You can't cuddle up to a Tamagotchi "virtual pet", but you can carry it in your pocket. It says "beep, beep" instead of purring or barking, costs between £15 and £21 and requires constant affection, washing, feeding and exercise. If you're not careful, it gets sick and leaves messes. (Mercifully, it "sleeps" at night.) And it has one thing in common with real pets - if you neglect it, it dies. But that doesn't matter, says Stephanie Bultel, a spokeswoman for manufacturers, Bandai France. "When it dies you just programme a new pet. You can create as many as you want with watch batteries. It lives forever." Bultel herself is not adept at pet care; her "tams" - as they are known to connoisseurs - rarely live more than a week, or 70 tam years.
"Tamago" means egg in Japanese, and the suffix "otchi" adds the meaning "cute little". Since these ridiculous creatures arrived in France in May, every French child between the ages of 6 and 13 seems to want one. They drove French school teachers crazy for the last month of classes, but parents may find them ideal summer baby-sitters.
The worldwide shortage is so severe that plants in China, Thailand and Indonesia are reportedly working 24 hours a day to cope with demand, and telephone-card factories in Japan - where seven million have been sold in seven months - have been converted to Tamagotchi production. A kind of mythology has sprung up around them in France, summed up by seven-year-old Helena Dassault, who wandered into the VHS (Victor Hugo Symphonie) shop in Paris's rich 16th arrondissement to seek instructions for her virtual pet. "Are they really in fashion?" Helena asked The Irish Times. "Then I had better buy a lot of them!"
Pascal Bouaziz, the manager of VHS, is gloating. "We're the only store in Paris who has them," he boasts. "We phone the big department stores such as Galeries Lafayette and Printemps several times a day to see when theirs come in; they receive only a few dozen and they sell out within hours. We have a secret supplier."
Bouaziz sells not the original Tamagotchi made by Bandai of Japan, but a Chinese model known as the Dogotchi. And the Dinogotchi - a virtual dinosaur - is on its way. VHS is selling 50 of the key-chain size gadgets a day, for £21 each. Because he pays - and charges - more than the usual rate of £15, Bouaziz has only run out of the toys once. "We get a lot of Asian customers," he adds. "They buy a dozen at a time - there's a shortage in Japan too, and I hear they sell for up to 5,000 francs (£588) on the black market there. In America, there are 12 million on order."
Bouaziz gave a Dogotchi to his six-year-old son, Jonathan, who took it to summer camp. "He takes care of it as if it were a baby. It's so cute. It teaches him responsibility." The shop manager predicts the craze will last until Christmas. "You'll see a lot of them in trains, planes and cars this summer," he says.
Some children are already demanding certain colours - opaque white is most popular - and he foresees virtual-pet collections.
It's difficult to understand why even bored, affluent children fall for Tamagotchis. The little animal, usually a crudely drawn dog, walks back and forth on a tiny black and white television screen. You care for him by pushing three buttons so small they cramp your fingers. As your only reward, the animal gains weight or gives you a barely intelligible smile of contentment. "If he's hungry and he won't eat when I feed him, I have to scold him," says Helena Dassault. In the two days since her mother bought her a Dogotchi, the little girl has abandoned her Barbie dolls. She is an attentive "mother": "My best friend forgot hers when she went to Morocco on vacation. When she came back to Paris four days later, it was dead."
If Helena's friend has mastered the Internet, she can leave an epitaph to her departed pet on a "virtual cemetery" web site. Whoever claimed the French were rational Cartesians?
