Sometimes it feels like the line between work and video games is blurred. The story and graphics might not be comparable, but the gameplay mechanics feel like they are. You do activity X for 10 minutes to train skill Y. You have to click this, this, and this before the boss Z punishes you. Congrats: you leveled up! Now do it again, but harder.

A new game from design professor Pippin Barr called It Is As If You Were Doing Work (play it for free in your browser here) perfectly encapsulates this feeling. It dumps players in a bootleg Windows 95 environment where they have to send emails and click dialog boxes to climb the work hierarchy. Nothing really makes any sense, but work long enough and you get to have some time off to play a game or listen to some music. What luxury!

Barr says he built the game as an exploration of a possible future, where automation has destroyed most of our current jobs. “The game poses as an application that humans who have been put out of work by robots and AI can play as a way to recapture the sense they once had of doing work and being productive,” writes Barr. “It's a kind of semi-condescending service offered by this new world to those of us who can't deal with it.”

In that regard it’s a little like VR smash-hit Job Simulator, although the end-effect is a little more uncanny. Personally, I’ve been playing It Is As If You Were Doing Work on the same computer I use to do work during work hours, and I don’t quite know what’s real anymore. Time to hit this button marked “publish” and see if I get any promotion points.