Quackpond

Quackpond is a one-trick pony of a game but it is a handsome pony with a good trick. I am not sure how much effect you have on the plot but the story plays out in a very interesting way with the fun being working out what is going on.

The idea probably wouldn't work for a larger game but Quackpond is nice and short. It was fun playing with my duck and when it was over I found that I missed Brown Boy the Mallard.

Travel back with me to the relatively early internet. I’m 14. I spend my daily allotted hour of dial-up internet time split between Runescape and a Lord of the Rings-themed geocities message board built by a friend. There are maybe seven members (it’s invite-only); we use it to write nerdy roleplays, none of which we finish, and discuss the books/movies on which those nerdy Rps are based. At the time I’m horribly in love with the friend who made the site (I’ll be in love with them for another couple years; I’ll never do a thing about it). Meanwhile, one of the other members apparently has a crush on me, starts causing drama with the site creator in some kind of misguided rivalry. Parents get involved, it’s all weird and embarrassing, friendships end, and our little geocities site, like Middle Earth in the third age, enters its sad decline.

I really enjoyed Quackpond. It’s such an effective speedrun of this experience. The fact that you play as someone peripheral to the core relationships is so smart; most of the time, you were a bystander to this sort of thing, only realizing way too late how serious and messy and totally out of your hands the whole thing was. This is an experience that even younger folks will recognize; how many Discord servers have died this death? The difference is that back in my early teens, that there was no discord; these small communities had to be built, and a lot of us didn’t know how to do that. You relied on people who could code, or who knew html, and though friendships sometimes survived on larger forums or various IM services, most of the time these sites were like deep sea vents. When they went dark, the communities that had clustered around them just died out. We talk a lot these days about the internet being so corpo, and it’s true, but any ownership of the early web required skills that not everyone had. Enshittification still happened, in a way, but instead of ads it was immaturity, jealousy, resentment, poorly handled feelings or neurodivergence that made a site unusable. As soon as I saw the post about the site shuttered I had just enough time to go look at my duck (Doodle, a grey muscovy) one last time; I tried to play with him, got that final error. Ouch.

I love the way this game works. The gameplay is slight, but it works well, never overstays its welcome. I overuse “well calibrated” as a descriptor of small games, but this one is well calibrated, the perfect length to say what it’s saying, just enough variation in what your clicking on to hide the fact that you are just clicking on links. Writing and design are great, it was funny (there was always a duck song guy; the geocities creator’s brother was a duck song guy, actually, by which I mean he incessantly referenced that specific duck song), it made me genuinely sad. Great stuff!

Quackpond is an early-2000s website forum/community simulator that's about playing with cute ducks. But just like a smoothly swimming duck, there's more going on beneath the surface of the pond. (Spoiler - click to show)(the story involves an abusive relationship playing out through forum posts)

The aesthetic is 100% what it should be, down to the table-based layout (which makes me cry as a person who does web design sometimes, but is very appropriate for this game). And the story is well-handled and engaging.

Where the game didn't quite work for me is its mechanics. Every time you navigate to the "play with your duck" link, new forum posts or responses appear. You can respond to these, but it doesn't affect anything beyond the post in response to yours. After a couple of days, the story proper starts and after a few more it ends—(Spoiler - click to show)and so does the game. You will abruptly see a mocked-up "permanently closed" error after navigating to your duck after the final forum post appears.

Overall, playing this left me with the feeling that I was on the outside of things, watching total strangers interact and ignore me. Considering both the aesthetic and the story, this is probably by design! But as a game, it left me wanting just a little bit more.

I should acknowledge that I played this as part of IFComp, so I was expecting a bit more trickery behind the scenes. (e.g. the "rules" page warns you not to try hacking or accessing secret things and I was like "Aha! That Is A Clue!" but it was not.) Outside of that context, I think I would have had a different set of expectations and a different gameplay experience.