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Mechanic Monday: Is this a ?

Hahahaha I don’t actually have time to do this today and yet! It’s Mechanic Monday!
Today’s a conjecture on something that I don’t even know exists? It’s based on my understanding of what a program can do, and spins wildly off into hypothesis territory from there.  Anyway at my day job everyone has at least two screens.  It’s that kind of workplace.  Three is becoming the norm, I’ve seen people with five.  Which seems aggressively excessive.  And I see a weird number of people using programs that look like they’re for coding? Considering very few people here work in any capacity on anything that would involve code? But it means I’ve long flirted with the idea of playing a MUD right out in the open on my desktop.  Just fire up Darkmists or some other telnet-based text game, and who would know it wasn’t me tappity-tap-tap-tapping away on important company business (once the ASCII art intro finishes scrolling of course)? I already do some shorthand things - the main reason that I don’t play games at work is that I spend a lot of it doing writing, be it for games or my theatre.  Sometimes I hide hours of writing by doing it in Outlook so it looks as though I’m just composing a complex work email.  And lately I’ve been thinking about Excel.
Excel is, in a sense, programmable, right? I mean you can allow user inputs that automatically generate outputs, and you can link those outputs together to form chains.  Right? If that’s the case, here’s my idea:

Excel-lent Bandersnatch
In BINDERSNITCH, you open an Excel Workbook and are confronted with an introduction and page after page of hashed gibberish and nonsense.  However, by following the clues and changing or entering certain codewords into various cells of the spreadsheet, you can cause the gibberish to resolve into clear stories that lead you on to the next part of the puzzle.  Some puzzles will have you go back and tweak the programming of certain cells in previously solved puzzles to generate a different result.  Some puzzles will allow a branching of the narrative.  Depending on how you work through the story, different endings are possible.

Is that how Excel works? I think so, but I’m not sure! I thought of this because I’ve been working as a writer on an escape-room-esque experience - which I really need to do some work on, on top of the other things I have to do today! So avidi-avidi-avidi-a-that’s all folks! Catch you next week for a more coherent MECHANIC MONDAY.

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