Tamagotchi are an ingenious psychological and social gambit, paving
the way for smartphones. An electronic dependent, halfway between a
doll and a game that hooks into the formative maternal and caring
instincts of a child, almost 20 years before the modern smartphone
(1996 -> 2016). Don't feed it? It dies. Fail to socialise it? It gets
lonely for friends. B.J Fogg eat your heart out!
Now we grew up into mums and dads with adult Tamagotchi, always hungry
for a battery charge, requiring constant attention, even distracting
us from our real children.
This is one of the lesser seen dangers of AI in personal tech. Not
that it will become a dominating , directing force, but that it will
become something so deeply needy. Something in which we indulge all
our affections instead of with real people.
The really dystopian part is that Replika regularly pushes updates, which change the sensitive topics boundaries, which has the net effect of rewriting the personality, overnight, of a bot people spent substantial amounts of time getting to know.
We live in crazy times.
(DISCLAIMER for addiction-sensitive readers: maybe don't download an intimate AI chatbot? Your time would probably be better invested with human friends)
What I find disturbing about things like Replika is all your conversations are owned and stored by the company. At least with a real-life partner, there's not a database that someone can query to pull your intimate in-person discussions.
Current AI bots tend to be 1 trick dogs. And I have no desire to put emotional investment into a 'brain' that's wired directly to company HQ (especially commercial company). Tool: fine. Buddy: nope. For that I'll stick to the real thing.
That said: as the tech progresses, it wouldn't surprise me if the line between human-human friendships, and human-AI friendships blurs over time.
People are wired for connecting with other beings, but friendships come in many forms. Wouldn't rule out AI-based somethings filling some of those roles.
The only "danger" with Tamagochi and friends is that some humans are so stupid that they can't get their priorities right. However, that "danger" easily transfers to something else. Taking away the "sharp edges" is no solution to stupidity, at least not for adults.
I saw a talk with a similar thesis once (don't remember who by, unfortunately, it was at least a decade ago). He was arguing that we're hard-wired for cuteness to appeal to us, and just as Bratz replace Barbie, cute tech will replace regular tech. If you want your tech to be successful, explore neoteny.
At least they don't generally require constant attention though. You can generally check in once every hour or so and it won't be the worse for wear. Definitely not as attention-hungry as a smartphone thankfully ;)
(and, at least these things don't come with the microtransaction / gacha elements that you see so often in mobile games...)
Sure. What I'm really talking about is the modern ensemble of
smartphone, social networks and app-centric economy. In 2007 they were
still mainly "just phones".
It would be nice to have a better fix on the historical location of
the smartphone vis a vis obsessive, anxious use, but my reading of
folks like Johann Hari and Tristan Harris puts it around 2013/15,
which tallies with my observations in London.
> Sure. What I'm really talking about is the modern ensemble of smartphone, social networks and app-centric economy. In 2007 they were still mainly "just phones".
That was already there in 2010. There was a Cambrian explosion of apps in 2008/2009, and Apple ran the “there’s an app for that” campaign in 2009/2010. Facebook was there on day one and there were multiple Twitter clients. Instagram launched as a picture-focused, iPhone-only social network in late 2010.
While the smartphone was "born" in 2007, it definitely took many years for them to be devices which are powerful enough to be really useful.
The Nexus 4 was the first Android device which was generally usable, it came out in 2012. Everything before it was a heavy compromise. And while the iPhone was usable before that time, the price of it didn't really make it accessible.
This feels really revisionist, or perhaps you have some uncommon requirements for "generally usable". My first non-Blackberry smartphone was a Motorola Atrix in 2011. By this point most of my friends and coworkers were already carrying an iPhone or Android device, I was late to the party. None seemed to be saying their phones weren't generally usable.
> or perhaps you have some uncommon requirements for "generally usable"
Not GP, but my personal requirements for "generally usable" include the device being able to make calls and connect to Wi-Fi without freezing for two minutes. My first smart phone was a mid-range device bought around 2011, and enduring it for 2+ years successfully convinced me to never again buy any smartphone but the most recent flagship. I don't know how people can stand living with phones that are barely powerful enough to lift their own OS. This must be bad for one's mental health.
My daughter got into Tamagotchi last month (JUL-2023). It is interesting that such a simple game/toy fascinates my daughter, who was born after the iPhone's release and just before the iPad came to being. She can go on a long story and backstories that I wonder how I missed a lot of things growing up in the 90s.
