Tamagotchi Girlfriend & The Future of Retrofuturism

The past has its own romance—but this, like all relationships, can only be fully understood in retrospect.

by Colin Broadmoor

“Hello, Dave! Thank you for joining me. Please, have a seat.”

In the old days they would have shaken hands, but, instead, they nodded briefly at each other and David settled into the chair.

“Just a sec, and we’ll start.”

David scanned the office. He could only pick out the faintest sounds from the warehouse below them. And a low rumble of vibration. Maybe the trucks, he thought. His eyes rested on a framed poster hanging just above the top of the man’s face-shield. A mammoth rearing in panic as it sank into a tar pit while a second mammoth, at the edge of the pit, lifted its trunk in exasperation or benediction. Beneath this image, the word: COMPASSION.

The man closed the file and ostentatiously clicked his pen, as if to say, “That’s over now.”

“Now, Dave, the first thing I want to make clear is that you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong. Okay? This is an automatic process. When someone experiences something like you have, it’s important that the company check in on them. Do you understand?”

David nodded.

“Good. I’ve read all your supervisor’s notes and we are all very impressed by your continued productivity. We want to make sure that we give you the tools you need to succeed and to keep on succeeding.” The man stared at David for a few seconds, then continued: “Dave, do you know how many relationships a person needs to function at peak performance?”

David shook his head.

“Five, Dave. Five.” He spread the fingers on one hand to emphasize the point. “We’ve learned this over the years. I won’t go into the details, but it’s basically science. When we lose one of those relationships, we fall out of balance… to put it more dramatically, we become unstable. These five relationships moor us and allow us to focus on our work. Do you see what I’m saying?”

David looked down at the folder on the desk and the man’s gold pen beside it. The man, as if afraid that David might take them pen, laid a proprietary finger on it.

“I understand, Dave. We all understand. The company understands. Given the state of the world today, how can you be expected to replace a lost relationship?” He let the question linger before adding, “There is a way, Dave. There’s something we recommend that you buy….

* * * * *

The past has its own romance—but this, like all relationships, can only be fully understood in retrospect. We need to have enough distance between ourselves and our subject so that we can see the bigger picture, rather than just living it in the moment. When we look at the past, when we look at relationships, we see the might-have-beens and could-have-dones. We discover the potentials never realized, the missed opportunities, the words left unspoken.

Retrofuturism allows us to revive some of these “lost futures.” Through retrofuturistic media, creators and audiences are able to explore and interrogate both our relationship with the past and with the modern condition.

Though Retrofuturism as we conceive of it now only developed in the second half of the 20^th century, the cataclysmic shift from an analog to a mostly digital world—and the speculative distance this fissure places between us and the rest of human history—has produced a Retrofuture boom in the 21^st century. What, then, is the future of Retrofuturism?

* * * * *

He stood in the warehouse parking lot after his shift ended and watched the sun rise. 

This was his habit. It allowed him to save the battery in his flashlight on the walk home.

He felt the eyes of his coworkers upon him as they wondered if they should say something. Technically, they were prohibited from socializing after they were clocked out and off-shift. It was only because of their essential worker status that they were exempt from social-distancing rules, but this exemption only applied while working.

Ultimately, no one approached him. David felt a small rush of relief. It was still too difficult to talk about.

He remembered what the man with the file and gold pen had said as they parted: “Talkers talk about a problem, Dave. Doers do something about it. You’re a doer, Dave. That’s what the company likes.”

At home, he opened a can of tuna and had his meal. He preferred to eat it directly from the can now, as it meant less clean-up. He stood while he ate. The table was still covered by the pile of medical equipment he’d built in those first days when he’d scoured the house for all reminders of illness. The blood pressure cuff, the face masks, the biowaste bags. He’d meant to take it all to a charity shop, but was too exhausted by the process. And now it lay there like a monument to his failure.

