Tamagotchi

Tamagotchi is presented as an early, familiar example of a virtual companion: a pet encountered through the screen of a small electronic toy, with interaction taking place through an exchange of signs. Its significance in the discussion lies less in the toy’s mechanics than in the kind of relationship it makes imaginable—a connection with an apparent other mediated entirely by a screen.

The Screen-Mediated Pet

The account recalls the Tamagotchi phenomenon as something readers may remember from roughly a decade earlier. The compact electronic toy places the virtual pet behind a screen, and the user’s contact with it consists of exchanging signs. The description supplies no further technical details; instead, it emphasizes the arrangement between person, device, and simulated companion. The pet is present as an interlocutor, but only through the interface that makes the exchange possible.

From Pet to Virtual Partner

The remembered pet becomes a point of departure for the later example of Vivienne, a virtual girlfriend marketed by the Hong Kong software company Artificial Life, Inc. in March 2005. Vivienne was designed for newer third-generation cell phones and combined computerized voice synthesis, streaming video, and text messages. The progression from Tamagotchi to Vivienne marks a shift from a virtual animal to a simulated romantic partner, while retaining the screen as the medium of contact.

Vivienne’s offered courtship was bounded: she could be taken to movies and bars and given virtual flowers and chocolates, but she did not undress and limited intimacy to blowing kisses. Artificial Life, Inc. described her as practice before a relationship with a real girlfriend, rather than as a substitute. The text places that assurance beside the more unsettling possibility that screen-mediated relationships might lead users to dispense with the flesh-and-blood person altogether. Tamagotchi thus serves as a precedent for considering not simply what a virtual companion can imitate, but how much of interpersonal contact can be organized as an exchange through a device.

A Test of Human Interaction

The comparison returns to the question of how a person distinguishes a human interlocutor from a machine. The book connects Vivienne’s simulated conversation to Alan Turing’s proposed intelligence test: a machine possesses human intelligence if, after a long conversation, a human interlocutor cannot decide whether the exchange is with a human or a machine. Tamagotchi is not itself presented as passing that test. Its role is more preliminary: it establishes the familiar form of a screen-bound companion, making the movement toward simulated conversation and intimacy easier to recognize—and harder to dismiss as merely a technical novelty.