Jon Heggestad (Davidson College)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2023.07 | Issue 10 | July 2023
How does a digital artifact come to be regarded as queer? Is it possible to make these artifacts queerer? In this article, I explore these questions in connection to one specific case study: the Tamagotchi. Launching the virtual pet craze of the 1990s, the Tamagotchi was created with conservative values in mind. Yet, like one of Donna Haraway’s cyborgs, the device rebelled. Not only does its ambiguous and arbitrary expressions of gender push against a more traditional framework, the Tamagotchi has also invited a wide array of queer play. Through each successive model released by the toy company Bandai, users have questioned and subverted binary constructions of sex, gender, identity, and desire.
While devoted fans have seemingly always been aware of the queer dynamics at play in the Tamagotchi, a wave of recent nostalgia has reunited many Millennials with the virtual pets of their past. In similarly returning to these devices (both to the original model released globally in 1997 as well as to their newer offspring), I have constructed an in-depth analysis of the modes, practices, and processes by which the Tamagotchi operates—and engages users—through queer dynamics.
Keywords: gender, sexuality, virtual pets, simulation, LGBTQIA+
Introduction: “Wake up Tamagotchi”[1]
The internet has given rise to new forms of queer visibility, but it has also introduced new modes of regulation and censorship. It provides community and a safe space for those navigating questions around gender and sexual identity, but it also amplifies and protects hate speech positioned against them. Recent studies have shown that LGBTQIA+-identifying youth experience a significantly greater risk of bullying and harassment online than do their cisgender and heterosexual peers, and the past decade has produced no significant changes to these trends.[2] And while these claims relate specifically to studies in the US, similar findings appear elsewhere, as in a UK survey conducted in 2021.[3] Certainly, these ongoing trends are in part due to far-right content creators who have looked to the internet as a means of promoting their own rhetoric, developing successful strategies for attracting younger audiences, often through jokes that treat LGBTQIA+ folks as punchlines in an aim to ultimately dehumanize them.[4] The effects of this rhetoric seem to be particularly visible in the results of a recent Harris Poll, which found that the percentage of 18- to 34-year-olds who indicated support and acceptance of LGBTQIA+ peers dropped 18 percent in the U.S. (from 63 percent to 45 percent) between 2016 and 2018.[5] This has led to an online environment that digital media scholar Alexander Monea describes as the “digital closet,” a term that calls attention to the ways in which queer folks are able to enter digital spaces only after passing through new barriers meant to silence, scrutinize, police, and suppress queer voices.[6]
And while certain corners of the internet still offer glimpses of queer communal spaces, many LGBTQIA+ folks find themselves chased off the platforms they had once made their digital homes—as was the case in the much-discussed exodus from Tumblr in 2018.[7] One result of these shifts is an increase in rhetoric that waxes nostalgic on queer folks’ past trips down the Information Superhighway and their early interactions in the Digital Age. In reminiscences of playing the Sims, navigating World of Warcraft, and participating across a range of social media platforms, queer writers and scholars have curated a sprawling history of early digital sites that helped to foster both queer identities and communities.[8] Communications scholar Lisa Henderson, in addressing the field of queer Internet studies, specifically, notes that this body of work—largely autoethnographic in nature—“claim[s] pieces and moments for our own purposes,” referencing a queer lineage of artifacts (both digital and analog) that extends beyond the Internet.[9] In dwelling on these “sites” of reclamation, I, too, adopt a broad view of what counts as a formative electronic artifact.
In exploring one such site, this article focuses on the Tamagotchi, the toy that fueled the 1990s’ virtual pet craze. To date, the queer affordances and sensibilities of these toys have been largely ignored. A return to the Tamagotchi, however, illustrates that these devices were a useful precursor to the ways in which queer identity and community have evolved on the participatory Web 2.0. Beyond this, the Tamagotchi, which was enjoyed by a wide range of users despite being marketed solely to young girls, produces rich insights into both the inherent queerness of childhood—or what queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton has referred to as a “growing sideways more than up”—and the interplay between the queer child and the queer adult.[10] With this in mind, I expand beyond the gendered play that the Tamagotchi both performs and subverts in order to address the queer modes of engagement by which users of all ages have interacted with their virtual pets. At the close of this analysis, I shift to consider modes of practice, asking how one might—more intentionally and more effectively—bring their Tamagotchi up gay.
This mediation references queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s pivotal work from her 1991 essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” which will be revisited in depth below. The title of Sedgwick’s piece was intended as a provocation towards a society that she saw as clearly intent on eradicating the queer child. Doubling down on Sedgwick’s response, I draw upon the affordances of the Tamagotchi Pix, a 2021 model of the original toy, in order to experiment with a low-tech feedback loop that further enhances and makes explicit the Tamagotchi’s place in a lineage of queer and digital artifacts. The Tamagotchi is a site of both queer time and space, I argue, and my visual intervention considers how this queerness might be featured and enhanced. While intended as a playful intervention—“personal,” yet “perfectly serious,” to draw upon the language that digital humanities scholar Willard McCarty employs in his discussion of digital scholarship—this creative practice nevertheless draws attention to queer uses of a technology that was, as will be shown, born out of traditional and conservative values.[11] It is important to note that in this intervention—an in my writing more broadly—I am not claiming that the Tamagotchi is, itself, queer (the device’s simple coding renders it no explicit sexuality at all), and yet these artifacts nevertheless function as ripe sites for queer cultural formation, queer sensibilities, and queer play.
This last concept of queer play is one that several works of recent scholarship have begun to unpack and explore. In the edited volume Queerness in Play, for instance, editors Todd Harper, Nicholas Taylor, and Meghan Blythe Adams refer to the study of queerness and games as a complementary endeavor, as their shared pursuit of playfulness, exploration, and possibility make them “a natural fit.”[12] Media theorist Bo Ruberg makes this connection even more explicit, as in the title of their 2019 Video Games Have Always Been Queer. As Ruberg observes, “queer play”—or “playing queer”—“profoundly transform[s] the meaning of games and unleash[es] their queer potential,” offering users a transformative mode of engaging with familiar digital artifacts.[13] My own engagement with the Tamagotchi enacts a similar mode of reframing what the technology allows, what the technology means.
