i played catz, an eerie nintendogs-knock off with an interesting theme song.
some players remove the battery from their tamagotchi as a non-implied way of shutting it down.
the virtual intimacy of the tamagotchi
i want to write about the tamagotchi, because i'm so fascinated by these tiny machines that are designed solely for kinship. i want to make sense of the little simulation, and how it's simplistic gameplay is both a failure and victory for anyone interested in virtual intimacy. it's almost too harawayian to be true. and it is, ironically, untrue, like a dream. but in this blog we do not operate with the notion of untrue, because this blog is - in fact - a dream.
i grew up when the tamagotchis were all the rage in recess. everyone had them. i really wanted one too, but my mum wouldn't let me. not that i wasn't spoiled (trust me). i had lots and lots of simulation games. especially nintendogs-like showelware intended for little girls to practice their nurturing skills. but the thing that stood out about the tamagotchi was how it is designed to be omnipresent. the fact that you could bring the tamagotchi with you everywhere created a sense of actual companionship in comparison to games that were meant to be played on a computer or commercial console. alexander galloway uses the terms non-diegetic acts, that refers to things in a game that is not a part of the game's fiction [1]. it could be like menus or save screen or pausing. the tamagotchi is unique in the way that it has no non-diegetic gameplay. every part of the machine, software as well as hardware, is a part of the tamagotchi fantasy. it is rendered as a product of science fiction-esque mythology. it is supposed to be an alive machine: an alien in a plastic egg longing for your love.
when approaching the tamagotchi from a author-centric point of view, it comes across as donna haraway's kinship [2] in a concretistic way. i think that reading is way too generous though. i've watched plenty of videos online about how to turn off your tamagotchi by removing the battery. here the tamagotchi becomes the opposite of virtual care, it is a game of metaphorical death. it might be because it's insistant beeping is annoying. to players (if that's the right term here) it might come off as alienating and anti-immersive, which is of course the beauty of it all, but also the sadness. but i believe we can find the poetics of any videogame within the transgressive acts of gameplay. espen aarseth describes transgressive play as: "games are machines that sometimes allow their players to do unexpected things, often just because these actions are not explicitly forbidden. in other words, they are not part of the game’s intended repertoire, and would in most cases have been rendered impossible if the game designers could have predicted them" [3]. when i ask friends to recall their tamagotchis, all they remember is their dying. it is love designed to be disposable. i hesitate with the transgressive notions here, because i really don't know what bandai (the company behind tamagotchi) wanted to achieve with this videogame, maybe they didn't know either. dead or alive, the tamagotchi legacy lives on as a great chapter in videogame history. also, i read about a cemetery for dead tamagotchis, and maybe as an end note, this is where it all gets very interesting.
1. alexander galloway, "gaming: essays on algorithmic culture"
2. donna haraway, "staying with the trouble"
3. espen aarseth, "i fought the law: transgressive play and the implied player"