer has been paid for the whole day, so he’s going to play,” he added.

Chuck was dressed in a green suit, an orange shirt, and wire-rimmed glasses. He is tall, thin, and pale, and wears his red hair cut short. He was moving around the spacious Hoberman pavilion, meeting people, taking characteristically long strides, and yet his glad-handing seemed forced, not like the natural blarney I’ve encountered in other toy men. Chuck often looks slightly ill at ease in public, especially when he’s on display as “the inventor.” Carolyn, who was standing near her husband, appeared to be having more fun. “I like selling,” she told me. “Chuck doesn’t. He’s too shy. But I really enjoy talking to people, hearing what they have to say.”

Now forty-seven, Chuck runs the design and product-development side of the business, and Carolyn, fifty-one, oversees sales and intellectual-property protection. For Chuck, the greatest challenge has been finding a way to be successful in the toy business without betraying his artistic standards. He explained, “As an artist, my view was that one’s work is the expression of an individual speaking to a viewer who is also an individual. And, as an inventor, I’d always loved the fact that the Patent Office only recognizes the inventors on the patent. So my mind-set as we started the business was that marketing was a kind of abuse of statistics. The population is divided into arbitrary categories, but an individual can never be a category.” (When time allows, Chuck continues to seek opportunities to use his designs in artistic and architectural contexts; the mechanical curtain for the stage at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, in Salt Lake City, was a Hoberman design.)

Chuck hated the whole notion of focus groups, which are ubiquitous in the toy industry. After all, the Hobermans’ company had been founded not on a marketing gambit but on a mystical revelation that occurred while Chuck was meditating. “I didn’t want to know why people liked the sphere,” Chuck told me. “They liked it because I liked it, and that was enough.”

The event that changed Chuck’s thinking took place last year, when the Hobermans introduced their Discover Dome-a demisphere sheathed in origami-style folded paper that had fun facts about planets and dinosaurs printed on it. “We simply said, ‘If we build it, they will come,’ ” Chuck recalled. “In retrospect, I think we all suffered from mass hypnosis.” Their fellow-toymakers loved the ingenious domes, but kids weren’t interested, and the price, $29.99, was too high for most parents. The Discover Dome bombed, and the Hobermans were stuck with thousands of unwanted toys.

As a result of the dome disaster, Chuck had another revelation. “I realized we had to get serious,” he said. The company proclaimed 2003 “The Year of the Sphere” in its marketing literature, and Chuck’s own image was incorporated into the brand (the packaging bears a photograph of his bespectacled red head). The Hobermans also began conducting focus groups-going to private and public schools around New York City and asking the kids what kind of toy they’d like to have.

The kids said they wanted a toy with music and flashing lights-something “interactive”-so Chuck designed the Sonic Sphere.

Like many of the exhibitors at the toy fair, the Hobermans had hired actors to impersonate children playing with the product, in order to demonstrate how much fun it is. (Real children aren’t permitted at the fair.) A woman was playing with the Sonic Sphere, rotating it to make different types of vocal and instrumental sounds emerge from the small orange plastic speaker in the center, and expanding and collapsing it to change the pitch and rhythm of the sounds. “So I’m hanging out here in my bedroom, and I can be my own d.j.!” the player playing at play said.

The Sonic Sphere was getting good reviews from other toymakers. Brooke Abercrombie, the president of Neurosmith, stopped by. “What a great way to translate motion into sound!” she said. But Chuck couldn’t tell whether he had a hit on his hands. “It’s not like designing the sphere,” he said. “Instead of doing something that pleased me, and that, it turned out, kids loved, now we’re trying to invent what we think kids will love-which is a very different stance.”

In June, the Hobermans went to the Licensing International trade show, which was also held at the Javits Center. Unlike the toy fair, with its Saharan wastes of gimcrackery, at the licensing fair there are no physical objects-the trade is entirely in characters, narratives, and brands. Licensed toys-largely movie, music, and TV properties-which were once a tiny part of the toy industry, have steadily grown to encompass more than thirty per cent of domestic toy sales. Movie tie-ins are declining, mainly because of the relative failure of the action figures that Hasbro produced for the new “Star Wars” trilogy, but tie-ins to popular TV characters like SpongeBob SquarePants are on the rise. (SpongeBob alone generated more than half a billion dollars’ worth of licensed products last year.)

Toymakers use the word “toyetic” when they’re discussing whether an entertainment property has what it takes to be a successful toy. The movie “Men in Black” spawned a lot of licenses, but it wasn’t particularly toyetic because the characters are limited to wearing one color. The Harry Potter phenomenon, which also launched a tsunami of licensed products, hasn’t proved to be particularly toyetic, either, perhaps because children would rather read the books than play with the toys.

