I can't believe Bill lost at the knowledge tournament AGAIN today. I've really never had that happen so far, usually my characters win at the knowledge tournament on the second or third day. I've never read that Bill was particularly unintelligent relative to other characters. (Maybe it's a joke about Bill Clinton being stupid?)
Today, Bill was making a weird sad face that I don't think I've seen other Tamagotchis do.
At first I wondered what this could mean. Neither scolding nor praising seemed to do anything. Only way to remove this face was to fill its happy meter which had the consequence of making it jump happily in the room. It did this face at 3 different moments during the day and I wondered what to do with it.
On the 4th time I realised it was doing that face as soon as it wasn't fully happy so filling the happy meter didn't solve the problem, it just "removed the symptoms". So I thought maybe I should check the "Fear" and "Mine" meters. (Usually I don't like to know about them, the less meters you know about the more the "Tamagotchi effect" applies, I think). Here's what I found:
His Stress level ("Fear") was all the way up to 95 out of 99! I really don't know what got it so high, but I'm pretty sure this is the reason for the weird face, so I proceeded to bring it all the way down to 0. By the time it reached 4 I noticed that Bill had only 3 happy hearts again and wasn't doing the anxious face:
To reduce the stress level I was playing the sports game with Bill and praising it after each victory. I thought maybe the process could be shorter if I played the Math game but then...
The knowledge game INCREASES the stress meter by 10! So I think I do understand now what got the stress level so high. (This and the fact that at one point I forgot to turn off the lights for Bill and only did so at about 3 AM!).
Anyway, everything's back in order now and I hope Bill will win at the knowledge tournament tomorrow.