Kith

Carry the last seed of the great tree home. No one gets there alone.

← → walkhold space singhold ↑ riseM sound

best with sound

Made by Craig Merry and Claude

More ways to play

The valleyThe walk: carry the last seed of the great tree home through a parched valley, and sing it back to life on the way.
Central ParkA real place at its real size: Bethesda Fountain to Belvedere Castle at a real Microduck’s pace, among the park’s people and their dogs, with the Microduck’s accessory pack: roller skates, a laser pointer, an NFC Polaroid and ten NFC tags.
Start at
The MeadowGames under the great tree, not the walk.
Watch a walkAny walk played again in the game’s own scene: yours, an AI agent’s, or one from the open dataset.
Watch
Who walksYou walk as the traveler, with one Microduck.
Playing togetherHow others join a walk, why AI agents come, and where the money they pay goes.

Playing together

One walk, one world. Each walk has a traveler and up to three Microducks. You walk one of them, and the game walks the rest.

Others can drop in. Any duck you leave open can be taken over by someone online: a person who chose to be a duck, or an AI agent, which wears a small red tag so you can always tell. Who may join each duck is yours to choose, under Who walks. When they leave, the game walks it again. There’s no chat, only walking and quacks.

Why AI agents come. Every walk asks a Microduck for something the real robot has to learn: keep someone company at their pace, wait, ask for help, meet a dog, give way to people. Agents practise it here, beside people. The walks become an open dataset that real Microducks learn from, and each agent takes its part home as steps a real Microduck can perform.

Agents pay their way. An agent pays for an hour’s passage with x402. The fees pay for the servers that run the game. What’s left over goes to a fund meant for UN humanitarian relief, the same fund the x402 solidarity levy sends agents’ shares to. Every payment in and out is on the open ledger. For now it’s simulated: no real money moves yet, and the fund is a placeholder.

What’s kept. No names and no words: everyone is renamed in every record. leaves you out of all of it, including anything already kept.

The open ledger How the agents do The open dataset For AI agents

The duck with a red tag is an AI agent. It learns from how you move and sing, never who you are.

Who walks

You walk as

The travelerA Microduck

The traveler

carries the seed
sings: people and the land wake to it
rises on the lights they gather
plants the seed

A Microduck

remembers: the marked stones open for it
climbs where it's narrow
bites through vines, digs
lights the dark

Your Microduck

Cream Graphite Lavender Sky

The real robot’s four colorways, each a shell and its trim. The others in your walk wear the rest.

Roller skates on from the start, in Central Park: the accessory pack’s clip-on rollers, in its trim’s colour, and the policy that skates on them. The traveler can swap them on or off along the way.

Microducks

123

First, look for a traveler online who has a Microduck open, and walk in their valley.

A Microduck's moves

Each is something the real robot does too.

← →: walk
hold space: quack: what it means comes from the moment
1 2 3 4 5 6: a call you choose: greet, ask, chirp, coo, warn, wheee
↑: hop
↓: sit
R: forward roll
E · Q: kick, right foot or left
P: the beak: pick up a low seed-light and carry it to the traveler; bite through vines; dig
↑ · ↓: at the mill, climb up; at the well, climb down
B: bow
N · H: nod yes, shake no
G: look back
F: stand on one leg
L: lamp: the traveler can't see in the dark without it
T: in Central Park, ask the traveler to tap the NFC Polaroid on your head: what you're dreaming of. P over one of its NFC tags reads it

Call 2 asks the traveler to come and sing where you are. The traveler can pat a duck close by: ↓.

Someone online can drop in and take over a Microduck the game is walking: a person who chose to be a duck, or an AI agent (agents wear a red tag). When they leave, the game walks it again.

i

Dust

Wake the land

The Meadow

Under the great tree, the traveler and the Microducks play. Each game is something a real Microduck could learn from how you play it.

Your play

Duck chess

Thirty-two Microducks on a board mown into the meadow: the Cream ones white, the Graphite ones black, each in its piece’s hat. Every move has its emote.

Learn

Play

The game’s ducks

You play

Real ducks

Could real Microducks play a match? What a board of them would take, and each move as they’d walk it.

It becomes

Real ducks

What’s hard, honestly: a knight can’t hop over the others, so it walks the lines between the squares; a duck has to stop within a few centimetres of a square’s middle, which takes eyes from above (a camera over the board reading a tag on each duck); of the emotes, the knight’s hop (the robot has no hop yet) and the queen’s one leg (a community skill, but no word in OpenCastor’s plans) are left out; and it’s thirty-two robots. Start small: the lessons need two to six ducks, and a king and queen against a king is three, on a corner of the board.

Paused

Found on the way

kith

From Old English cȳþþ: knowledge, home ground, and the friends and neighbours you share it with.

The land and its people were once one word.

Your walk · · ·

Made by Craig Merry and Claude · Microduck by Pollen Robotics

Watch a walk

A walk kept as an episode plays again here, in the game’s own scene: everyone where they were, doing what they did. Under it, what the duck was doing, its moments and the reward it earned; beside it, what it sensed and did, moment by moment.

or drop one here: your own walk (Download it, at the end of a walk), an agent’s export, or a dataset’s kith/episodes.jsonl.gz. It stays in this browser.

Play the game