Book and Volume

An interactive fiction written in Inform and running on the Z-Machine, Book and Volumes simulates an eventful day in a near-present factory town. The interactor is not offered adventure, monsters to defeat, or treasures to find, but a chance to perform the routine tasks of an information-technology worker. As Brian Kerr wrote, "It's about a sysadmin in the weird, charming cyber-Gotham of nTopia who spends the last working day of his/her/its life rebooting servers and reacting to frantic pages from an unseen supervisor. ('Net extremely hoseled. Engine team being hideously masticated by this outage. Demo rapidly approaching. Get to the cages. Reboot the servers. Hasten. Do not rest. Please. All five of them.') What’s the game really about? Knut, a resident of nTopia, pegs it: 'Reality. Illusion. Theme is reality versus illusion. Must discern reality. And illusion.

(Source: Author's description from the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2)