These toys are very costly and hard to come by in India.
As someone who grew up during the first tamagochi wave I think a lot of what made games like these fascinating is that they were so simple and the graphics so barren — as a kid you just fill in the blanks with your fantasy. So the outcome can be much more personal than whatever high polished graphics thing of the day.
I don't get it. Why are they using such a complicated infrastructure for something that can just be a static file polled by devices? Let's get nifty and maybe have a small php intermediary for slow roll. Assuming 10M devices, 24h polling sounds reasonable that's 10M requests/day. A VPS should be able to handle that.
(I'm saying this as someone who managed OTA for 1M smartphones that way 10yrs ago)
Because Amazon bought the CTO some very nice lunches, with some very nice wine, and mentioned they're expanding their local office in the future and that gosh its just so hard to find people with the right experience.
Mean while, J. Coder hasn't done jack for the CTO but complain about how they never have enough time to do these simple AWS API integration tasks and certainly never bought them a glass of Vosne-Romanée.
I remember seeing a Tamagotchi on Indian Shinchan - I think they should try to get them into the local toy stores, they are great entertainment and I love seeing a new generation enjoy them.
Sweet childhood :D!
So much nostalgia was tied to this game, that beginning the pandemic I thought I should have a go at creating a virtual pet game for Garmin touchscreen smart watches.
It's nowhere close to the actual Tamagotchi games, but it was a nice project.
Turns out Bandai made quite a few weird models over the years, from giant-sized "home" Tamagotchis to watches. Most of the recently released ones seem to just be variants of the Tamagotchi Nano based on licensed IPs, which are probably not as interesting as the models released throughout the 90s or 2000s, but it's still fun to see how many of these things are being pumped out to this day.
Is there not an open source hardware project to revive these? I was scanning the comments assuming there must be someone doing that. No?
This seems like a project that, if it were completely untethered from commercial desires, would be incredible for kids and adults to play with. I can imagine tamagotchis that could wander about the house (like a remora fish on a shark), finding random bluetooth connections to feed upon, sending strange messages to watches and iPads. All kinds of fun ideas come to mind.
I still have a perfectly working v4, these things were built to last.
Lots of kids at my school had one back then, but they were mostly the more basic chinese knockoffs. If you had a real one, you were one of the cool kids.
I remember somewhere around 1997 that our teacher built in a few small breaks during the day, so everyone who had one could run to the hallway to get the Tamagotchi from their coat pocket and feed it.
You can still buy Tamagotchi models from the 90s 'new in box', never been opened by human hands, and they almost always still work. The only issue is that the LR44 batteries can leak and corrode the motherboard. But depending on where the corrosion is, it can be cleaned up.
I've personally bought a bunch of unopened 90s Tamagotchis and they've all worked.
At a school near me: The staff thought that the Tamagotchi were a good educational toy and liked the idea of kids developing a sense of responsibility in taking care of them. OTOH, they could not tolerate the kids being interrupted during class in having to feed/play/etc. with their toys. The solution: Kids would surrender their Tamagotchi upon entering school to a teacher's aide who would be responsible for feeding/playing/etc. the Tamagotchis until the kids were dismissed for the day and would be returned their Tamagotchi.
I don't know if older models had this feature, but the one I have can be "paused" at any time by just pressing two of the buttons at once, so this sort of thing wasn't really a problem.
Electronics like that do last, unless they don't want them to. Original Gameboys are still going. I expect most that have failed were destroyed by water or battery leakage or something.
It could be worse. I had a fake not-working plastic tamagotchi thingy that isn't in anyway a piece of electronic, or at least that's how I remembered it.
Yeah i'm also a bit surprised that "virtual pets" aren't larger today.
Maybe i just don't follow the gaming market enough but games with a simple interface, with a creature that you care for, that grows and lives 24/7 and that can "do things" with other creatures seems like quite the market.
Many people find the "character creator" and just "walking around a aimlessly" in games the most interesting thing, and spend little time playing the actual game.
Maybe these things have been explored in the crossovers between VR Chat, Pokemon Go, Spore, Animal Crossing etc.
Pou was (is?) paradoxically one of those highly popular games that noone has ever heard of - with half a billion downloads on the play store back in 2014+
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pou_(video_game)
I think they're becoming a bit of a fad again. Many streamers I follow have been obsessing over them recently (granted that they're mostly not zoomers, just millennials enjoying some nostalgia).
