Quackpond

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!