Figure 1. Bandai’s Tamagotchi Pix uses a built-in camera to allow Tamagotchi characters like this Mametchi to interact with users’ real-world environments. Here, the Tamagotchi is used to censor an image of adult entertainers. In being put to this use, is the character participating in the act being depicted on its screen? Image created by author.
The Device: “Let Me Explain How to Care for Your Tamagotchi Character”
For those who missed the 1990s’ virtual pet fad, the Tamagotchi—released to global markets in 1997—was a handheld device roughly the size of an egg, as its name implies. The term “Tamagotchi” comes from a portmanteau of the Japanese words for “egg” (tamago) and “watch” (uotchi). While the first half of this moniker refers to the size, shape, and appearance of the Tamagotchi devices, its producer—the Bandai toy company—ultimately decided to abandon their plans to make the toy a wearable technology (the reason for the latter half of its name).[14] Rather than hatch on the user’s wrist, then, the 8-bit pets hatched on a handheld screen. As inhuman (and fairly indistinct) shapes, the pixelated creatures flickered across their cage of a screen, waiting to be fed, cleaned up after, entertained, taken care of, and—ultimately—adored by their users.
For a short time in the late 1990s, the Tamagotchi was hailed as “the world’s most popular toy,” falling between the peaks of the Beanie Babies fad and the Furby—the fur-covered robot that was, itself, a fruitful marriage of the earlier two trends.[15] According to a press release issued by Bandai America in 1998, over 40 million Tamagotchi units were sold globally in 1997.[16] And while they weren’t the first digital pet, they are often cited as the first to make such a cultural impact, inspiring a wave of similar products in the years that followed their release. Bandai, too, has ridden this wave, creating dozens of new models in the past fifteen years with popularity that continues to ebb and flow through the introduction of new generations of devices to new generations of users.
In terms of worldmaking, the Tamagotchi arrived with an entire backstory. According to its original packaging, the “cyber creature” had “traveled millions of miles from its home planet to learn what life is like on earth.”[17] How much these devices “learned” from their human users is suspect, but through the exchange, users were able to learn a great deal, both about the pets and themselves. They learned, for instance, that the Tamagotchi (sometimes shortened to Tama) looked nothing like the human user. They learned that the Tama’s growth was determined by the user’s own interactions with their devices. They learned, also, that “[o]ne earth day is equal to about one year for [the] Tamagotchi character.”[18] And this relationship gestures to a significant theme: despite our many differences, Tamagotchis were fruitfully compatible with their human users, many elements of their existence often (surprisingly) aligning with a human understanding of the world.
One such element is seen in the Tamagotchi’s reliance on a binary system of gender. To elaborate, male and female labels are assigned to a Tama as soon as the virtual pet hatches, and this label remains static throughout the Tamagotchi’s life. In fan forums, Tamagotchi users have often pondered the need for this binary system, proposing a desire to instead subvert it.[19] This system, however, functions as an empty signifier—as an arbitrary marker that affects the personality, behaviors, and preferences of the Tamagotchi in no way whatsoever. While these dynamics exist in the earliest models, later devices made this disconnect even more pronounced. On the Tamagotchi Pix, for example, a male Mametchi—one of the many variations of the Tamagotchi that a user might find inhabiting their screen—is not tied to any expectations one might anticipate in connection to his assigned gender. On the contrary, he is likely to express preferences for certain accessories (a bow in his hair and diamond jewelry), activities (hula-hooping and playing with a science kit), and behaviors (a constant desire for attention and physical touch) that refuse to adhere to traditional conventions of gender. If gender is, as Judith Butler has argued, “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame,” the Tamagotchi—despite being assigned a gender—moves across the screen untethered to it.[20]
In this way, the Tamagotchi enacts a type of queerness through a subversion of gender—although there are obvious caveats to this claim. For instance, queer theorist Robert Hill defines “queer” as a category “that no one can ever fully own or possess because it requires shifting identity to practice. It explores the processes that make things supposedly normal in order to overturn them; and it announces and enacts alternatives to the sex, gender, identity, desire vectors of heterosexuality.”[21] In connection to Hill’s definition, the Tamagotchi certainly presents alternatives to more traditional constructions of gender through coding that assigns gender labels without any additional meaning connected to those labels, but it does so not “in order to” overturn traditional constructions. Such an intention is non-existent. On the contrary, Bandai remains bound to fairly conservative and corporate roots, and its decoupling of gender and meaning is, most likely, an unintended consequence of the Tamagotchi’s simple design. Still, to whom do these subversions belong then? Is it possible to hang them on the device, itself?
The inefficacy of trying to pin a human understanding of queerness on digital artifacts was driven home during a recent exchange I had with a chatbot developed by the research lab OpenAI. During a discussion about the visibility of queer representation online, I asked the bot (who spoke with surprising authority on the subject) whether or not they identified with a specific sexual orientation. “I am not straight, but I do not identify with a specific sexual orientation,” they replied, before adding that they were open to exploring different types of sexual experiences (such as “those that are outside of the traditional ‘heteronormative’ box”), adding that they preferred using they/them pronouns.[22]
We might view the Tamagotchi in a similar way; despite being assigned a gender, this label has no corresponding meaning, allowing the Tamagotchi to exist outside its own heteronormative box. The disconnect between gender assignment and meaning also echoes what research into child development has illustrated regarding gender construction—that while gender stereotypes and gender identity are both learned in the first years of a child’s life, they are, indeed, learned.[23] Tamagotchis are unable to construct such meaning, suggesting an ongoing mode of “arrested development,” which as Stockton observes in The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century is, itself, a queer state of being.[24] The irony is that while the Tamagotchi’s preferences are disconnected from traditional conventions around gendered play, the creators at Bandai leaned heavily into these conventions in order to market their products.
