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This website is an archive of my research about e-pets as a social phenomenon and I focus mainly on Tamagotchi, which is symbolic as the first generation of digital pets.
Tamagotchi is a handheld digital pet that was created in Japan in 1996 and became one of the biggest toy fads of the 1990s and the early 2000s. As of 2017, over 82 million Tamagotchis have been sold worldwide. Most Tamagotchi are housed in a small egg-shaped computer with an interface consisting of three buttons.
I found Tamagotchi very intriguing not only because of its nostalgic quality or lovely visuals but also because the social phenomenon lying behind it, which is strongly related to many subjects, such as digital technology, ecology, artificial intelligence, capitalism, consumerism, e-waste, and genetic engineering.
The main page of the website is a collection of egg-shaped Tamagotchis, including all the 47 versions released by Bandai since 1996. Each egg is clickable and lined to an external website to show an aspect of my research. Through these superlinks, the web pages function like fragmented narratives knitted together to illustrate my concept. A viewer can start exploring the archive by clicking an egg randomly and the result of clicking is also unexpected. Every time the viewer refreshes the website, the order of the eggs will be disrupted. This way of exploring provides a sort of randomness and customization, which is often experienced when we surf on the Internet. What you will learn is based on the predesigned database and the subjective route you choose by triggering links. It is a maze full of contingency and the learning result about Tamagotchi can be quite different between different viewers.
You can refer to the “Customizing Manual” to look for the specific link after the random exploration.
My research about Tamagotchi can be divided into 4 aspects based on the subjects I mentioned above.
In terms of ecology, what makes Tamagotchi interesting is its self-contradicting essence. The concept of raising a pet and the egg-shaped form of Tamagotchi are all derived from nature. However, instead of encouraging encounters between humans and nature, it alienates them and leads humans to be immersed in an artificial fantasy where everything is a reflection of human desire. It is purely designed to entertain humans ourselves. By bringing liveness to digital machines and taking care of them with enthusiasm, even addiction, we create a digital species that gains its population and variety of species exponentially. It is ironic that at the same time, many endangered species in nature are facing extinction due to humans’ excessive hunting, environmental pollution, and many other side-effects of human activities. The double standard is striking and shows that we don’t really care about nature itself but the fantasy we derive from it.
In terms of artificial intelligence, Tamagotchi reflects how humans project ourselves onto machines. Since 1996, the company Bandai has released 47 versions of Tamas, each of which gains new characters, functions, and themes. It is notable that with the development of digital technologies, the e-pets are more and more humanized. In the first version, Tamas are only some pixelated creatures and have simple functions. However, in recent versions, Tamas are dressed like humans, live in castle-like rooms, go to school, stores, and hotels, and even raise pets themselves. The initial mating function turns into dating and marriage which takes place in gorgeously decorated houses. Raising digital pets is mixed with role-playing. E-pets behave like humans, or say, behave in a way expected by us.
Another notable phenomenon is that there exists a group of users who are so emotionally attached to their Tamas that some of them can’t stand their death or feel extremely guilty when their Tamas are dead due to their negligence. They make graveyards for Tamas both physically and digitally. Alan Turing, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, suggested that “we judge the intelligence of a computer by whether it can trick a human into thinking they are conversing with another person.” To some extent, Tama can be seen as the rudimentary AI which has a sort of humanity when it triggers sadness and guilt in a human. However, in contrast, our guilt towards polluted nature is usually diluted when we take it as a shared and unavoidable crime as an expense of progress and survival and when we devote ourselves into developing intimacy in the digital nature.
In terms of genetic engineering, if we view Tamas as a strange new species, its biological analysis will be interesting and reflects humans’ desire to play God, to manipulate DNA, and to fight against natural laws. Tamas and its descendant e-pets, such as Petz, give users a real sense of ownership through “customisation”. Even though they refer to nature, realism doesn’t matter in these games. Imaginative collages are commonly used in designing e-pets.
In terms of consumerism and capitalism, Tamagotchi is essentially a commercial product and the releasing of new versions is seen as the progress of digital technology. However, it is also controversial in many aspects. Just like other digital devices, it produces large amounts of e-waste due to its large sales. The death designed for Tamas is also questionable because the death of the e-pets sometimes are not individual but also collective. The Facebook game Pet Society, one of the descendants of Tamagotchi, was popular with thousands of users across the globe. But by 2013, the game’s owner decided to pull the plug due to falling in profits. Over thousands of users lost their pets at one night. There are many similar examples, such as QQ pet. In this sense, “digital death is not part of the game but also an unforeseen consequence of a commercial imperative.”The bigger question is not just about “our responsibility to our digital companion animals, but about the very real ethical responsibility that the company that creates them has for us.”