Book and Volume

"This Web edition of Book and Volume is is enabled by Matthew Russotto's ZPlet interpreter. This offers a quick idea of what this interactive fiction is like. Downloading the story file and an interpreter (outside The Iowa Review Web) is the only real way to engage with Book and Volume. An interactive fiction written in Inform and running on the Z-Machine, Book and Volume 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." -- from author's description, Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two