Make It Cuddle, Make It Fight, Market It Pink: Virtual Pets and Affective Economies of Gendered Play

This paper examines how 1990s virtual pets, through their design and marketing, encoded assumptions about gendered emotional labour and reinforced cultural hierarchies over which forms of engagement counted as legitimate play. Its central argument is that these digital artefacts were cultural texts rather than trivial novelties, and that they organised care, attachment, mastery, and competition within a divided affective economy. It proposes a typology distinguishing standalone "distinct" virtual pets, such as Tamagotchi, GigaPets, Neopets, and a Little Mermaid virtual companion, from "embedded" creatures in larger game ecosystems, including Pokémon, Digimon, the Chao of Sonic Adventure, and Final Fantasy's Chocobos. The former are framed around repetitive, domestic-style nurturing, while the latter are instrumental allies in levelling, combat, and collection.

The analysis finds that care-based play was typically pastel-coded, domestic, and marketed toward girls, and was structurally narrow despite its emotional richness. Embedded pets, by contrast, were wrapped in bold colours and adventure or competition rhetoric, with Digimon explicitly positioned as a "boy-oriented" Tamagotchi. The distinction also appears in temporal rhythms: distinct pets demanded steady, low-level daily attention, while embedded pets offered bursts of intense effort followed by progression. Hardcore player cultures tended to dismiss caretaking mechanics as trivial, revealing clear hierarchies in which some emotional labour was valued above others.

The study's scope is centred on the 1990s and on Anglophone and Japanese commercial products, and it relies on a qualitative, textual and historical approach informed by design analysis, marketing materials, and existing scholarship rather than on player surveys or empirical sampling. The author acknowledges that players moved across these modes and that user practices, including boys' attachment to Tamagotchi, complicate strict gender binaries. Nonetheless, the paper concludes that the affective hierarchies first visible in virtual pets persist in contemporary creature-collecting games, mobile care genres, and the enduring split between "cozy" and "hardcore" gaming cultures.