Back on the Tamagotchi grind
I reactivated my 2024 Tamagotchi Connection, which I kept alive for a few months last year. I've been a long time fan of virtual pets, starting off with the original Digimon toy as a child and then eventually moving to a original Tamagotchi the year afterward.
A lot of my most hopeless game dev ideas are virtual pet games... but I think there's really nothing that can capture the same vibe you get from keeping the virtual pet in a custom, single-purpose device. Turning it into a physical object you must carry around separately from your phone or computer or handheld gaming console is the key to making it feel like how I remember, from way back when.
I was thinking yesterday about how I find my insulin pump such an obnoxious thing to deal with when it's beeping at me... but I adore taking care of a Tamagotchi that beeps miserably at me all hours of the day. It's certainly the fact I've chosen to take care of this little toy, and that I could drop it at any moment if I wanted to. I actually sometimes find myself incapable of hearing the beeps of my insulin pump - my brain seems to completely edit them out of my awareness, which is shocking - but I've never felt that way about a Tamagotchi.
(As a kid, learning that I could get so fatigued by my insulin pump beeps that I would legitimately stop hearing them was one of the first things that taught me to realize that my experience of the world isn't a crystal record of reality, but rather a fuzzy, mediated, untrustworthy experience. Learning that I can hear my Tamagotchi all the time because I want to has been another reminder of that.)
Anyway, yesterday my little critter had a special Halloween event (I think???) and was dancing around with a jack-o-lantern. Here is the (poorly-lit) proof:
Hope you had a happy Halloween!