The ethics of tamagotchi was the last thing I thought I would ever read. But, after reading the full article – “Caring-About Virtual Pets: An Ethical Interpretation of Tamagotchi” by Annie O’Rourke — the parallel that can be drawn between the virtual world of the pets and the virtual world we live in today, both inside of the media vortex as well as through the as mentioned in the previous blog-post mobile games is a very interesting one.
Annie O’Rourke is concerned with the ethical aspect of the game: What does it mean to give conceptual life to a material object – a jumble of code in a double digit system encased in a plastic cocoon? And what does it mean when you care for that object as if it matters if it is hale and healthy until you grow bored of it and in the end discard it?
Much like Dormehl (writer for digitaltrends.com) posits, O’Rourke also states that the initial universal popularity with the toy was due to a certain digital ennui (my words) — a generation of people living in a “digitized” world with “broken-up” time and a “ feeling of individualized ineffectiveness” (original words). What better generation of consumers to spring this toy onto, but one comprised of people with little opportunity for agency and self-actualization who, when given the chance, jump at the first opportunity to get a simulacrum of the experience of caring for another being. For a certain period of time. Attached only until the novelty wears off, and to be discarded and forgotten the moment the dreaded drudgery of domestic routine rears its ugly head.
The ‘text’ of the game, O’Rourke states, is predicated on the fact that the perceived experience of nurturing is so startlingly simple it can be broken down into an algorithm which can be fit inside of a 1×1 screen. Feed, play with, punish, provide medical care. All an easily replicable cycle. The only reason the game succeeded from the onset, was because the “background” of its creation was an easily comprehensible and known one.
It is this familiarity and the willingness to “believe” that creates that attachment to the virtual pet. You have to buy the idea wholesale that this is a creature you care about and that you don’t want to die in order to engage with it and its “text”.
“Virtual Pets mean very little in themselves (as figures on a screeen), it is their narrativisation (primarily in the head of the user) which makes them become a ‘pet’ and forces a particular kind of behaviour.” (p.5)
She warns against taking the word of the marketing team advertising the game at face value, however — the same way that the connection with the game, the emotional one, which really believes in it, is forged, so is our perception of the world which can be manipulated by marketing forces: “It is worth staying with the marketed image of Tamagotchi for a while, for it is here that the connections to the ‘real’ world are most explicitly being forged. We have to be careful however, for marketing itself works in a similar way to the virtual. It creates and fixes the very market it is seeking to sell its product to. Like the virtual, it does not simply represent (and then satisfy) a consumer’s previously unfulfilled desires. These images actively shape and mediate how the object or text is received and experienced.” (p. 13)
It is thus to follow that the draw of the game and its infinitely spawn-able characters is predicated on the player playing along with and engaging with it and its text on the game’s turns. It helps if the behaviour and connections it is trying to foster are virtualizations of real world experiences, which can be recreated to a degree to which the appeal is in its realism, and but not so realistic as to lose that same appeal. The reason people grew bored was because the game became too realistic – the novelty wore off and it could not sustain the boring routine which already predisposed people to get rid of their actual pets.
As for the ethics? We are already living in a proto-virtual world, one in which we recreate simulated experiences of our daily lives: we meet up with our friends to play in virtual spaces, we roleplay characters who shoot down enemy forces on battlefields, and play out romances which follow the same structured destiny on each play-through. Anything which simulates the real world without examining it or challenging it is going to play on established harmful cliches, thereby rooting them even deeper into our cultural psyche.
In the case of the tamagotchi, O’Rourke states that we are learning new examples of care – ones in which that which is nurtured exists perpetually without agency or ability to change; in which it can be easily disposed of as soon as it becomes inconvenient: “In the mean-time our idea of what ‘care’, ‘response’ and ultimately ‘ethics’ are have been transformed, and it is a world which we all now inherit.” (p.20)
O’Rourke, Anne (1998). Caring about virtual perts: an ethical interpretation of Tamagotchi. University of Wollongong. Journal contribution. https://hdl.handle.net/10779/uow.27825507.v1
