What SysAdmin Crisis is
A terminal simulation about being the person on call at three in the morning.
Last updated:
Terminal games are usually about breaking in. You are the intruder, the screen is green, and the fiction is that typing fast makes you dangerous. SysAdmin Crisis puts you on the other side of that screen: you are the person holding the pager when something falls over at 03:00, and nothing about the night is adversarial. The servers are not your enemy. They are just loaded, hot, full, or waiting on a lock.
The shape of a night
You run a small fleet — named machines like web-01, db-01, lb-01 — from
a single terminal. Logs scroll. Metric bars move. Somewhere in that stream a
line appears that does not belong, and the whole game is the distance between
noticing it and understanding it.
A shift starts at 00:00 and ends at 08:00. In real time that is roughly ten minutes. Survive to sunrise and you are graded; lose the fleet and the shift is a failure.
What you actually do
| Read | Log lines carry a timestamp and a subsystem tag. The signature of an incident is in the text, not in a popup. |
| Diagnose | Confirm the guess before acting. top shows processes, netstat shows connections, df shows disks. |
| Type | The fix is a command, not a menu item. The syntax is gamified Unix and the command names are English in every language. |
Where to go next
If you have never played, the night shift explains the clock, the win condition and the way a shift ends. If you have played a few nights and want to know why your grade is what it is, start with the game loop.