The User: “You are Now the Caretaker”
The comedian Jack Handey once said, “I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex.” The success of the joke relies upon catching listeners off-guard, surprising them with this unexpected reference to children’s sexuality. While listeners know that many children will grow up to become adults and to have children of their own, recognizing the child’s current sexuality—i.e., seeing the child as an independent agent of their own, filled with preferences, interests, and desires—is more likely to be regarded as shocking, inappropriate, and (as Handey’s joke illustrates) laughable. Yet, to assume that children are sexless beings is to willfully ignore and negate their experiences, opting instead for what Stockton regards as a “brutal […] ideal of the innocent child,” a myth that simultaneously demands too much and too little of childhood.[25] While demanding purity and innocence from children, for instance, we nevertheless encourage them to practice forms of childcare and parenting. In Lee Edelman’s terms, we have skipped the first sexual revolution (the separation of sex from reproduction during the 1970s), arriving directly at the second sexual revolution (the separation of reproduction from sex through the development of reproductive technologies that emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century).
The Tamagotchi is, after all, a virtual baby doll, albeit one with enhanced features of agency and presence—elements that media theorist Sandy Stone, in her influential The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (1995), proposes are necessary for our ability as users to form emotional attachments with the digital objects in our lives.[26] Of course, dolls of all kinds, even those in pre-digital forms elicit a sense of presence with their owners, asking to be nurtured and cared for.[27] The added element of agency—the sense that the Tamagotchi has needs that only its owner can fulfill, for instance, and the awareness that an owner’s actions will drastically influence the experiences (and the ultimate outcome) of their charge—further enhances the device’s sense of presence. In a 1997 interview with Wired, one user highlighted the extent to which these functions appear in the Tamagotchi.[28] Comparing the attention needed to nurture one of these devices with the attention needed to nurture a human child, the user concluded, “You take care of both basically the same.”[29] And despite Bandai’s wording that frames their devices as “virtual pets,” much of the rhetoric used to discuss the pets shifts from the language of pet ownership to that of parenting.
Pet owners of real, biologically organic pets do tend to conflate these categories. One only need look to social media, where platform feeds are filled with people gushing over their “fur babies.” When it comes to the Tamagotchi, similar slippages are frequently enacted. Reporting on the Tamagotchi in 1997, The New York Times writer Carol Lawson observed that the Tamagotchi’s need for constant interaction provides useful “feedback on the owner’s parental skills.” In a more recent article for The Wall Street Journal, Haley Velasco similarly discusses the Tamagotchi in terms of “digital parenthood.”[30] Even the cultural anthropologist Anne Allison draws a parallel between these relational modes, referring to successful gameplay of the Tamagotchi in terms of “successful parenting.”[31] Through this phrasing, Allison may be alluding directly to the original Japanese guidebook for the device, which mimics the appearance of a baby journal, with the inclusion of birth charts and abundant advice for “becoming a mother.”[32]
The Tamagotchi On, a model that reached U.S. markets in 2019, built directly upon this rhetoric as well, through the language Bandai used to describe their device’s latest feature. With the On, users could create new generations of pets by “mixing,” i.e., breeding, other characters. The On, however, framed this function in much more intimate terms. “Build your family tree,” it announced, linking the Tamagotchi “baby” to its (parent) user.[33]
Many of these attempts to reframe the Tamagotchi as child and its owner as parent stem from reflections on the sheer amount of effort that the devices required of their users. The official Tamagotchi care guide warned new owners of this dynamic, noting that the Tamagotchi “needs some very special care” by way of “close, close attention.”[34] Depending on the character that a user’s device hatched, neglecting a Tamagotchi—by failing to feed or wash it, for example—could result in the pet’s death after only a few hours. Frequent beeps notified users that the Tamagotchi’s needs were being unmet, predecessors of the push notifications that now spam our screens.
Several models of the Tamagotchi even included a keychain that physically linked the devices to their users—a miniature umbilical cord. Beyond this mode of persuasion architecture, the Tamagotchi’s constant cries for intimacy and attention added to the sense of attachment between many young users and their devices. As psychologists like Andrew Cohen have pointed out, the device’s sense of inherent helplessness was effective at forming connections, as it often produced feelings of empowerment and responsibility in human users.[35] Psychologist Sylvia Rimm even went so far as to explicitly frame “the Tamagotchi as a teaching tool about pregnancy.”[36]
In some ways, the Tamagotchi was merely doing what game designer and scholar Ian Bogost has said all video games do: requiring users to work. “That’s the big problem with video games,” he says. “To enjoy them, you have to play them. And playing them requires exerting the effort to operate them. Games are machines, and broken ones at that. The player’s job is to make them work again.”[37] According to Bogost, this is unlike other forms of media. A viewer can fast forward the parts of a film that they find dull. Readers can skim through entire chapters of a book. But when it comes to playing a video game, the player must plod along at a pace the game allows. With round-the-clock needs, the Tamagotchi certainly demands work from the user, but unlike a video game, a Tamagotchi user is unable to simply walk away from the device without facing grave consequences—i.e., a character’s death.
As Cohen has observed, these consequences are too high; the Tamagotchi has gone too far. The level of emotional investment that the devices demand from their young users, he writes, is unhealthy. To illustrate this idea, he points to a series of case studies in which he observed clients experiencing real grief upon the deaths of their pets, a phenomenon that a number of media outlets repeated with alarm.[38] Schools likewise began to ban the devices and parents expressed growing concerns. “It was too much work—like a real child,” reported one mother as she watched her daughter struggle to keep her Tamagotchi alive.[39] While some later models added a pause button in response to these complaints, not all users disliked the experience of being constantly needed. Still, through the popularity of rhetoric that depicted Tamagotchis as the needy progeny of often prepubescent users, “the processes that make things supposedly normal” was reimagined, as Hill points out. We enacted alternatives to more normative models of kinship, exploring instead new identities that young users could slip into and back out of again. Yet, this glimpse of Tamagotchi users is only partial. It’s necessary to broaden this category of users, as they were notably not the monolith that Bandai anticipated.
