Wait…
Wait…
Tamagotchi isn’t the first game to include real time elements. Massively multiplayer online games were already a thing then, if a niche one. It isn’t the first to do so with long periods of inaction. The Secret of Monkey Island let you confirm Guybrush Threepwood’s claims that he could hold his breath for ten minutes. You had something to look at in that time, though. When you first turn on your tamagotchi egg-friend, you set the time and all you get to look at for minutes is a wobbling egg, a few frames of animation in a resolution that makes the Game Boy look high definition.
Wait…
I got distracted from my egg on a screen on an egg, and I didn’t see the egg hatching. I looked back and there was a face moving around, and that was that. Time kept going without me. I missed it. That was the first lesson Tamagotchi had to offer. Neglect it and you miss out.
Wait…
Tamagotchi sits in your pocket and beeps at you to pay attention to it. Literally so; attention is one of the key demands that lights up alongside food. When you give your egg-friend the attention, and play games with them, trying to guess their actions, they bark at you when you get it wrong. There is a comfort and companionship on offer in having something assert enough of its own self to feel alive, perhaps. You are told that you can train your egg-friend, but just like with that initial wait, it feels more like they’re training you.
Wait…
Mobile, sending notifications, promising chance-based rewards for your investment, Tamagotchi makes currency of your time and your attention. Time and attention is the only currency it asks on an ongoing basis, though (unless you count the wider picture of different releases with different features, but that’s another matter). Its bigger lessons are not on any future practices. One is on the rewards of simplicity and that drastically taking away the player’s means of control can tilt their relationship to a game into a different place. The other is that, when allowed to be, time is a powerful force indeed. It keeps flowing like so much water washing away the discarded remnants of your inputs.
Beep!
[Uncharted is an occasional feature where I look at games which were massively successful but, for whatever reason, were not eligible for the charts so could not possibly have made my list of #1 games. In this case it is because the most popular version of Tamagotchi was released as its own hardware rather than sold separately as software]