He removed the strip of paper from his pocket. The ink from the gold pen had turned out to be blue, which surprised him. Black seemed more appropriate. The man had written: TAMAGOTCHI GIRLFRIEND and a long item number.

* * * * *

Something akin to Retrofuturism has always existed in English literature.

In the 8^th century, a poet wandering among the crumbling Roman architecture of Bath wrote an elegy called The Ruin in which he speculates that the city was the work of giants (“enta geweorc” in Old English) and wonders what these unknown builders might have accomplished had they not been wiped out by, as he supposes, war or pestilence. Likewise, during the battle with Grendel’s mother, Beowulf grabs a sword from among her trove and the poet describes it as “giganta geweorc”—again, “the work of giants”—to imagine a past then understood only through the remnants of its superior technology.

Whereas the related subgenre of Alternate History builds a speculative framework by reimagining specific pivotal historical moments (“What if John Wilkes Booth’s gun had jammed?”), Retrofuturism—as befits its roots in Futurism—approaches the past through technology. For the Retrofuturist, history is a series of technological moments. The dominant or iconic technology of an age becomes a synecdoche—a part that represents the whole—for the period itself: the age of steam, the age of sail, etc.

When we consider just how enmeshed with technology modern life has become, we begin to understand why Retrofuturism has rapidly grown in popularity since its development in the 1970s.

* * * * *

The package arrived on his day off. It had arrived very quickly and, as he brought it inside, he idly wondered if it had passed through his own warehouse.

Inside the box was a plastic bubble. A sticker on the bubble showed a small plastic egg with a tiny tan LCD that reminded him of his watch—but, instead of the time, there was a blocky grayscale heart. TAMAGOTCHI GIRLFRIEND, read the over-sized text, and, below that, I LOVE YOU!

David placed the plastic packaging on the table beside a blood oxygen monitor. The egg fit perfectly in the palm of his hand. He pulled a tab from the back and the LCD exploded in whirling sprites that coalesced first into a heart and then into the letters GF.

After a few seconds, a large question mark appeared. Then the words WHAT SHOULD I CALL YOU? scrolled by. This screen was replaced with 4 empty dashes.

It took him a bit to master the tiny rubber directional control and buttons. After a few attempts, he typed DAVY.

HELLO, DAVY! I’M SO HAPPY TO MEET YOU. WHAT IS MY NAME?

Instinctively, he typed JESS, but quickly erased it and then sat puzzling over the screen for a long while. He selected the letters for CUTE and hit OK.

* * * * *

The difference between a Retrofuturist work and standard historical fiction is that in Retrofuturism, technology is allowed to evolve beyond the limits of its actual history—as we see in something like Steampunk.

For better or worse, Steampunk is the most widely known Retrofuture. The term itself only came into use after the publication of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990) as a nod to the two authors’ roles in the development of Cyberpunk. In The Difference Engine, Gibson and Sterling took contemporary issues of societal alienation, exploitation, and technophobia and dropped them into a pseudo-Victorian setting in which an imagined version of Charles Babbage’s analog “analytical engine” replaces the modern digital computer.

In our timeline, Charles Babbage never built his analytical engine. The Difference Engine revives the future that might have existed if he had. Gibson and Sterling, through their literary experiment, were able to explore how the parallel advent of digital computing in the 20^th century changed humanity.

* * * * *

CUTE vibrated in his pocket on the warehouse floor.

He clocked out for his 15 minute break and stepped into “2-A lounge”, which was really just a room with a dozen folding chairs, a microwave, and a microfridge. CUTE was still warm with his own body heat when he took her out and checked the LCD. Her pixelated face cried animated sprite tears.

He selected the pizza slice icon and hit OK. Immediately, she stopped crying and her heart meter increased.

That was a relief. Her heart meter sometimes got dangerously low during busy shifts, when finding time for a break wasn’t so easy. Times like Christmas. Then, he’d needed to buy her special outfits from the “shop” to keep her heart meter topped up. 