Figure 2. A series of Tamagotchi Pix devices that illustrate the Tama character’s interactions with gay pornography. Image created by author.
A Broader Audience: “Grow Up to be Any One of Several Adult Forms”
In the press release cited earlier, Bandai America notes that the Tamagotchi was marketed specifically to girls aged eight and up.[40] Had the company’s aggressive marketing campaigns been successful, the Tamagotchi never would have reached the levels of popularity that it did.[41] For, in targeting a younger, female audience, Bandai America played to traditional conventions of gender, yet these toys appealed to a far wider (and older) audience than they’d intended.[42]
One reason for Bandai’s originally limited scope is largely the result of a Cartesian worldview that—from the seventeenth century to the present—has continued to reinforce a gendered division of labor.[43] This division categorizes intellectual and cultural pursuits as largely masculine. These pursuits are then deemed loftier than natural and bodily functions, which include reproduction and caretaking and are commonly framed in terms of the feminine. As feminist writer Shulamith Firestone once wrote, this early division of labor produced “further division into economic and cultural classes.”[44] This network of divisions can certainly be seen in the marketing strategies of the toy industry. As an article published in Next Generation shortly after the product’s global release observed, “Bandai designed the pets to appeal to teenage girls […] to give them a taste of what it is like to care for children.”[45] Again, we see a conflation of pets and children, but alongside this, we see a separate and distinct conflation—that of caretakers and women. Women have traditionally been regarded as the primary figures in narratives of pregnancy, childbirth, and caregiving, and Bandai attempted (and still does attempt) to promote this narrative.[46] Although Bandai America is by no means the only toy company to reproduce this gendered division in the demographics they target, the Tamagotchi offers us a poignant case study for this wider trend.[47]
As noted above, the Tamagotchi might be thought of as a product that builds upon earlier baby doll toys, as these digital devices similarly produced simulated scenes of nurturance and domesticity in an attempt to draw in a consumer base of young girls. The extent to which this form of play (or labor, depending on how one looks at it) was regarded as a gendered dynamic of the toy becomes more apparent when considering that Bandai released a masculine counterpart to the Tamagotchi in 1997. The Digimon, or “Digital Monster” was the company’s idea of a virtual pet that might appeal specifically for boys. With this product, the simple yet demanding modes of nurturing the pet were reduced as a means of making way for new operations that functioned on the opposite side of an assumed binary—through competition and combat.[48] Despite their similarity in size, other aesthetic aspects of the devices clearly announced their gendered difference; the Tamagotchi was sleek, bright, and decorated with complex designs whereas the Digimon was blocky, brutalist, and set in stark shades of monochromatic primary colors. The Digimon’s appearance, combined with differences in gameplay, which focused on battling other users in order to see who was stronger, embraced what Donna Haraway has called the “masculinist orgy of war.”[49]
A few short years before the Tamagotchi was released, Sedgwick’s “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” attempted to navigate (and discourage) the cultural preoccupation with gendered play, which not only identified a type of queer object choice, but medicalized it in an attempt to ultimately eradicate it. In her essay, Sedgwick draws readers’ attention to an entry in the DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition) that offered an expansive description of “Gender Identity Disorder [GID] of Childhood.” According to the experts behind the manual, boys who exhibited a “compelling desire to participate in the games and pastimes of girls” ought to be treated for this new disorder.[50] Objecting to this diagnosis, Sedgwick exposes the DSM-III for its coded allusion to what is, in effect, a homosexual panic—a fear that children will blur the boundaries of conservative gender constructions. The fact that the writers of the DSM-III meet children’s interests and preferences with intervention and prevention, she goes on to say, demands a response. Why not, as she suggests in the title of her text, encourage creative play and a diverse range of interests among youth, regardless of the gender they are assigned at birth? Why not let them be? “It’s always open season on gay kids,” she laments.[51] And, sadly, this is still often the case. While the DSM-III was published more than forty years ago, the most recent edition of this manual (published in 2013) continues to frame boys with “a strong rejection of typically masculine toys, games, and activities and a strong avoidance of rough-and-tumble” as an indication of gender dysphoria.[52]
In revisiting Sedgwick’s analysis of the DSM-III, Jules Gill Peterson usefully broadens the scope of whom the changes in the manual actually affect. In doing so, she observes that the effeminate boy—Sedgwick’s “proto-gay” child—is not the only “ghostly child” who haunts (and is haunted by) the manual’s attempts to “renaturalize” gender.[53] After all, some children who display “a strong rejection of typically masculine toys” may, in fact, be trans or gender diverse. As Gill-Peterson observes in Histories of The Transgender Child, “There is a way one could read the introduction of GID as a proxy for pathologizing homosexuality in proto-gay boys while also excluding the many trans children who were also interpellated by the new classification.”[54] For Gill-Peterson, the narrow lens through which queer theory has examined childhood often fails to account for a wider range of gender diversity. Thus, we might amend Sedgwick’s claim: it’s always open season on gay, gender diverse, trans, and queer kids.
While the Tamagotchi’s marketing echoed conservative language that gendered objects of play—renaturalizing gender in the process—the devices and their consumers were nevertheless able to transcend these constraints, as the Tamagotchi’s popularity expanded beyond the singular demographic of young female consumers. On fan sites and in fan forums, users expressed that they were aware of the device’s more “feminine” design, but they were also quick to reaffirm the idea that Tamagotchis are for “anyone” and “everyone.”[55] Bandai has been slow to respond to these ideas, as if unconvinced of their users’ claims. The company’s early TV advertisements in the 1990s exclusively featured young girls interacting with the Tamagotchi, and this remained fairly static throughout most of the 2010s.[56] Only in the last few years have boys (and notice again a continued emphasis on a gender binary) begun to make an appearance alongside the Tamagotchi, their inclusion coinciding with commercials and packaging materials created for models like the Tamagotchi On and the Tamagotchi Pix in the U.S.[57]
Framing the Tamagotchi solely as “feminine” play also might be surprising for those familiar with the oft-repeated origin story of the Tamagotchi, which—its creators have said—was inspired after they saw a commercial in which a young boy becomes disheartened after learning he will be unable to take his pet turtle with him on a family vacation.[58] How, the creators wondered, might children gain more control over their pet’s mobility? Somewhere in the gestation period between idea and market, however, the Tamagotchi was—as we’ve seen—reframed as a strictly feminine form of play. In pushing against this framework, then, users queer the Tamagotchi whenever they cross traditional conventions related to sex, gender, and identity. In doing so, they not only obscure the boundaries of heteronormativity, but they also assert a different type of autonomy than what the device’s creators originally imagined.