At the beginning of his toymaking career, Chuck would never have considered taking a license-an arrangement under which the toymaker pays the entertainment company for the right to use its character (and often has to guarantee a minimum payment to the licensor, regardless of how many of the toys are sold). A licensed toy doesn’t have to be particularly ingenious, because its appeal has less to do with what the toy does than with what it represents. The Hoberman Sphere is the antithesis of this kind of product: it’s a toy that is what it does, and does what it is. The other drawback of licensed toys is that they deny children the most absorbing aspect of play: creating narratives. An ordinary cardboard packing box can be an enchanting toy if you imagine that it’s a secret fort. But a toy that relies on a screen-based character or story doesn’t require much imagination. Licensing is the fast-food version of toys-all you have to do is consume.

Nevertheless, like his view of focus groups, Chuck’s opinion of licensing was evolving. “I feel this is American culture at its most distinctive,” he said of the power of branding that was on display at Licensing International. “There is something very twenty-first-century about the idea that Lara Croft Tomb Raider represents a part of the global economy.” At the Nickelodeon pavilion, he put on 3-D glasses and watched a “SpongeBob” episode in the SpongeBob Tiki hut, and then had a talk with some people from Nickelodeon about the possibility of creating a Hoberman product based on the lovable yellow sponge, in time for “SpongeBob” the movie, which is due in theatres in the fall of 2004. Chuck was still hedging against a licensing deal-“What’s the point, really?” he said to me gloomily-but Carolyn was open to the idea. “You know, we need to think big,” she said. “Sometimes I imagine a Hoberland, a place where everything transforms. There’s a Legoland; why not Hoberland?”

Now the toy-buying season is here again, and, if this season is like others in recent memory, parents will be lining up around the block, in the snow, outside Toys R Us, to get a toy that, of the thousands of new toys released this year, is the only toy that every child must have. The must-have toy is the apotheosis of the marketing of toys as fashion accessories. Will this year’s must-have toy be Kasey the Kinderbot, a learning toy from Fisher-Price, which, in addition to helping kids read and write, also promises to teach them about manners, self-awareness, and emotions-all for $39.88 at Wal-Mart? (Parents will presumably be willing to spend more than twenty dollars for a toy that relieves them of the responsibility of parenting.) Will it be the rare P-Rico Plush doll, from the popular “Homies” series? Or will it be the Sonic Sphere, from Hoberman Designs?

There was no must-have toy last year, or the year before that; the last M.H.T. was Furby, a robotic feline, in 1998. Some industry analysts, like Kurt Barnard, the publisher of Barnard’s Retail Trend Report, see this as evidence of the toy industry’s continuing slippage in its competition with video games-PlayStation 2 and Xbox were the M.H.T.s of the past couple of years. “What the toy industry needs to figure out is how to make toys that are as compelling as video games,” Barnard told me. “Until that happens, it’s going to have problems.” But another industry observer, Christopher Byrne, an independent toy analyst, sometimes known as “the Toy Guy,” sees the decline of the must-have toy as a sign that toy buyers are becoming more rational about toys. “Parents have awakened to the fact that the toy they practically killed themselves to get may not have had the appeal that they expected,” he told me recently. “I can’t argue with more than forty-four million Furby toys sold, but how many of those did kids play with for a long time?”

The Sonic Sphere is at Wal-Mart and Toys R Us stores across the country, and the Hobermans are monitoring the weekly numbers. “The volume isn’t huge, but the trend is encouraging,” Chuck said last month. “So far, it looks good.”

Chuck also mentioned, to my surprise, that he’d decided to take a SpongeBob license. “I know, I know, we’re selling out,” he said with a smile, seeing my raised eyebrows. “But the good thing about SpongeBob is that he can change his shape whenever he wants, which fits nicely into our aesthetic.” He went on, “We’re knocking around a couple of ideas, one of which is an exploding SpongeBob head, or maybe a head that turns into a pineapple.”

Chuck spoke with a confidence that I had not heard from him before. By following his lifelong interest in transformations, I thought, he had himself been transformed-from an artist into a toymaker. But I was wrong about that. Not long after we spoke, Chuck changed his mind and dropped the SpongeBob idea. “A SpongeBob toy might have made us some money, but it just wasn’t what we’re really about,” he explained. “I have to believe that there really is a group of people-regular people shopping at Toys R Us and Wal-Mart-who share this basic wonder that I have when they touch a plastic linkage that somehow embodies the geometries that underlie natural structures, regardless of whether Sponge-Bob or Spider-Man’s face is on the toy. There’s no point in making a throwaway item just because it might sell. There’s got to be more to what we do than that.”

Copyright © John Seabrook 2004. All rights reserved