LORE AND DISORDER

asily the best reason to play with bots is that it gives you full’s engrossing backstory from terminal logs. Without spoiling too much, the lore involves a global pandemic (see Post Script for discussion of real-world parallels), nasty corporations, and a long-buried artefact it probably wasn’t a good idea to uncover. It sounds like a mishmash of ideas from and , but fashions something distinctive from the fragments. The writing is also cleverly entwined with the task design – you’ll find a log complaining about the nonautomation of security scans and data entry, for example. If these activities are left to human hands, the author notes, “our operative fail rate will skyrocket”. Our time with the game certainly bears this out.