What a weird toy. Why not just get a real pet. Did people really do this back then?
Tamagotchi Connection
21–30 of 80 posts
Re: Tamagotchi Connection
#22What a weird toy. Why not just get a real pet. Did people really do this back then?
It's probably better for more people to not get a real pet.
Re: Tamagotchi Connection
#23I 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 still have my perfectly working V1! Although it's been sitting in a box for most of the past 25 years.
Re: Tamagotchi Connection
#24I've been thinking about making an app in the style of Tamagotchi, but where you do the habits you want to learn to 'feed' the Tamagotchi.
There were a few mechanical keyboards made with oled screens, and there was a push for qmk developers to drop everything and make keyboard tamagotchis for a while to much consternation. They did it though, but the keyboard pet moves along with your typing speed.
Re: Tamagotchi Connection
#25Anyone know why it was called the "Connexion" in the UK and not the "Connection"?
Possibly to make it non-generic and thus trade-markable
Perhaps the person who wrote connexion was simply a traditionalist, it was the standard spelling until sometime in the 18th century and still seen in many texts in British English in the 20th. Wiktionary calls it a 'dated spelling'. I have been known to write it myself.
Re: Tamagotchi Connection
#26What a weird toy. Why not just get a real pet. Did people really do this back then?
Racing simulators are such a weird game. Why not just race real cars? Do people really do this?
Re: Tamagotchi Connection
#27Anyone know why it was called the "Connexion" in the UK and not the "Connection"?
It's a variant spelling still occasionally used in British English, mostly in the names of organizations. I imagine whoever was localizing it noticed that (or was an idiosyncratic Brit that actually preferred it)
(My spellcheck is similarly keen on changing -ise suffixes to -ise even though both are valid in British English and the OED actually marginally prefers it for words like 'organize')
Re: Tamagotchi Connection
#28Tamagotchi 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…
> 20 years before the modern smartphone (1996 -> 2016)
The first iPhone was released in 2007. You could argue that ”modern“ smartphones took a few more years, but definitely not until 2016.
Re: Tamagotchi Connection
#29Way back, there was a lightning (1 hour?) game programming contest over at FlipCode[1] IIRC where someone had made a Flash-based Tamagotchi spoof called Tamagraniti or similar, where you had to take care of a rock.
The interface was exactly like the real deal, and like the real deal you could water it, try to feed it and even give it a pet pebble for company. All with the expected results.
I loved it and I regret not saving a copy of it.
Re: Tamagotchi Connection
#30Tamagotchi 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…
> 20 years before the modern smartphone (1996 -> 2016) The first iPhone was released in 2007. You could argue that ”modern“ smartphones took a few more years, but definitely not until 2016.
Sure. What I'm really talking about is the modern ensemble of
smartphone, social networks and app-centric economy. In 2007 they were
still mainly "just phones".
It would be nice to have a better fix on the historical location of the smartphone vis a vis obsessive, anxious use, but my reading of folks like Johann Hari and Tristan Harris puts it around 2013/15, which tallies with my observations in London.