Word: tamagotchis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when you watch a home movie of your third Sim great-grandchild, then buy her toys to turn her into the genius you know she will eventually want to be, you get some sense of the game's unusual long-term emotional hook. Imagine those Tamagotchi virtual pets looking just like your kid brother and endlessly spawning new generations of themselves...
...Enoki's shrewd strategy: make it easy to use, easy to pay for and loaded with gimmicky content to dazzle and entertain Web novices. "The Internet scared Japanese people," says Yukiko Takahashi, a manager at Bandai Networks, a subsidiary of the toy company that gave the world the Tamagotchi virtual pet and created rudimentary games that have been big hits on i-mode. "It made people think about connecting a PC, using a keyboard, modems, ISDN lines, stuff they didn't understand and stuff that cost too much. The smartest thing DoCoMo did was not to use the word Internet...
...money goes to improving an existing product, not to basic research." Even when an inventor comes up with a hot product, the country's strong ethic of subordination of individuals to groups holds sway. Take the case of Aki Komikado, an unassuming sales-and-marketing employee who invented the Tamagotchi digital pet in 1996. The toy craze earned her employer, Bandai, $350 million, but Komikado didn't get a pay raise or a big bonus, and it doesn't seem to bother her. "Why should I get lots of money?" says Komikado, 32. "The real effort was made...