YES Let me tell you a true, sad story. When we'd finished arguing about today's proposition, the individual on the other side of this page disappeared for a while. When he eventually returned from the backstreets of Quarry Bay, he slumped into a furtive huddle over his computer. It transpired - this is the tragic part - that he was clucking over a plastic key-ring with a minute computer screen which showed a tiny egg. 'It hasn't hatched yet,' he breathed to his neighbour, who wasn't the slightest bit interested because she had a deadline. I know this because the neighbour was me.
You'll be lucky, therefore (or perhaps not) if anything appears in the adjoining column. What with all that feeding and disciplining and stroking, my diabolical colleague will be a busy chap. Tamagotchi are demanding: they beep, they have mood swings, they crave attention every two hours and if you ignore them for long enough, they die and go to a virtual cemetery on the Internet. This is a perfect outlet for journalists, who have the attention-span of gnats and are happy to fiddle with anything that comes to hand - usually expenses, though a virtual pet will do.
But should children be encouraged to grow up into pea-brained hacks? I hardly think so. Neither do some of the sensible teachers of Hong Kong who are fed up with pupils disappearing under their desks in response to the call of their Tamagotchi. They have decided to do some real-life disciplining, are confiscating the beeping eggs and - well, that cemetery on the Internet has been filling up pretty quickly.
Fans, like my addled colleague, claim that Tamagotchi train children to be responsible and loving. Yes, of course they do, in the same way that the trolls which were a playground craze when I was a child encouraged me to learn Norwegian. I mean - puhleese. All that those Tamagotchi are teaching children is a novel way to waste time. Crying that you're saving your pet from starvation has more appealing melodrama than sidling off to read comic books. As for being plunged into deepest mourning when the inevitable happens - crikey, it's practically Shakespearean. Except that Tamagotchi owners will never find out who the Bard was, seeing as they're too busy with their daily duties to pay attention to him in class.
As the children of Hong Kong aren't in the habit of bringing their cats and goldfish along to school, logic dictates that Tamagotchis, too, should be left at home. We adults on Postmagazine, however, will have to learn to endure my opponent's infatuated cooing. What's worse is that he couldn't find an original Tamagotchi so he just bought a cheap rip-off which will probably have expired by the time you read this. See? I told you it was a sad story.
Fionnuala McHugh NO One of the few things that makes the terrors of the schoolyard bearable is the delicious frisson of knowing you are at the vanguard of a new craze. You might have to run the gamut of raw-boned bullies, suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous acne and endure didactic diatribes from ogres who look like they should be starring in a Pink Floyd video, but it is all bearable when the lunch bell sounds an escape into a consuming passion.