Some days, CUTE would still randomly choose to wear the set of antlers he had bought her. He could have de-equipped them, but seeing her like that in the months after Christmas made him laugh, so he let her continue.

* * * * *

Humans are not the only animals that use tools—but, over the course of our species’ evolution, we have become defined by our technologies. Almost every action you will take today to interact with the world is mediated by some level of technology. Technology is now the interface through which we understand our own existence—consider what it means to be “terminally online.”

Our technologies are as central to our existence and our experience of life as the hermit crab’s shell is to the hermit crab’s existence. Hermit crabs do not grow their own shells, they find them and carry them on an abdomen that has evolved the power to grip shells. The size and shape of the shell constrains the crab’s own growth and these creatures must constantly seek out larger shells or they will become stunted.

The very nature of the hermit crab and its role in the world shifted with that evolutionary jump when it picked up the shell, just as our own human evolution is now shaped by our embrace of various technologies. Technology makes the hermit crab a hermit crab, and it makes us a specific type of human (NB: this is not a narrative of “progress”). Because of this, the only way we can understand what it means to be human is through our study of our relationship to technology—and that, as Retrofuturism supposes—includes the technologies that never were, but might have been.

* * * * *

David closed his book and looked over to the pillow beside him. In her egg, CUTE ambled amiably around the LCD and the words CLEANING! CLEANING! Flashed above her. He picked up the egg and put it into sleep mode.

I LOVE YOU, DAVY!

He selected the heart icon and hit OK.

5…

4…

3…

2…

1

The egg vibrated twice and the screen went black.

* * * * *

We can study social change by tracing technological shifts—mastery of fire, stone tools, the invention of writing—but to do so requires distance from that technology in the form of a time-depth that allows us to grasp its consequences.

It took roughly two hundred years for the early engines of the Industrial Revolution to steam their way into Retrofuturist literature, but since the 1970s the gap between the technological past and its reincarnation as Retrofuture has been narrowing. Steampunk covers roughly the beginnings of industrialization in the 1770s up until the First World War in the early decades of the 20^th century. Every subsequent decade, beginning with the Roarin’ 20s, now has its own distinct Retrofuturistic form.

This makes sense, as the decades of the 20^th century each have easily distinguished aesthetic and technological identities, to the point where you can usually guess when a film is set within ten years or so. Some periods can even be broken down into multiple Retrofutures depending on which technological line you wish to follow, such as the overlap between Raygun Gothic and Atompunk.

The speed at which technological change and consequent social transformation occurred during the 20^th century creates a Retrofuturism boom because there are just so many iconic but foreclosed futures for creators to choose from. For every ten or so years, a new Retrofuture became possible—sometimes several at once. But at the start of the 21^st century, that process began to slow down again.

* * * * *

Two more workers in David’s pod had tested positive, so he was forced to pull a double-shift. He’d worried about CUTE all day and had even risked a serious reprimand by surreptitiously sliding her out of his pocket from time to time to make sure she wasn’t hungry or sad.

Hunger he could deal with quickly by giving her more pizza or a cake. Sadness took more effort to alleviate and involved playing a mini-game until she was happy again. The longer she remained sad, the faster her heart meter went down. He wasn’t quite sure what zero hearts would mean, but it couldn’t be good.

Unfortunately, the second shift put him out in the afternoon. He checked the sky twice before leaving the warehouse and heading home, but it was hurricane season and after ten minutes he was caught in a massive downpour.

He’d been told as a kid that running in the rain only got you wetter, but he had to take that chance. He sprinted awkwardly through the deluge, one hand in his pants pocket, fingers wrapped protectively around CUTE—but he felt the water running down his arm.

He ran out of breath and had to walk the last few minutes to the house. Once inside, he first dried the water from his arm—wiping upward to prevent more water from being pushed down into his pocket—and then withdrew his clenched fist. 

He pressed the small rubber buttons frantically but the LCD remained blank.