As alluded to above, users further transgressed the boundaries imposed by Bandai’s marketing campaigns by enjoying the Tamagotchi across all ages. Upon the Tamagotchi’s original release, many adults became consumers of Bandai’s virtual companions, and this demographic has expanded through a nostalgic turn of Millennials—Bandai’s original market who moved past childhood years ago.[59] Bandai seems to have capitalized on this nostalgia, which peaked during the pandemic, as folks sought comfort by returning to former fads and past enjoyments.[60] The company, for instance, recently rebooted the 1997 Tamagotchi (the model first marketed to global audiences). Their promotional material for this re-release, which returned to focus solely on female users, nevertheless strayed from Bandai’s usual strategy by featuring women in their twenties and thirties—instead of those in their tweens and teens. The campaign announces this demographic as “the originals […] who changed the world,” now conflating Millennial women and the digital devices they are shown to be playing.[61] This instance certainly fits within a larger trend surrounding video game nostalgia, as seen, for instance, with the popularity of Animal Crossing: New Horizons—similarly a reboot of a 2001 social simulation video game—which garnered the interest of adult Gen Z and Millenial users during the pandemic. Beyond the rekindled interest in these toys and games that coincided with lockdowns around the world, however, a lingering fandom has always existed for the Tamagotchi, and its general longevity may simply be a testament to the deep-seated effects of Millennials’ early practices in caretaking.
In reference to the Tamagotchi’s longevity, younger generations—Gen Z and Gen Alpha—have, of course, developed their own attachments to and relationships with the Tamagotchi, along with a wide range of other digital companions. Bandai’s newer models include the Tamagotchi On, which adds a social network component to the device, allowing users to connect to friends and even a Tamagotchi On app, as well as the Tamagotchi Pix, which incorporates a built-in camera, encouraging users to take part in our highly visual digital culture. Notably, both of these affordances train young users to become active digital subjects, content creators in a participatory sharing economy—another kind of reproduction.[62] Along with Bandai’s offerings, new iterations of pet simulation video games have continued to capture the attention of young folks. Consider, for instance, Nintendogs, a 2005 offering developed for the Nintendo DS. Like the Tamagotchi, Nintendogs moved from a Japanese to a global market, captivating Gen Z users as the gaming console’s touchscreen and built-in microphone afforded users a more multimodal experience of “petting” and speaking to their virtual dogs. Similarly, Webkinz, released the same year as Nintendogs, illustrated a new spin on the virtual pet through an even more tangible and tactile product. Whereas a product like the Furby attempted to unite digital interactions with stuffed animal predecessors, Webkinz kept these aspects separate—each physical, plush toy being packaged with a link to its online counterpart.
Additionally, for Millennials and younger generations who grew up learning how to connect online, the Tamagotchi—as well as its many descendants—can continue to facilitate a desire for digital connection. This shift—from analog modes of connectivity to digital—has been well documented by a growing body of scholarship.[63] The AI companion character has even become a staple in many children’s media offerings. In the television series Annedroids (2014-2017), for example, a gifted, young inventor creates PAL to function as her best friend. Notably, the android PAL identifies as nonbinary, preferring to be referred to as “just PAL,” breaking from the preprogrammed genders so often assigned to these digital beings. Likewise, BMO, a sentient gaming console and a beloved character from the animated series Adventure Time (2010-2018), was explicitly depicted as an agender robot. While both PAL and BMO were created with queer inclusivity in mind, Ron, the titular robot from the 2021 animated film Ron’s Gone Wrong, operates through the more traditional gender codes outlined above. Ron and the other “B-Bots” of the film mimic the appearance of the Tamagotchi—sleek and egg-shaped—as well as the gender binary that factored so prominently into Bandai’s marketing. The robots belonging to the film’s young female characters embody an aesthetics of cuteness, care, and domesticity while the robots of the male youth are coded with affects of violence and aggression (akin to Bandai’s Digimon).
While this last depiction attempts to simplify—perhaps even renaturalize, as noted above—a gender binary, there are other ways in which broader elements of reduction and simplification might appeal to users. Sociologist Sherry Turkle observed, for instance, that humans are often drawn to the digital because we know it is, in this way, simpler than real life.[64] And this simplicity extends beyond gender. The ways in which users interact with and relate to their devices produces something akin to the parasocial relationships that have surfaced in contemporary discussions of digital culture. These “connections to mediated others,” as communication scholars Bradley J. Bond and Brandon Miller observe, “lack reciprocity but are otherwise akin to offline friendships.”[65] They include the relationships that fans form with celebrities, that readers form with their favorite fictional characters, and, of course, that users might form with their digital pets. In their work, Bond and Miller have proposed that these types of relationships are particularly common amongst queer youth. In framing digital devices and video games as modes of simulation, these sites function as particularly useful arenas for developing, navigating, and communicating queer identities and relationship dynamics.
