Mr Jolstad and his co-founder Ilya Kruglenko - who first met each other in Moscow during the 1990s while selling second-hand Australian telephones to the Russians - initially created Magic Desktop to protect their own children from getting tangled up in an unpleasant web.
The linearity of the core story becomes clear during a second playthrough, but here the relatively short duration of each episode is a strength: it is possible to take different sides and pick different fights to elicit different responses over the episode without finding the situational repetition tedious over these short stretches.