WearOS and WatchOS each have dozens of smartwatch games and have a following of gamers who enjoy puzzle and arcade games on the small screen. However, one type of game lends itself to smartwatches like PB&J: virtual pet watch faces/games like Tamagotchi or Pikachu wearables from the ’90s.
I had the original Bandai Tamagotchi in 1996, and Pokemon Pikachu in ’98. I vaguely, nostalgically recall raising my Tamagotchi into adulthood, running with my marathoner dad wearing my Pikachu pedometer to keep the little monster happy. They all feel larger and more real than the dozens of pixels that display them.
Also, they really Didn’t die of neglect, didn’t abandon me because of my lack of steps. You’d have to dig them out of the box in my parents’ garage to prove it. They seem to me as alive as Schrödinger’s cat.
Anyway, as someone who works a sedentary job, I rely on smartwatch reminders to move or stand up to stay healthy, but I’m always looking for new ways to stay motivated. Most people force themselves to turn off their daily step count or maintain a consistent step count of 10,000 steps a day, but this is very impersonal and it’s difficult to re-establish the habit once it falls short.
Whether it’s a fitness watch face or a smartwatch app, it’s the perfect place to bring a ’90s virtual pet back to life as a cute way to reward you for exercising, or to torment you emotionally when you’re lazy.
Imagine a little Pikachu (or copyrighted critter) reacting to your activity. If you’ve taken 500 steps in the past hour, he’ll happily stroll away. Complete a tracked activity and you’ll see a custom animation, such as lifting weights or swimming next to a Goldenen. But if you sit all day, your virtual pet will lie down and look glum. After a few days or weeks of neglect, it will leave and you must start over with a new creature.
If you want to capture the atmosphere of the original Tamagotchi, you can make it so that you have to feed, entertain, and clean up your pet, and in the worst case scenario it gets sick or dies from neglect. Or you can sync it with a goal-setting mobile app like Finch, which rewards you for completing a variety of activities, not just fitness activities.
I favor simplicity and style, which will make features like this ubiquitous and popular. While an Android smartwatch or Apple Watch has the display space and RAM for deep apps, an active care system would cause most people to abandon their virtual pets after the novelty wears off.
an automatic, reactive The virtual pet adjusts to your fitness data and can be customized to your fitness level or personal goals, making it a very cute motivator. It may appear on your home watch face, or as a clickable icon within a watch complication. The latter probably makes the most sense for extending battery life, so you’ll only see the animation when you’re actively checking on your virtual pet’s condition.
Ideally, you can choose different types of pets based on how active you are in your daily life. Virtual Cats are better suited for long, lazy stretches, while serious athletes might raise (or upgrade to) a more active animal.
It would be cool if I could see my Pixel Watch 2 pet based on Fitbit Premium data throughout the day! Samsung already has sleep animals to judge the quality of your sleep, and is planning to launch My Energy Score this summer, which can easily expand on its current system and use Samsung Health data to control your pet’s health on the Galaxy Watch 7. If you don’t sleep well, your virtual pet will have bags under its eyes.
You might think that this kind of functionality would require a suitable smartwatch with enough animation processing power. But I’d also like to see this feature on battery-saving fitness watches, since they’ll most likely have in-depth training data to draw from.
Last year, I discovered that Garmin holiday faces (like the one above) start out empty and then build a snowman or decorate a tree based on how many intensity minutes you complete. Over time, other dynamic watch faces will adjust to different images.
Now that Garmin watches are starting to add more AMOLED displays, sleep guidance, and enough storage space to store large terrain maps or music playlists, if they can squeeze in more changeable watch faces, based on your weekly mileage, each day Monthly mileage adjustments, I wouldn’t be surprised by steps or other data without requiring a lot of RAM. The same goes for other fitness brands!
I believe the virtual pet craze is gone because the stakes are also virtual. Once you forget to play it and it dies, you realize how little impact it has on your life and then you can move on.
In this case, neglecting your virtual pet, the embodiment of your physical health and fitness, would be symbolically disturbing. It’s easy to ignore an empty chart if you don’t close rings for a day, but it’s harder when you see Pikachu kicking its feet impatiently.
Gamifying your fitness is nothing new, we already have plenty of motivational running and walking apps to keep us motivated. But wearing an adorable animated creature on your wrist to celebrate your wins and nudge you to get back into your exercise routine will be especially inspiring.
Hopefully brands like Samsung or Apple decide to bring back this 90s fad for kids like me who need to stay healthy!