Animal Attractions
Remember
Tamagotchis , those digital pets-on-a-keychain marketed by Bandai starting in about 1996? You could feed them virtual food, exercise them and even clean up after them. But the experience was about as realistic as inviting the Pac-Mans home to dinner; if not cared for promptly when an alarm sounded, they could sicken, starve and die within a day or so.
The company still sells them and said its total sales hit 10 million units by the middle of 2005. But chances are good that a large proportion of those little digital critters took their last virtual breaths in the back of junk drawers somewhere, out of sight of owners who took a silent oath never to actually own a real live dog or cat.
Well, the Web makes everything better, and virtual pets are back. And this time they
