Tamagotchis and Tomorrow
Tamagochis were roughly egg-shaped plastic electronic devices that fit in the palm of the human hand, and were attached to a key chain for easy portability. They were advertised between the Saturday morning cartoon shows, and soon almost everyone — from little kids to teens and grownups — had one.
The little toy was intended to be transported on one’s person, in a shirt pocket or purse, as it needed to be continually “fed” or otherwise attended to, by pressing its tiny buttons. Those little buttons across its face were set below a little screen, which was the business end of the device, the part where the entertainment happened. Despite its diminutive size, the electronic devices took up increasingly large proportions of time for its owner, who was notified of the Tamagochi’s needs by a series of shrill beeps indicating that it was time to interact with the device. They came around the same time as Giga Pets and other knock-off brands, some no-name, in a frenzy of the virtual pet craze.
True, some people who got them never figured out how to set the things up, not having the patience to deal with the little buttons and the elaborate order in which they needed to be pressed in order to get the thing to do what it was supposed to do: entertain you. These were the same people who ended up giving their unused devices to their younger siblings or some kid on the block who didn’t have one, always just when the battery was wearing down because they had forgotten to turn the thing off before they threw it in a drawer.
Sound familiar at all?
My mother said virtual pets reminded her of an earlier trend she recalled from her twenties, pet rocks. We crowded round the first time we heard about them. “What did pet rocks do?” we demanded. So, they did nothing? Then why did people want them? Everyone else had one. But what was the point, then? Well, to be like everyone else, then. To confirm, then: What did the pet rocks do? Absolutely nothing. Did people talk to them? Some people did. And did the pet rocks talk back? No, of course not. A pet rock was just that, a rock, like any rock. Where did people get them? Did you just pick up a rock and start calling it your pet rock? Basically, yes. But they were sold in shops, as well.
Mind boggling stuff, it was.
There were also grown-up coloring books, she said. No way! We said. Why would a grown-up want to color in a coloring book? They just did. To relax. To do something different. To unwind. They were billed as a way for adults to de-stress — long before today’s multi-million dollar self-care industry.
Well, since that conversation happened, over 20 years ago, adult coloring books came back in with a vengeance. Pet rocks didn’t exactly come back as a trend in their previous incarnation, but crystals — a form of rock, really — have emerged from something a relative few were into collecting to wide popularity, and are sold on all manner of websites, from Goop to Free People.
Am I the only one who has wondered if there is any way that the cell phone craze can go the way of Sea Monkeys and pet rocks?
I was just reading about how there is a pain condition called Cell Phone Bicep, which is essentially the bringing back of a condition similar in many ways to carpal tunnel syndrome, which was a repetitive stress syndrome of epidemic proportions in the late 90’s.
There have already been sufficient studies on the ways that social media, usually mitigated via cell phones, have raised rates of depression and anxiety, when people compare their own lives with others’ and find their own lives sadly lacking in comparison, even when they are aware that what they are seeing is filtered and curated.
What I recently learned is that the rampant cell phone use by practically everyone (at least 85% of people in North America own a cell phone) is that the devices are causing neck injuries, which lead to spine injuries which can actually eventually lead to spinal deformation. (As a side note, I strongly feel that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest should be required reading for everyone, not least because in it, Wallace explored the dark side of people’s desire to be constantly entertained).
I have recalled Tamagochis and Gigapets recently, the little innocuous gadgets called to mind by the sight of people on the subway looking down at their ubiquitous tiny hand-held devices, necks distorting their posture as they peered down at the things while their fingers ceaselessly pressed the tiny buttons while texting.
Something about the sight made me remember the virtual pets that captivated a generation, a generation ago.
Some people were such good owners of their virtual pets that the pets grew in amazing ways or could do tricks. These were the people who would interrupt their conversation with a friend to say they had to feed their Tamagotchi. In the set of people I knew who used the things, eventually everyone grew out of their virtual pets, either via bored with the thing, having it die by lack of care and not having the interest to get another one or set it up again, loss of interest due to some new, more shiny interest coming along, or getting a job or a mate or some sort of a life. I can remember, though, when many people all had a virtual pet at the same time and would report on how it was doing, some with braggadocio, and others with embarrassment or a wry smile demonstrating not very much true regret that it had died.
But eventually the virtual pet trend died way. In contrast, the abilities of a cell phone are so myriad that their use has grown rather than petered out. So where the delights of an imaginary creature composed of little more than a few pixels that you really had to use your imagination to bring to life faded, the full-resolution of today’s cell phone has caught, and held, our attention.
I wonder, though, about how our attention was primed for our cell phones by our relationships to the virtual pets we had in our preteen and teen years. The idea of a virtual pet was that it would provide some sort of comfort to you not least in how you could carry around the entertainment device with you everywhere you went.
That is the same appeal of the cell phone, isn’t it? We can have our electronic device/toy with us always, even when we can’t have a person. At the same time, there is a literal epidemic of loneliness, among people of all ages. The rise of the epidemic of loneliness has roughly followed the same lines as that of social media use, tellingly.
Both devices relieve boredom and provide entertainment. Unlike either a pet rock or a coloring book, handheld devices of any measure of interactivity give us the sensation that it is alive and, therefore, that we are not alone. (Even when we are).
The problem is that the internet, which today’s hand-held devices connect us to, can be a much darker and more sinister experience than watching a little monster gambol two pixels to the left and three to the right on a screen a little bigger than our fingernail.
Virtual pets such as Tamagotchi and Giga Pets, with their stone-age graphics and buttons that not everyone was able to figure out, provided us with an experience that we would hard wire into ourselves, and want to return to.
When the technology was finally invented, we did.
Tamagotchis and Tomorrow
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