MU42

One of my sideline hobbies is collecting trinkets I find lying about on the ground. Over the course of several years, I've collected more than a dozen individual legos of various colors, sizes, and type specificities.

One lego, by itself is rather unremarkable.

Two legos allow one to at least use the interconnecting design of the lego building blocks category of toy.

As the number of legos increases, so does the "play-ability" of the "collection" (deliberately avoiding the word "set" here).

At what point, in the growth of a collection such as mine, does the collection achieve the minimum mass/amount/whatever to qualify as more than just a collection of a few legos, becoming instead a member of a more substantive category (something with which someone might experience enjoyable play... an "eclectic set", for lack of better terms)?

This is, of course, a theoretical/rhetorical question; but it serves nicely as a visual aid for gaining objectivity with reference to the concept of "more than the sum of its parts".

When does a collection of individual widgets become a set?

When does a project (such as a MU, a MU service or softcode package, or any other MU thing... perhaps brigadoon day or the Innovations in Text Based Gaming conferences) become more than a collection of code ideas, theme ideas, and/or PLAYER characters? When does such a thing "have life" (re: having a life of its own)?

Is "life" like legos? At some point you arrive at "enough to be that" and you just know it when you get there?