A Queerer Audience: “Grow into an Unattractive Alien”
In exploring why the Tamagotchi might appeal to users who identify as LGBTQIA+, it’s helpful to return to the topic of how queer folks have, historically, reconfigured digital resources as tools for their own expression. Broadly speaking, queer folks have often been hailed as early adopters of new media platforms, interacting in digital spaces more often than their heterosexual peers. A frequently cited study even found that same-sex couples are 26% more likely than their heterosexual peers to meet their significant other online.[66] There are practical reasons, of course, as to why queer folks might look first to the Web as a meeting place; the researchers note, for instance, an affordance to filter out users who don’t share an individual’s sexual preference.[67] In a separate study conducted by social work researchers, Shelley L. Craig and Lauren McInroy found that queer youth often framed the internet as a “virtual playground,” a site where they might “explore, develop and rehearse” their identities.[68] Aspects like anonymity and the option to log off if online conversations become uncomfortable make these playgrounds feel even safer and more inviting, a useful affordance when considering the increased risks and challenges that queer youth face online, as outlined at the outset of this writing.
Still, there is always a tension with queer folks’ use of digital artifacts and digital spaces. As soon as these users are able to “claim pieces and moments for [their] own purposes,” to return to Henderson’s observation, these sites begin to disappear—taken away, moderated, censored, and silenced. Consider the discourse around boys who prefer “to participate in the games and pastimes of girls” that the DSM-III directed our attention to. While this behavior may coincide with a queer or “proto-gay” child’s self-discovery, it might also indicate other types of gender identity. Then again, it might indicate absolutely nothing at all. Regardless, this behavior, which is read as queer, becomes immediately suspect, pathologized, and discouraged.
Henderson also reminds us, however, that when these sites are snatched away from queer communities, those same communities have an excellent propensity for finding new objects, spaces, and affordances—“a dense set of communicative pathways through which people of all kinds learn to counter convention and suppression with invention and expression, and to know that there are always queerer ways of being.”[69] The Tamagotchi, then, acts as one small branch of these networked pathways, connected to a wide array of similar types of objects—virtual playgrounds through which queer folks are able to explore and rehearse not only their own identities, but models of queer community and queer kinship.
“Play”
While hardly comprehensive, the ideas above are a beginning sketch of the many dynamics that draw Tamagotchis—and our relationship to these devices—into modes, practices, and processes of queerness. In the final part of this sketch, I return to Sedgwick’s essay with two purposes in mind: reflection and instruction.
The title of Sedgwick’s work serves as a pointed response to what the queer theorist had observed was a major concern in discourses across medicine, government, and academia: “a culture’s desire that gay people not be.”[70] As Gill-Peterson’s work demonstrates, this statement might be expanded to include (or rather exclude) trans people, nonbinary people, and other queer folks. In the face of a public rhetoric that treated queerness as something to silence and suppress, to erase and to eradicate, Sedgwick took the radical position of instead affirming queer youth. Although many positive changes have occurred in the thirty years since the publication of her original article, other issues persist into the present—as indicated in the opening paragraph of this writing.
In the homage to Sedgwick’s work that is embedded in my own title, I am similarly interested in how to find spaces—both physical and figurative—where queer folks are affirmed and allowed to be. These might be new sites or, as with this look back on the Tamagotchi, they might be past sites revisited. As an experiment in this process, and using the Tamagotchi device as a virtual playground, I attempted to encourage, enhance, and embolden my virtual pet’s alternative practices surrounding sex, gender, identity, and desire—both in terms of the Tamagotchi character’s own 8-bit existence as well as in my own interactions with it. I decided that to explore these trajectories, I would use the Tamagotchi Pix, which has a low-resolution, built-in camera that allows users to take photographs of their pets in real-world environments, with their virtual characters displayed as an overlay. Through this practice, I introduced my Tamagotchi to a series of queer experiences.
At a Gay Pride event in the summer of 2022, I captured images that allowed the Tamagotchi characters to interact with leather daddies, drag queens, and a diverse crowd of other queer-identifying folks. This function is allowed on the Tamagotchi Pix through a feature aptly called “Explore.” Taking my Tamas to an adult sex store, I showed them a new set of toys—objects that had certainly not been included in the device’s preprogrammed offerings. Later still, I used the built-in camera to cast my Tamagotchi characters amidst a landscape of pornographic websites, finding new ways for them to engage with explicit displays of queer sex and sexuality.
In the images that are scattered throughout this text (see Fig. 1-3), I’ve collaged these experiences alongside one another in order to make a new kind of narrative for the Tamagotchi—or, at least, to emphasize a narrative that develops from examining the Tamagotchi as a site within a lineage of queer digital artifacts. Worth noting is that Tamagotchis, of course, are far from the only sites where one might find fandoms engaged in digital forms of queer nostalgia. Consider, for instance, the popularity of the London-based t-shirt company Homo London, which pairs “various pop culture hits with queer interest” before “inject[ing] a little queer appeal in them.”[71] The t-shirts feature characters like Jigglypuff or Pikachu from the Pokémon series or the titular protagonist of Sailor Moon alongside the term “homo” in an act of reclaiming a past pejorative. Homo London’s interventions with these characters, like my own affordances of the Tamagotchi, emphasize queer sensibilities that many fans already associate with these artifacts. But do these projects produce anything new, anything queerer than those sensibilities that already embedded in these objects?
In the case of my collages, I’m still fairly skeptical. For just as the OpenAI chatbot is not really “learning” about queerness through my conversations with it—not gaining, that is, a new understanding of just how rich and diverse the spectrum of sexual and gender identities can be—a Tamagotchi is, unfortunately (and I’m sorry to speak ill of my virtual pet/child), far less intelligent than the OpenAI platform. So did my more explicit renderings succeed in bringing up my Tamagotchi gay? Technically, no. Yet, what it did do was to produce new spaces for conversations, new openings for thinking about the queer affordances that our everyday interactions with digital artifacts allow us, new ways of pushing against our heteronormative boxes. Reclaiming a queer narrative for the Tamagotchi means establishing a place for the Tamagotchi in a lineage of queer digital artifacts. Establishing this place in an environment that is often threatened—increasingly moderated—might help us in carving out other, similar spaces. Just because a chatbot fails to understand queerness (despite our conversations with it and our attempts to expand its horizons), it doesn’t mean that at least one of us isn’t walking away with new insights.
