“Calm down. All you have to do is write a thousand words and everything will be fine. And you have all day, except it's already noon.” Thus begins Violet, a text-based interactive computer game that has the player take on the role of a stressed-out graduate student with a dissertation deadline and a beleaguered beau who is threatening to flee the relationship — and the continent.

Violet is the academic equivalent of Zork, the first popular work of interactive fiction, written by a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientists from 1977 to 1979. Zork was considered both an amazing innovation and a massive time-waster. The same could be said for Violet, which won the 14th annual interactive fiction competition. Zork was deemed innovative because it created a fictitious world that a player could navigate by typing in sentences. Violet, the creation of Jeremy Freese, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, is unusual in that the player takes on a mundane role, plagued by banal real-world irritations.

So, does Violet have any utility? One commentator on an education-technology blog sponsored by The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com) doesn't see the appeal. “What a redundant concept. Video games are a distraction from dissertations and research, now there is a video game about our dissertations and research. Is there an option to play a video game to escape?”

Maybe the best audience for Violet isn't graduate students with their own dissertation deadlines, but prospective students, who can play the game to help them decide if they really want to 'go there'. Violet could also be required playing for administrators, department heads, university presidents and deans, as both a reality check and a sort of graduate-student empathy builder.

Perhaps one change is required to make the game more widely accessible — something that honours its interactive predecessor as well as its affectionately geeky potential players. One name comes easily to mind: Dork ...