Pleasure in Plastic Placidity

You are sitting in a striped lawn chair next to an infinity pool at sunset. Beside you, a black radio plays a smooth, bossa nova-type beat. You look out over the limitless blue ocean, which is mere feet from your beautifully trimmed lawn and crystal clear pool, and you wonder: can life get any better?

Without warning, from nowhere at all, a rubber duck drops into the pool.

NEW DUCK: BRIGHT YELLOW

You think it might come to life… But no. Its beady black eyes stare back at you, its pursed red bill holding a secret, like the Mona Lisa.

This is Placid Plastic Duck Simulator, a video game with no story, character, or objective.

You play as an invisible camera, which is able to float around the area and focus on the rubber duck of your choosing. The ducks will spawn onto your screen without your permission or request. You are unable to interact with the environment in any way, except through the game’s settings, where you can change the game’s resolution or turn off the music. Some of the controls you have include: moving the camera to and from the lawn chair, swiveling the camera or zooming in and out, and switching the focus from duck to duck.

NEW DUCK: MARBLED TIGERS EYE

The only thing that changes in your Vaporwave island paradise is the duck-shaped meter in the upper right corner, which gradually fills up as time passes. You have no control over how fast or how slow the duck meter fills. When it is filled up, a toy duck will fall from the sky into the pool, joining the other ducks freely bobbing around, as ducks are wont to do.

NEW DUCK: LEOPARD PRINT

As I write this, I have started a new save and have the game on in the background on my laptop screen. Every time a new duck joins the party, I feel the need to document it like David Attenborough on Planet Earth.

“Here, we observe the common rubber duck, floating undisturbed in its natural habitat, perhaps searching for a mate, or pondering the meaning of life...”

But apart from this strange duck-fueled rapture, in which I eagerly await for a new duck to grace my presence, there isn’t really anything to do in this game, which sets it apart from what I usually play.

NEW DUCK: NEGATIVE BATTERY CHARGE

Take Baldur’s Gate 3, for example, which is a game that I have sunk an embarrassing amount of time into. In this Dungeons and Dragons adventure, you play as a character who has had a parasite forced behind their eye, which will turn them into a tentacled alien monster if they don’t find a cure. You pick up a team of talented fighters and magic users along your journey to find a healer. Eventually, you save the world from a race of ruthless aliens. There’s a ticking clock. There are a hundred side quests you can choose to embark on to increase your power or to learn more about the game world. So, because there’s tension, emotional stakes, and literally hundreds of hours of things to do, I think objectively I can say that it’s a good game.

But Placid Plastic Duck Simulator is... well, nothing.

NEW DUCK: RED KNIGHT

There is nowhere to go, except for a small corner of what appears to be a tropical island resort. You are cornered by a grey concrete wall with holes cut out like a slice of Swiss cheese, and another equally blank wall decorated with Grecian marble columns. There’s a single door set into this wall, but it’s locked with a keypad that (as of writing this) is impossible to open. On the other side of the pool, there are two floaties that you, as a voyeur without a body, cannot use. A small slide extends from the main pool down to a secondary, smaller pool, which is side by side with the ocean and separated only by a small lawn.

NEW DUCK: GREEN

There is no indication of how you got here in this manufactured utopia, or why you’re here, or how long you’re here for. There’s just ducks.

In fact, it’s hard to classify this as a game, or even a “simulator,” as the title suggests. You have no agency. This is the equivalent of closely monitoring a Windows desktop saver. (I did this as a child. So maybe it was destiny?)

The sky slowly changes from light orange sherbet to neon pink and dusky blue. A plane flies overhead. Lights blink on inside the pool, yellow against the glassy teal tiles. An ad comes on the radio in a language you do not recognize.

NEW DUCK: BLACK AND WHITE GRID

This is probably the reason why people love going on tropical vacations. There is a kind of quiet joy in sitting by a pool with fuck all to do. You don’t always need an objective to be happy; you don’t need to stay busy in order to be doing something productive with your time. Life will wait for you. You can stop, and breathe.

NEW DUCK: YELLOW SUBMARINE

Night falls. The stars are out, and there are so many more than you can see from your own apartment window.

NEW DUCK: LED STRIPS

There’s a joy in video games that’s hard to pull off in other media. It adds an extra level of personality; it’s music, it’s noise, it’s visuals, and it’s you. Video games cannot exist without a you. The ducks in this world would not miraculously appear without your presence.

NEW DUCK: SPARKLY EYES

If I was watching a video of a bunch of plastic ducks falling into a pool, I’d probably think, Huh, okay, cool, I guess. But the video game aspect of Placid Plastic Duck Simulator adds another desire to the mix: the compulsion to collect and “complete” the game.

Obviously, not all people who play games care about completing them 100%. Often, game developers will hide secret achievements around their levels, or add harder difficulty modes, so there’s more replayability and an extra challenge for the people who want to see every single aspect of their game.

NEW DUCK: 8 BALL

You can see this a little bit in Placid Plastic Duck Simulator; you can get various achievements if you collect a certain number of ducks or click on certain ducks at just the right time. But you don’t get anything in return. There is no hidden lore to reward you for waiting.

And that’s what this game is: waiting. It’s forcing the player to sit down and swallow the biggest fucking chill pill of their life. In a world where movement and action and scrolling and seeing and consuming is key, here you wait for the ducks to come to you. It’s fate. Destiny. And when they’re there, they don’t demand anything from you. The pool is there. The music is there. What more could a toy duck need to be happy?

What would make you happy?

NEW DUCK: CHEESE

Sometimes, there is no point. There is no secret message. The world does not exist for you to change it. The sun will move across the sky. The radio will play. The ocean will swell and sigh. The ducks will fall one by one into illuminated chlorinated water and you will finally, finally, realize that this is exactly what you needed. That this is enough.

You are enough, because you exist, and you experience.

NEW DUCK: RED

Placid Plastic Duck Simulator is not a game. It’s not good or bad. It’s just fucking ducks, dude.