Tamagotchi Made Us Antisocial

Because the trauma of grieving the death of a childhood pet was either not painful enough or too short-lived, Akihiro Yokoi divined a technical solution: An electronic pet with all the fixings of the real deal — sporadic outbursts, dietary needs, the works — with the added bonus of a drastically shortened lifespan.

That way, a child could experience the death of a pet every 12 days of so rather than every 12 years. Brilliant! Surprised Peter Thiel hasn’t come up with his own mechanism for inducing acute childhood misery.

Ok, maybe Yokoi’s Tamagotchi wasn’t exactly the form of corporal punishment I described above. After all, it was one of the most successful and well-remembered toys of the ‘90s.

Assuming most already know the Tamagotchi, either from personal experience or cultural memory, I’ll just provide a brief description courtesy of the Smithsonian:

Before Japanese toymaker Bandai released the Tamagotchi to massive success in Japan in 1996, selling 5M units in its first six months, its creator (Yokoi) was watching TV.

According to the origin story, which has since been called into question by a Reddit user (the most reputable source on the internet), a commercial came on in which a boy was reprimanded by his mother for wanting to bring his pet turtle along for a trip. He was forced to leave it at home.

Eureka!

Yokoi soon envisioned a way to sidestep the pesky corporeal issues inherent in “real” pets and begin work on a portable option.

Unsurprisingly, the thought of an electronic pet, with all the annoyances of a live animal but none of the affection, was a tough sell to Japanese toy stores.

“What’s so fun about this?” asked the Bandai sales team tasked with convincing retailers to stock the product.

But after bringing the toys to a focus group of teenage girls, described as the “marketing pulse of the nation” by the New York Times in 1997, the tides quickly turned.

Soon Tamagotchi set its sights on the U.S., two years before Pokémon would make the same trek across the Pacific.

The initial reception by the mainstream press was less than enthused, closer to concerned/befuddled. Weeks after the May 1997 U.S. launch, the NYT penned a piece titled “Tamagotchi: Love It, Feed It, Mourn It” in which it set the tone of the article with this brutal lede (And yes, it is in fact lede, not lead. Some of you didn’t barely graduate from a mediocre Journalism School and it shows):

“A dog may be man’s best friend, but a virtual pet can be a child’s worst nightmare.”

The piece laments the fact that children are “discovering that virtual death can be nearly as traumatic as the real thing” and cites a 9-year-old named Keith who “cried hysterically and went crazy” when his Tamagotchi died.

A psychologist is even quoted saying that the “loss” and “mourning” created by these toys constituted “out of control” consequences.

Man, there’s nothing like late 20th-century media hysteria.

In less than 24 hours, F.A.O Schwarz reported it had sold out of its first 10,000 unit shipment (priced between $15-$18 a pop) and tipped their hand by stating publicly they would “take every piece [they] can get.”

This fueled a crazed demand boom, particularly among Japanese tourists, for whom the prospect of purchasing the hottest new toy back home had become a pipe dream and stocked up on supply while on holiday.

Bandai was accused of purposely tightening supply to continue the mania, despite a spokeswoman from the company saying they had been caught “flat-footed” and were speeding up production to 3M units per month.

An added wrinkle to the money-printing toy was Bandai’s decision to gift a Tamagotchi to owners of 1,000 shares of its stock, resulting in a quadrupling of trading volume and a price-per-share increase of 60 Yen.

Bandai made over $160M from Tamagotchi sales alone in the U.S. that first year.

Tamagotchis had arrived in droves and completely taken over the lives of children across the country. As an assistant principal noted in 1997: “First we were overrun with Beanie Babies, then all of a sudden teachers started commenting that the kids seemed to be taking a lot of long bathroom breaks.”

The kids weren’t chainsmoking in the stalls like their parents before them. No… they had far greater responsibilities: Taking care of virtual lives.

Predictably, schools banned the toys.

And within a couple of years they gave way to the next fad (Furbies, Pokémon, Opiates, etc.)

But the lessons and effects they left behind remain…

Known as the “Tamagotchi Effect,” a term coined to describe the bond forged between owners and their pets/devices, the Tamagotchi may have been a flash in the pan, but it acted as a harbinger of things to come.

The emotional attachment and constant need for devotion from children to the device is one of the earliest examples of the parasocial relationship now affecting billions across the globe (including you and me) with respect to our various devices.

Journalist Nagao Takeshi writes “The constant presence of the device allowed for it to not only infiltrate the previously fixed social spaces of the user, but also create new ones in the absence of social interaction.”

Sound familiar?

So while parents were freaking out over the potential traumatic role the death of a robot pet could play in their child’s lives and teachers were furious over the time spent caring for the gadgets rather than taking notes in class, the truth is that it was the emotional exploitation and social hijacking that should have been of chief concern.

It opened the floodgates for a social world beyond socialization. A false respite from the hard work of engaging with the world that acted as an impenetrable place of solace — one that soothes in the short term but slowly impedes upon reality, sucking away minutes, then hours, before setting the stage for the modern world of 24/7 ‘connection’. Though in this case, connection no longer means the bond between people, but rather the strength of your internet connection.