By SCOTT DEWING
Published: April 2006

I DON’T SPEAK JAPANESE, but I’m pretty sure that the word tamagotchi translated into English means something like, “annoying little electronic device used by kids to drive their parents crazy.” Or something close to that anyway.

For those of you who have not encountered such a device, let me explain. A Tamagotchi is a handheld “virtual pet” about the size of a silver dollar with a small video screen and three buttons on its face. While Tamagotchis come in various bright colored designer enclosures, they all make the same annoying sounds when being played. I know this because my daughters have no fewer than six of these little bright colored “virtual pets” that accompany them everywhere they go. Their favorite location for Tamagotchi interaction seems to be in the car while I’m chauffeuring them to school. The car is a fantastic place for this type of activity because it’s a small area in which the beeping and chiming noises emitted from the tiny electronic devices are trapped. This is particularly convenient when the chauffer is trying to listen to NPR. Some mornings there is the added bonus of a backseat fight that involves one of these beeping and chiming Tamagotchi devices.

The Japanese seem to have a keen ability for designing and manufacturing superior electronics and bizarre toys such as Transformers, Power Rangers and Hello Kitty to name a few. A masterful hybrid of electronic wizardry and bizarre toy, the Tamagotchi was created by Aki Maita and is manufactured by Bandai, a Japanese toy-making company that is the third largest producer of toys in the world. According to the manufacturer, “[a] Tamagotchi is a tiny pet from cyberspace who needs your love to survive and grow. If you take good care of your Tamagotchi pet, it will slowly grow bigger, healthier, and more beautiful every day. But if you neglect your little cyber creature, your Tamagotchi may grow up to be mean or ugly. How old will your Tamagotchi be when it returns to its home planet? What kind of virtual caretaker will you be?”

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t speak Japanese. With a little bit of research, however, I discovered that tamagotchi doesn’t actually translate as “annoying little electronic device used by kids to drive their parents crazy”—even though that is arguably a fitting name for the device. Tamagotchi is a combination of the word tamago, which means “egg” and the syllable chi, which purportedly denotes affection. Loosely translated then, Tamagotchi means something like “beloved egg-friend.”

In an effort to understand the Tamagotchi and its appeal, I asked my eight-year-old daughter to explain how it works.

“Dad, please, I thought you were busy writing your column today?”

“Yes, and it’s, well, sort of about your Tamagotchi.”

“Really? I thought you wrote about important grown-up stuff.”

“Everything is important,” I say, then add, “It’ll all make sense in the end,” hoping that would prove to be true.

She humors me and explains the Tamagotchi world. Life begins with the hatching of an egg. For the first hour of the little hatchling’s life, he or she (the sex is determined randomly at birth) requires almost constant attention. Using the buttons on the front of the Tamagotchi, your job is to feed the little guy meals until he is full, play games with him until he is happy, and clean up his mess after he goes poo-poo. You can also give him praise to make him happy and medicine if he is showing signs of being sick. You can monitor how your little guy is doing by checking his health meter, which consists of four hearts each for “Hungry” and “Happy”. Four-filled in hearts is good. Empty hearts are bad and if the poor little guy goes too long with empty hearts, he dies, sprouts angel wings and hovers on screen in perpetual after-life until you decide to push the right combination of buttons and transform him back into an egg to start the cycle all over again.

All of this may seem quite good for a child, teaching life lessons of responsibility, care and attention. However, the problem with the Tamagotchi—well, besides being exceedingly annoying in the car—is that, in the end, it is a distraction from real opportunities to learn life lessons of responsibility, care and attention. Case in point, my 8-year-old’s Tamagotchi probably receives more attention than her puppy, which needs real food, real water, real love and real praise. The gadget beats out the real. I don’t know why this is so, but when I thought about it, I realized a disturbing trend in which a “Tamagotchi Syndrome” pervades our social consciousness. Like my daughter, many of us have become obsessed with our electronic gadgetry. In general, we’re more concerned with the status and features of our cell phones than with solving world hunger, more fascinated with the latest iPod than with being involved in international politics, more focused on the latest video games than on viable, alternative energy sources.

Some believe that the end of the world will be accompanied by a big bang. Others believe it will come in a hail of fire and brimstone and rapturous trumpet blasts. I believe that the end of the world, or at least the world as we know it today, will likely be much less stark and much more boring than that and will be more along the lines of a slow “death by a thousand cuts” in which our penchant for the distractions of technological gadgetry and our disillusionment with the panacean promise of technological advancement will blind us—or at a minimum continue to increasingly distract us—from focusing on local and global issues of fundamental importance to our survival.

But who knows, perhaps by the time the end of the world arrives, we’ll be so distracted that we won’t even notice nor care.