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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.

• The paper argues that 1990s virtual pets were cultural texts that encoded assumptions about gendered emotional labour, organising care, attachment, mastery, and competition within a divided affective economy rather than being trivial novelties.
• It proposes a typology separating standalone 'distinct' virtual pets (Tamagotchi, GigaPets, Neopets, a Little Mermaid companion) from 'embedded' creatures within larger game ecosystems (Pokémon, Digimon, Sonic Adventure's Chao, Final Fantasy's Chocobos).
• Care-based distinct pets were typically pastel-coded, domestic, and marketed toward girls, while embedded pets used bold colours and adventure or competition rhetoric, with Digimon explicitly positioned as a 'boy-oriented' Tamagotchi.