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Tamagotchi Connection

en.wikipedia.org

11–20 of 80 posts

Re: Tamagotchi Connection

#11
post #4

I still have a perfectly working v4, these things were built to last. Lots of kids at my school had one back then, but they were mostly the more basic chinese knockoffs. If you had a real one, you were one of the cool kids.

I remember somewhere around 1997 that our teacher built in a few small breaks during the day, so everyone who had one could run to the hallway to get the Tamagotchi from their coat pocket and feed it.

Re: Tamagotchi Connection

#14
Tamagotchi are an ingenious psychological and social gambit, paving the way for smartphones. An electronic dependent, halfway between a doll and a game that hooks into the formative maternal and caring instincts of a child, almost 20 years before the modern smartphone (1996 -> 2016). Don't feed it? It dies. Fail to socialise it? It gets lonely for friends. B.J Fogg eat your heart out!

Now we grew up into mums and dads with adult Tamagotchi, always hungry for a battery charge, requiring constant attention, even distracting us from our real children.

This is one of the lesser seen dangers of AI in personal tech. Not that it will become a dominating , directing force, but that it will become something so deeply needy. Something in which we indulge all our affections instead of with real people.

Re: Tamagotchi Connection

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being complicated and involving many AWS services benefits Amazon in a few ways, lock in and revenue being the big ones.

But as Bandai, don't I want something simpler and cheaper? Why would I opt for something more complex and be sticky with one vendor?

Because Amazon bought the CTO some very nice lunches, with some very nice wine, and mentioned they're expanding their local office in the future and that gosh its just so hard to find people with the right experience.

Mean while, J. Coder hasn't done jack for the CTO but complain about how they never have enough time to do these simple AWS API integration tasks and certainly never bought them a glass of Vosne-Romanée.

Re: Tamagotchi Connection

#16

Tamagotchi are an ingenious psychological and social gambit, paving the way for smartphones. An electronic dependent, halfway between a doll and a game that hooks into the formative maternal and caring instincts of a child, almost 20 years before the modern smartphone (1996 -> 2016). Don't feed it? It dies. Fail to socialise it? It gets lonely for friends. B.J Fogg eat your heart out! Now we grew up into mums and dad…

The only "danger" with Tamagochi and friends is that some humans are so stupid that they can't get their priorities right. However, that "danger" easily transfers to something else. Taking away the "sharp edges" is no solution to stupidity, at least not for adults.

Re: Tamagotchi Connection

#20
Here's a video showing pretty much every Tamagotchi released from the 90s up until today:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jQHU9m90VLU

Turns out Bandai made quite a few weird models over the years, from giant-sized "home" Tamagotchis to watches. Most of the recently released ones seem to just be variants of the Tamagotchi Nano based on licensed IPs, which are probably not as interesting as the models released throughout the 90s or 2000s, but it's still fun to see how many of these things are being pumped out to this day.

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