Quackenpond, by Quackenpond Admins
There is no shortage of thinkpieces arguing that parasociality is the defining ailment of our modern world; the internet has gotten everyone, but especially kids these days, way too focused on the travails of people they’ve never met, to the detriment of their ability to focus on the world as it is. This is, of course, rock stupid: Gen Z didn’t invent parasociality, just ask the Beatlemaniacs or medieval Catholics (I was raised in the faith and probably still bear it more affection than is objectively warranted, but man, folks got *freaky* about the saints). No, the main thing the internet does is make things more awkward, because you’re not just getting invested in stranger-drama, sometimes you’re a fly on the wall as it’s all going down.
Case in point: Quackenpond! With its Geocities-core presentation and cartoon-duck pet simulator gameplay, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is a piece of twee nostalgia bait, but nope, better buckle your seatbelt because shit *escalates*. See, the barebones duck-tending is attached to a DIY forum, which is where the main business of the game goes down. Early threads where other testers (the game-within-a-game has just moved into a very small beta) introduce themselves and engage in duck-based roleplay are quickly overtaken by other indicating that there are some tensions between the married couple who created Quackenpond – tensions that come out into the open in the space of just a few posts. And true to form, while most people quietly try to ignore the awkwardness, a few members of the peanut gallery can’t help but kibitz, gleefully stoking the flames of other peoples’ relationship issues until the whole thing collapses into a site-not-found error.
It’s a simple story, and the pacing is so tight that it doesn’t have much time to make an impact – even taking a lot of breaks to play with or feed your virtual pet, I think you’d be hard pressed to delay reaching the ending for more than ten minutes. Similarly, while the writing isn’t especially elegant or subtle, it does a good job aping the vernacular of these kinds of spaces, and provides more than enough foreshadowing of where things are going to go, from the lack of self-awareness displayed in the site’s rules (“Quackpond is intended for those 13+ …. mild swearing at times is okay, so long as you aren’t swearing at people or saying fuck every three words”) to the ominous fact that in the introductions thread everyone says they have anxiety, or are socially awkward, or aren’t good with people.
At least there are some nice touches along the way to the ugly, inevitably end. There’s a facsimile of a register/login/logout page, you can choose to reply to a few of the threads and then actually type in what you want to post (though the game unhelpfully doesn’t indicate when others have responded to you), and most importantly, the cartoon ducks are winsome creatures; I chose a skeptical mallard who seemed to be giving the world copious side-eye, and as I played with him while the screaming matches on the forum got louder and louder, I felt we were kindred spirits. I don’t know what’s wrong with humans either, Quackbush, but at least we’ve got each other.