Tamagotchi and Quake both join World Video Game Hall Of Fame
It's 'videogame', actually
New York's Strong National Museum of Play has welcomed four new entries into its Video Game Hall Of Fame: Quake, Goldeneye, 1981's arcade side-scroller Defender, and the virtual pet Tamagotchi. It's that last one that's by far the most interesting of the four picks, and I must admit, I'd never actually thought about Tamagotchi in these exact terms before.
Here's The Strong on Tamagotchi's inclusion:
"Beyond cultivating nostalgia, Tamagotchi offered a distinct form of play apart from the prevailing popularity of video game electronics at the time. In the book Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (2006), scholar Anne Allison argued that Tamagotchi provided young users with feelings of connection, intimacy, and personalization, a respite from competition and fighting games."
This is purely speculative on my part - I'd love for someone to give me a little more context or insight - but the first Tamagotchi was released in 1996, the same year as SNES farming game and Stardew Valley influence Harvest Moon and the original Pokémon. Taken together, that's an incredibly influential year for contemporary non violent or "cosy" titles, and I do wonder if these three games (or two games and Tamagotchi, depending on your view) themselves share common influences.
When I say I'd never thought of Tamagotchi as a videogame, I don't mean it in "not a real game sense", either. Just that it hadn't actually occurred to me to think about in what we might broadly call videogame canon or history. But I came around the idea pretty quickly, honestly. Now I think about, Tamagotchi might actually have been my first exposure to permadeath. I once lost one for months, eventually finding it under my bed to behold my beloved pet dying in a mountain of its own shit. Brutal stuff.
As for Quake's inclusion, The Strong focuses on its use of 3D space, as well as the popularity of its competitive multiplayer "central to the creation of esports as an industry". It was also, they point out, "the first shooter to get widespread mod support", spawning the likes of Team Fortress 2.
These four additions bring the hall of fame's total up to 49 games. The earliest entry is Spacewar!, and the most recent is The Last Of Us. We like to complain about irritating uses of punctuation in game names here at RPS but I suppose they've been with us since the beginning. I'm now wishing they'd named The Last Of Us something like Panic! At The Abandoned Supermarket just for the sake of symmetry.