Duncan created three influential
CD-ROM computer games for young girls in the second half of the 1990s:
Chop Suey,
Smarty, and
Zero Zero. These games were designed as alternatives to her traditionally male-oriented field where the few "girls' games" created embodied a "model of boy-catching self-fulfillment". Duncan spoke out against market-tested girls' games characterized by an "earnest blandness" and a "perfunctory feminism [like] slapping the pink bow on
Pacman". All three games created by Duncan are story-based and revolve around search and discovery. 1995's
Chop Suey is an interactive storybook, where two young girls explore the town of
Cortland, Ohio.
Smarty (1996) tells the story of the titular young girl's visit to her Aunt Olive for the summer—there she hosts a spelling radio show, explores small-town life, and visits a mysterious dime store.
Chop Suey was co-created with
Monica Gesue and narrated by then-unknown author
David Sedaris. Gesue strived to design a "colorful, warm, and bright" game that contrasted with the way "a lot of
computer graphics at the time were really icky". At the time, she sought out
David Sedaris—then an unknown writer after hearing him on local public radio. Duncan tracked Sedaris down and asked him to narrate the script for the game. Duncan spoke frequently of a proposed game for older girls called
Apocalipstick. She described it as something that "moves like
Doom", and "involves survivors of a cataclysmic destructive event who find the few films that remain, which happen to be solely swanky thirties
Thin Man-style flicks...[and attempt to recreate] life based on the Stork Club and Fortuny and the weapons of glamour". In 2000, Duncan created
The History of Glamour, a digitally animated hour-long video. Writing for
Salon, Matthew Debord described the work as "a merciless satire of New York's incestuous '90s cultural moment: fashion, art, celebrity and various downtown style tribes converge and are shredded for our delectation". In the same article, Duncan noted that the work is influenced by the play
Love, Loss, and What I Wore by Nora and Delia Ephron.
The History of Glamour was included in the 2000
Whitney Biennial. Duncan also published frequently. She wrote articles for publications like
Artforum,
Slate,
Feed Magazine, and
Bald Ego, and published her own blog called
The Wit of the Staircase. At her blog, Duncan listed her interests as "film, philology, Vietnam War memorabilia, rare and discontinued perfume, book collecting,
philately, card and coin tricks,
futurism,
Napoleon Bonaparte, the history of electricity."
Legacy Duncan's
CD-ROMs are widely celebrated.
Chop Suey has the broadest reputation. Upon its release,
Entertainment Weekly named it 1995's "CD-ROM of the Year" and it was generally praised by reviewers. In 2012 in
Motherboard, video games critic Jenn Frank called
Chop Suey "timeless", and celebrated its bravery in representing "the criminally underrepresented: that is, the wild imagination of some girl aged 7 to 12". Because her games were designed on CD-ROMs to be played on
operating systems that are "no longer possible to install on modern computers", the games were for many years inaccessible to most people. In 2015,
Rhizome, a nonprofit that focuses on
new media art, restored Duncan's games by making the "original, unaltered" games playable in a
web browser with fundraising assistance via
Kickstarter. In 2023,
ScummVM announced support for
Chop Suey as part of their effort to support
Macromedia Director games. == Personal life ==