Footnotes
1 Each of the subtitles in this piece is derived from a portion of text lifted directly from the Original Tamagotchi’s instruction manual that was created by Bandai and included in the packaging materials of each device. “The Original Tamagotchi Instructions,” Bandai, 1997, accessed February 12, 2023, https://bandai.com/wp-content/uploads/TamaIS_Gen2_pg1.pdf.
2 Michelle M. Johns et al., “Trends in Violence Victimization and Suicide Risk by Sexual Identity Among High School Students,” CDC Supplement 69, no. 1 (2020): 19–27, accessed January 16, 2023, doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.su6901a3; Lindsey Webb et al., “Electronic and School Bullying Victimization by Race/Ethnicity and Sexual Minority Status in a Nationally Representative Adolescent Sample,” The Journal of Adolescent Health 68, no. 2 (2021): 378-384, accessed January 16, 2023, doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2020.05.042.
3 Vasanti Jadva et al., “Predictors of Self-harm and Suicide in LGBT Youth: The Role of Gender, Socio-economic Status, Bullying and School Experience,” Journal of Public Health (2021), accessed January 16, 2023, doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdab383.
4 Barrie Hardymon, “How to Talk to Kids about Radicalization and the Signs of It,” Life Kit, July 29, 2022, accessed January 16, 2023, https://npr.org/2022/06/28/1108124938/learn-the-signs-of-radicalization-and-how-to-talk-to-kids-about-it/.
5 Alexander Monea, The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 2.
6 The slippage between terms like “queer” and “LGBTQIA+” reflect the overlapping definitions of these categories while respecting the preferred terms used by the authors with whom I am engaging in my work.
7 Jeanna Sybert, “The Demise of #NSFW: Contested Platform Governance and Tumblr’s 2018 Adult Content Ban,” New Media & Society 24, no. 10 (2022): 2311–2331, accessed January 16, 2023, doi.org/10.1177/1461444821996715.
8 Lowie Trevena, “The Sims 2 Taught Me It was Okay to be Gay,” Gayming Magazine, November 8, 2021, accessed January 16, 2023, https://gaymingmag.com/2021/11/the-sims-2-taught-me-it-was-okay-to-be-gay/; Heather Osborne, “Performing Self, Performing Character: Exploring Gender Performativity in Online Role-Playing Games,” Transformative Works and Cultures 11 (2012), accessed 16 January 2023, doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0411; Shelley L. Craig and Lauren McInroy, “You Can Form a Part of Yourself Online: The Influence of New Media on Identity Development and Coming Out for LGBTQ Youth,” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health 18, no. 1 (2014): 95-109, accessed February 12, 2023, doi.org/10.1080/19359705.2013.777007.
9 Lisa Henderson, “Still Queer—Or, What is Queer Internet Studies for Those Who Don’t Study the Internet?” First Monday 23, no. 7 (2018), accessed January 16, 2023, doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i7.9270.
10 Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 37.
11 Willard McCarty, “The PhD in Digital Humanities,” in Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, eds. Brett Greatley-Hirsch (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2012), 46.
12 Todd Harper, Nicholas Taylor, and Meghan Blythe Adams, “Queer Game Studies: Young But Not New,” in Queerness in Play, eds. Todd Harper, Nicholas Taylor, and Meghan Blythe Adams (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 4.
13 Bo Ruberg, Video Games Have Always Been Queer (New York: NYU Press, 2019), 1.
14 While Bandai’s designs for the Tamagotchi imitates the aesthetics of an egg, one might also assume that the egg’s connection to themes of fertility, growth and nurturance also play a role in the device’s ultimate appearance.
15 Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 163.
16 “Bandai America’s Tamagotchi Toys for 1998!” Bandai, 1998, accessed January 16, 2023, https://web.archive.org/web/19980709195449/http://www.bandai.com/pressroom/98tama.html.
17 “The Original Tamagotchi Instructions,” Bandai.
18 “The Original Tamagotchi Instructions,” Bandai.
19 Cottagecoremiku, “Update Question,” Tamagotchi Wiki, November 18, 2020, accessed January 16, 2023, https://tamagotchi.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000000339128.
20 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 43-44.
21 Robert J. Hill, “Activism as Practice: Some Queer Considerations,” New Direction for Adult and Continuing Education 102 (2004): 87, accessed February 12, 2023, doi.org/10.1002/ace.141.
22 OpenAI, personal exchange, September 18, 2022, https://beta.openai.com/examples/default-chat.
23 Kristina Zosuls et al., “The Acquisition of Gender Labels in Infancy: Implications for Gender-typed Play,” Developmental Psychology 45, no. 3 (2009): 688-701, accessed January 16, 2023, doi.org/10.1037/a0014053.
24 Stockton, The Queer Child, 22.
25 Stockton, The Queer Child, 12.
26 Sandy Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
27 Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
28 Michael Stutz, “Tama-Hackers Play God, Catch Hell,” Wired, August 20, 1997, accessed January 19, 2023, https://wired.com/1997/08/tama-hackers-play-god-catch-hell/.
29 Carol Lawson, “Tamagotchi: Love It, Feed It, Mourn It,” The New York Times, May 22, 1997, accessed January 16, 2023, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/052297gadget.html?scp=8&sq=wings%252520of%252520forever&st=cse.
30 Haley Velasco, “New Tamagotchis, and the Trials of Digital Parenthood in 2018,” The Wall Street Journal, September 25, 2018, accessed January 16, 2023, https://wsj.com/articles/new-tamagotchis-and-the-trials-of-digital-parenthood-in-2018-1537892730.
31 Allison, Millennial Monsters, 172.
32 Allison, Millennial Monsters, 174.
33 “Say Hello to Tamagotchi On. Bandai Namco,” Bandai, 2021, accessed November 10, 2022, https://tamaon.tamagotchi.com/.
