The Point of the Tamagotchi was to Watch Things Die

If you picked up a dystopian 19th century novel, paged through it, and found the plot-point where the fictional city's children were scrambling to get to toy stores to buy a robotic egg that was unable to hatch or reproduce, you would put the novel down. It would just be too painfully obvious a symbol for the dystopia's shallowness and inability to produce past that generation of robot-egg crazed children, and you would know that the civilization was in downfall, and that a heroic character would attempt to save it through literature or art. There would probably be ritualistic book burnings. I can see Sue Bridehead boiling some of the eggs before the city's children commit a mass suicide.

But the Tamagotchi wasn't a symbol in a 19th century novel. It was an actual literal toy. I stood in line in three L.A. toy shops — Puzzle Zoo, Toys R' Us, and the Imaginarium — to buy it, and when I got one at Toys R' Us it was because Cody's mom had called the stores ahead of time. The only ones left were purple with pink around the edges, which I didn't like because I was a tomboy at the time — another symbol of our culture's infertility, inability to reproduce, and my general shallowness. Who gave a fuck about purple and pink? Because supposedly, the point of the Tamagotchi was that you could raise, within its fingernail-sized screen, a little baby bird and watch the progress of its life.

As if! This is sort of like saying the point of Nascar is to watch cars move in a Boccaccio-an circularity. Really, the point of the Tamagotchi was to watch what you made die. If you ignored it — and you did, because you were a child — the bird got X's over its eyes and you showed everyone the screen, asking with your eyes, "Am I not the Harbinger of Death? Am I not also a Child? What powers do I hold, what potentiality do I contain? Am I not Little Father Time?"

Was the toy a symbol, borne of the Oriental, intended to show the Occidental how its irresponible children could not care for themselves? Or was it endorsed by parents hoping it served as an advocacy against teen pregnancy, so they wouldn't have to speak on it? Was it, in other words, the bag full of flour that health-class made one cart through John F. Kennedy High School in open denial of its namesake's happy philandering? Or, more simply: Were there consequences for killing a baby? Was abortion, in the age of Clinton, A-okay?

With Tamagotchi, there was something going on with sexual issues, something going on with fatherhood issues, and something going on with robots. The narrative I told myself as a child was that I wanted one because it would be the first robot I ever owned. Unlike my parents, I had no cell phone, no beeper, no computer. I was eight. Did I love the Tamagotchi because I could feel the coming of the culture of the small screen? Or did the Tamagotchi condition me to love small screens? Was it not a proverbial/real egg without a chicken? Was the chicken that it hatched the era of the iPhone?

Adriane Quinlan writes a lot, and is never bored.