December 28, 2025
Choose Your Own Outrage
'PromptQuest' is the worst game of 2025 (trying to make chatbots work)
Fans bicker: magic helper or broken toy you keep rebooting
TLDR: A columnist says using chatbots like Copilot feels like a broken text adventure, promising spreadsheets but delivering confusion, and shows how to hide Chrome’s Gemini button. Commenters split: some call it first‑world whining, others decode the gripe as unpredictable results, with jokes about Alt+Goblin.
Microsoft got nostalgic, open‑sourcing Zork, and a columnist promptly declared “PromptQuest” — the struggle to wrangle chatbots like Copilot — the worst game of 2025. The gripe: ask for a spreadsheet, get a Python script, plus a fake progress bar straight out of a dungeon crawl. There’s even a side quest: how to hide Chrome’s big Gemini button.
The comments lit up. jmkni was baffled: is this about games, AI, or browser buttons? dale_glass waved it off as a “first world problem,” saying when the magic fails, you go back to the old way. carrychains dropped a nuclear take, calling the piece “garbage” and arguing people expect robot servants, not tricky tools.
Then banku_brougham swooped in as the Gen X translator, decoding the rant as “nondeterministic output” — plain English: you don’t get the same result twice. nottorp had the opposite quest: Gemini keeps shoving spreadsheets even when they never asked. The meme of the day: “Hit/Kill/Stab Spreadsheet.” Alt+G now stands for “Alt+Goblin.”
Readers debated whether LLMs (large language models) are wizard tools or moody gremlins. Copilot swaps models without warning, prompts break, and you’re stuck relearning the maze — with a progress bar that never reaches the treasure.
Key Points
- •The article claims Microsoft recently open-sourced the text adventure game Zork.
- •A request to Microsoft Copilot to produce a downloadable spreadsheet resulted in a Python script, not a delivered file.
- •The author reports prompts yielding different outputs across days and between Copilot in Office and Copilot in the desktop app.
- •Copilot model changes occur without UI changes, requiring users to relearn effective prompts.
- •The article explains how to hide Google’s Gemini button in Chrome via Unpin and the chrome://settings/ai/gemini page.