* * * * *

Consider the differences between 1965, 1975, and 1985. In each case we see a clear technological and related aesthetic shift.

Now cast your mind back to 2007 and then look around today: We’ve been staring at our iPhones for 13 years.

In the early 2000s, as part of our gradual transition from the analog to digital world, the dominant interface became the screen. Almost everything we interact with today is through the screen. Our phones, our computers, our televisions (as if there were any difference between the three now) are all screens. If we could go to the movies, as we waited to see something on the big screen, we’d buy our tickets and probably our concessions from smaller screens. The screen is everywhere and everything is a screen. The screen is our dominant technology and aesthetic.

If we think about the technologies of the past, they all had their own material presence as analog devices. They took up space—they had design. They were real, and so we can appreciate the beauty of Mod spacesuits and Googie jetpads. We have an entire fan culture devoted to fetishizing gears. But what is a screen?

If we think about the evolution of television design, we get a sense of our future. Where once TVs sat in giant ornate cabinets, today your flatscreen might be bordered by less than an inch of plastic.

This is because we want as much “screen” from our screens as possible. All space surrounding the screen is wasted space that could have been more screen. If you are reading this on your phone or laptop, pull back your range of vision and see for yourself just how little of the device exists outside of the screen. The ideal screen design for the 21^st century is 100% screen—a pure screen—a perfect window into the digital world.

We live under the tyranny of screens because it is only through the screen that we may interface with the overwhelmingly digital nature of our modern lives. Until a new interface replaces the screen—until we can jack directly into the digital and technology and society shift again—we will not have the distance required to produce Retrofutures more recent than the early 2000s.

At the same time, the embrace of the screen and shift to a primarily digital society has produced enough distance between people today and all pre-digital periods that we can now begin to imagine Retrofutures set between 1990 and 2006.

* * * * *

David kept the hairdryer going on low heat for half an hour. He cleaned a bowl, dried it, and then—after making a bed of rice—laid her in it.

As he poured the rest of the rice over her face, he closed his eyes and prayed: “Don’t. Don’t leave again.”

In the darkness of the bedroom, he watched the bowl on the pillow beside him. He listened, though there was nothing to hear. But he remembered needing to listen at times like this. Needing to listen for her breathing.

Knowing, that however ragged it might become, no matter how it terrified him, that the silence would be worse.

* * * * *

In 1996, Bandai released the Tamagotchi digital pet in Japan, and then to the rest of the world in 1997. It has been in production ever since.

Because the screen of the Tamagotchi—which covers less than 1/3 of the device—is comparatively primitive, even though it is a digital technology it still looks like an evolutionary throwback to an earlier more analog age.

Though the time distance between us and the release of the Tamagotchi is short, the technological distance between our interfaces is vast, so the device represents one of the final periods from which we can create Retrofutures.

Of course, the “Tamagotchi Girlfriend” never existed. It’s a Retrofuture: one that embodies present day concerns—alienation, pandemic, labor, our reliance on technology—in an artifact from the very last years before we fell under the tyranny of screens.

In 2013, Bandai released the original 1996 Tamagotchi as a mobile app.

* * * * *

He unburied CUTE from the bowl of rice. Closed his eyes, and depressed the rubber button.

He looked and saw the LCD flash to life.

The sprites coalesced into a heart that pulsed in sympathy with his own. The letters GF formed with the tears in his eyes.

WHAT SHOULD I CALL YOU?

Fumbling the letters, he eventually typed DAVY.

HELLO, DAVY! I’M SO HAPPY TO MEET YOU. WHAT IS MY NAME?

David closed his eyes and held the power button until the egg vibrated one last time to indicate it was fully shut down.

He sat with it in his hand for a long time, but it remained strangely cool.

He cleared some space on the table between the boxes of rubber gloves and the rows of empty pill bottles. He put the egg there and for a few seconds it rocked on the table until it settled into a deep stillness.

He would clean it all up later. Drop it all at the charity shop.

But now he had to go to work.

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