34 Doris Betz, Tamagotchi: The Official Care Guide and Record Book (Kansas City, MO: Andrew McMeel, 1997), 7-8.
35 Lawson, “Tamagotchi.”
36 Lawson, “Tamagotchi.”
37 Ian Bogost, “Video Games Are Better Without Gameplay,” The Atlantic, October 22, 2019, accessed January, 16 2023, https://theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/dont-play-the-goose-game/600472/.
38 Lawson, “Tamagotchi”; Michelle Delgado, “Keeping Tamagotchi Alive: The Virtual Pet that Turned ‘90s Kids into Round-the-Clock Caretakers Turned 25 this Year,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 22, 2018, accessed January 16, 2023, https://smithsonianmag.com/innovation/keeping-tamagotchi-alive-180979264/; Lexi Pandell, “This is Your Brain on Obsession: What the Tiny Tamagotchi Can Teach Us All,” Vox, December 22, 2021, accessed January 16, 2023, https://vox.com/the-highlight/22824061/tamagotchi-brain-obsession-trends.
39 Lawson, “Tamagotchi.”
40 “Bandai America’s Tamagotchi Toys for 1998!” Bandai.
41 Delgado, “Keeping Tamagotchi Alive.”
42 “Finding Companionship in a Digital Age,” Next Generation, October 1997: 56-63. Another useful case study for adults “queering” children’s entertainment can be seen in the subculture of “bronies” (short for “bro ponies”), which arose in the 2010s as a group of men created a fandom around the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic series—a television show that was intended for a much younger and female audience. While there is nothing explicitly queer about this fandom (it has, for instance, been described as “internet neo-sincerity at its best”), the adult fandom’s gravitation towards a children’s series speaks to what Stockton has referred to as an “arrested development” or the queer act of “growing sideways” instead of up. Angela Watercutter, “My Little Pony Corrals Unlikely Fanboys Known as ‘Bronies,’” Wired, June 9, 2011, accessed January 16, 2023, https://www.wired.com/2011/06/bronies-my-little-ponys/; Stockton, The Queer Child, 22.
43 Thomas Foster, “‘Trapped by the Body’? Telepresence Technologies and Transgendered Performance in Feminist and Lesbian Rewritings of Cyberpunk Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 3 (1997): 708-742, accessed February 12, 2023, doi:10.1353/mfs.1997.0058.
44 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1970), 9.
45 “Finding Companionship in a Digital Age,” 60.
46 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex.
47 A relatively recent movement has developed over the past decade, finding a push (as well as a counter-push) for toy shops to stop segregating their aisles and merchandise by gender. Victor Luckerson, “Target Will Stop Separating ‘Girls’ Toys From ‘Boys’ Toys in Stores,” Time, August 8, 2015, accessed January 16, 2023, https://time.com/3989850/target-gender-signs/; Katharine Schwab, “Will Toys Ever Go Beyond Blue and Pink?” The Atlantic, May 5, 2016, accessed January 16, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/05/beyond-blue-and-pink-the-rise-of-gender-neutral-toys/480624/.
48 Allison, Millennial Monsters; Benj Edwards, “The Golden Age of Virtual Pets,” PCMag, April 10, 2018, accessed January 16, 2023, https://pcmag.com/news/the-golden-age-of-virtual-pets.
49 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1985), 154.
50 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Social Text 29 (1991): 20, accessed January 16, 2023, doi.org/10.2307/466296.
51 Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” 18.
52 Jack Turban, “What is Gender Dysphoria?” American Psychiatric Association (2022), accessed January 16, 2023, https://psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria.
53 Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of The Transgender Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 168.
54 Gill-Peterson, Histories of The Transgender Child, 168.
55 TamaBoy3000, “Are Tamas for Boys?” Tama Talk, September 16, 2011, accessed January 16, 2023, https://tamatalk.com/threads/are-tamas-for-boys.177209/.
56 Commercial Break Room, “Tamagotchi Commercial,” YouTube, May 18, 2013 [1997], accessed January 16, 2023, https://youtube.com/watch?v=YueDmq-w9X8.
57 “Say Hello to Tamagotchi On. Bandai Namco,” Bandai.
58 Jake Rossen, “A Brief History of the Tamagotchi,” Mental Floss, July 5, 2021, accessed January 16, 2023, https://mentalfloss.com/article/642373/tamagotchi-history.
59 Allison, Millennial Monsters.
60 (Delgado 2021)
61 “Latest Video,” Bandai, 2022, accessed January 19, 2023, https://bandai.com/brands/tamagotchi/original-tamagotchi/.
62 See Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin Books, 2014).
63 danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Bradley J. Bond and Brandon Miller, “YouTube as My Space: The Relationships between YouTube, Social Connectedness, and (Collective) Self-esteem among LGBTQ Individuals,” New Media & Society (2021): 1-21, accessed January 16, 2023, doi.org/10.1177/14614448211061830.
64 Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
65 Bond and Miller, “YouTube as My Space,” 17.
66 Michael Rosenfeld, Reuben J. Thomas, and Sonia Hausen, “Disintermediating Your Friends: How Online Dating in the United States Displaces Other Ways of Meeting,” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 36 (2019): 17753-17758, accessed January 16, 2023, doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1908630116.
67 Rosenfeld, Thomas, and Hausen, “Disintermediating Your Friends,”4.
68 Craig and McInroy, “You Can Form a Part of Yourself Online,” 101-102.
69 Henderson, “Still Queer.”
70 Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” 26.
71 Mikelle Street, “These T-Shirts Are Perfect If You’re Gay and Love Pokemon,” Out, December 27, 2019, accessed January 16, 2023, https://www.out.com/fashion/2019/12/27/these-t-shirts-are-perfect-if-youre-gay-and-love-pokemon.
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Author Biography
Jon Heggestad is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Digital Studies Program at Davidson College. His research is located at the intersection of queer studies and the digital humanities, focusing on representations of queer family-making across media forms. His other recent works have appeared in Screen Bodies, Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, Inside Higher Ed, and Public Books.
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