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# You Up?: What to Play, August 21
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/what-to-play-august-21-2026/
- Published: 2026-08-22T01:21:28.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-28T20:19:39.000Z
- Description: Just a little twist of the truth.
- Author: Jamin Warren
- Tags: Playlist, What to Play Now, work, data, bosses, chartjunk

![Pocket Boss reveal card](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pl285-reveal-card.gif)

A little workplace romance?

## Playlist 285

## Pocket Boss (2025)

## Mario von Rickenbach

### Play Time: 40 minutes

[Play Pocket Boss](https://pocketboss.ch/?ref=killscreen.com)

Playlist is normally *members-only* every Friday. We're unlocking this one for everyone — enjoy, and if you want a new one in your inbox every week, memberships start at $5/month with a free first month.

Invariably, if you've worked in any office capacity, you've been asked to give your personal phone number "just for emergencies." Don't do it. It's inevitably a trap, and I'm saying this as a former employer of dozens. While *I* never texted my employees unless it was an emergency (I swear!), the allure of 24/7 access to a direct report's personal time is simply too irresistible for some. Some countries, recognizing the propensity for managerial addiction, have outlawed contacting your employees through what are called "right to disconnect" laws.

The unnamed boss in [Mario von Rickenbach](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/mario-von-rickenbach/)'s 2025 game *Pocket Boss* does not live in one of those countries. They are having none of it. You are there, at all times, to answer every single beck and call—every last-minute request ("Fire Drill!"), every desperate plea for approval, and every late-night missive ("You up?"). It's a game about work, but more about the inanity of presence and the illusion that you're doing anything more than moving dots around on a board. And of course, you wait for a reply at times, menaced by those three SMS dots "...".

Each text from your boss presents a particular issue of inconvenient information, and your solutions would make Arthur Andersen himself blush. Shareholder value is a mess, so you rejigger the dots so that it's always rising. Satisfaction with management is mixed, so you adjust the perspective to fit a more comfortable narrative. Global revenue looks a bit tepid, so why not spice it up? And the main tool in von Rickenbach's arsenal is the very point of contact between you and the machine world: your cursor. And so, with each new challenge, you tweak, toss, cajole, caress, pump, deflate, defend, align, pop, and catapult data to form an arrangement that will satisfy your boss and their boss and their boss's boss and so on right up to the board and the shareholders. Everyone wins.

![Dragging the Profits curve into a better shape](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pl285-profits.gif)

Von Rickenbach was originally trained as an architect before moving to games, and his work uniquely emphasizes interaction-forward systems. *Kids*, *Plug & Play*, and *Drei* were made with animator Michael Frei ([a past Playlist selection](https://www.killscreen.com/what-to-play-this-weekend-april-30th/)). "For people who have more mechanics-based games that have a very consistent mechanic, it may be easier to do your own thing because you always have some internal structure that is very clear," he told me about his approach to design. It's about finding a pleasurable interaction and working it through to the end.

Inside *Pocket Boss*, there are two critiques, one aesthetic and one profound. In his 2003 essay "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," information designer Edward Tufte unloads on the rigidity and uselessness of one of the world's most popular programs. The principal gripe is the "foreshortening of evidence and thought" in PowerPoint that takes complex ideas and forces them into a format that abandons narrative and is filled with what he calls "chartjunk." "PowerPoint comes with a big attitude," he writes. "Other than video games, not many computer programs have attitudes. \[PowerPoint\] reduces the intellectual level of the content passing through the program." While the color work and buoyancy of *Pocket Boss* is certainly more pleasurable than whatever Windows XP presentation Tufte was struggling with, the bulk of our game is, in fact, about making charts. By definition, these are not serious efforts, and that your boss is texting you at all hours to produce absolute slop only drives Tufte's critique further. "Formats, sequencing, and cognitive approach should be decided by the character of the content and what is to be explained, not by the limitations of the presentation technology," Tufte screams. In fact, he draws a line between the use of the tool and the *Challenger* shuttle explosion, whose failure is blamed, in part, on a single PowerPoint presentation that undersold its risks.

![Bending the Earnings bars until they behave](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pl285-earnings.gif)

In *Pocket Boss*, the tragedy is less direct, but that in itself is more damning. It's only a little fudge, you might say as you unfragment your customer base. But behind that little action, a world of malfeasance awaits. It seems so small, and von Rickenbach makes the actions so pleasurable to disguise that you never really know what kind of company you're working for. When a recession hits, your boss rejoices, noting that revenue will go up.

It's not a critique of capitalism, per se, but a reflection of the amoral callousness of contemporary business life. In 2024, writer Dan Davies coined the term "accountability sink" for a system so opaque and complicated that no one can actually become complicit. "For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system," he writes. Am I selling baby formula? Or am I in private equity and each adjustment costs thousands of jobs? No matter; I go on my merry way, quietly adjusting information one bar chart at a time. Or as *The Wire*'s violent cop turned high school teacher Roland Pryzbylewski quipped about funny numbers: "Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the stats and majors become colonels."

And that is the crux of it. Promotion after promotion comes your way as you quietly lie with data. It's just a little twist of the truth. No big deal. After all, I'm next in line to become a boss myself.

![A line that only ever goes up](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pl285-line.gif)

Before you go 

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