TamaGochi inciting virtual slavery

You might want to look at a number of interesting articles on virtual pet ownnership on this site.

SNIP...For these reasons, it is in everyone's interest to understand what it means to simulate the experience of pet ownership. Can raising a virtual pet act as a substitute for the experience of owning and caring for the real thing? Clearly the current models, like Tamagotchi and the other "products" on the market offer a somewhat impoverished and ultimately unconvincing simulation of the actual experience, but better models are always coming out. Researchers at the International Computer Science Institute have successfully demonstrated a chain of supercomputers capable of real-time simulating the neuronal activity of a brain composed of one million cells with an average of one thousand dendritic connections each. While the computational power required for this experiment was immense, and the simulated brain comparable in complexity to that of a fly, the recent history of processor development suggests that it's just a matter of time before we can affordably simulate the behaviour of a dog or a cat with astonishing accuracy.

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-- scott (hma5_5@hotmail.com), February 18, 2000