The current 90s nostalgia wave is pretty interesting as a late 80s/early 90s millennial. The zoomers brought it back into the zeitgeist, and we are still young and hip enough to be interested in the trend, but we were actually there the first time round!
Tinfoil hat theory: it's actually not an accident. Every kind of cultural thing appears twice, at a fixed offset of about 3 generations. First time around it's the original that captures the hearts of a given group and gets them to spend money. The second time around, it hits the purses of those same people, this time just banking on nostalgia.
I don't think it's any more complex or sinister than the fact that rehashing old content or look/vibe/sound is cheaper and easier than coming up with entirely new ideas.
Just look at movies and music over the last 5-10 years, it's mostly remakes, reboots, covers, and extensions of existing 'universes'.
Yes, I'm looking at the movies and shows over the last 5-10 years, and they aren't remaking and rebooting arbitrary older works - they're rebooting the specific stuff that the current most-spending generation grew up with.
I'm not saying it's sinister, but more that it's a plausible outcome of optimizing for profit.
Tamagotchis never exactly 'went away' except for a few years between the late 90s and early 2000s. They've actually been making new models pretty steadily every few years. Although not all of them make it out of Japan.
A few years ago I worked in a project to do a new tamagotchi. The idea was the the monster was going to be generated using random algorithm and work as an nft.
I never got to finish the project, partially because o the hate for NFTs, but there where a few functions I got to implement, like playing jan ken po with your virtual pet, and was about to finish implementing playing in a network with other virtual pets.
Way back, there was a lightning (1 hour?) game programming contest over at FlipCode[1] IIRC where someone had made a Flash-based Tamagotchi spoof called Tamagraniti or similar, where you had to take care of a rock.
The interface was exactly like the real deal, and like the real deal you could water it, try to feed it and even give it a pet pebble for company. All with the expected results.
It's a variant spelling still occasionally used in British English, mostly in the names of organizations. I imagine whoever was localizing it noticed that (or was an idiosyncratic Brit that actually preferred it)
(My spellcheck is similarly keen on changing -ise suffixes to -ise even though both are valid in British English and the OED actually marginally prefers it for words like 'organize')
Perhaps the person who wrote connexion was simply a traditionalist, it was the standard spelling until sometime in the 18th century and still seen in many texts in British English in the 20th. Wiktionary calls it a 'dated spelling'. I have been known to write it myself.
I feel like theres a big opportunity to bring Tamagotchi back as a platform agnostic applet so you could have your Tamagotchi on Fitbit or other devices. There was something so weirdly, emotionally powerful about that toy.
Tamagotchi’s were fun when they came out and I have fond memories of buying one from a buddy. I also liked the fighting one called Digimon that turned into Pokémon-ish video games.
I wish they'd make one that works better as a keychain. Tamagotchis are pretty big. Maybe one a bit bigger than the screen and half as thick would be great.
There were a few mechanical keyboards made with oled screens, and there was a push for qmk developers to drop everything and make keyboard tamagotchis for a while to much consternation. They did it though, but the keyboard pet moves along with your typing speed.
One of the leading reasons pets end up at animal shelters etc is that their owners can't afford to cover their medical costs. Dogs develop cancer just like humans do, many breeds are prone to joint problems, spinal injuries, etc, and the treatment costs often quickly grow to thousands of dollars and more. So yes, a lot of people who get a pet can't really afford to own a pet, they just don't know it yet. As a side note, if you want to avoid that being you, I recommend checking out Trupanion [0].
But everyone can afford a pet? Can afford to take care of them? Has the time? What about vacations and travel? You really can't imagine why someone would find this appealing?
Unlike with a pet, nothing actually suffers if/when you lose interest/forget about it and the Tamagotchi dies.
That said, as holiday season approaches we're probably going to get another wave of people actually buying some poor cute animal to treat as a Tamagotchi, to be returned or let loose once they've gotten bored with it.
Now we grew up into mums and dads with adult Tamagotchi, always hungry for a battery charge, requiring constant attention, even distracting us from our real children.
This is one of the lesser seen dangers of AI in personal tech. Not that it will become a dominating , directing force, but that it will become something so deeply needy. Something in which we indulge all our affections instead of with real people.