In the mobile game Airplane Chefs, the player is a flight attendant rushing to microwave as much food as possible and serve it, just as efficiently, on a commercial jet filled with demanding passengers.
Hunting for bugs in this game is the job of Inha Kushnir, a member of the quality assurance team at Nordcurrent, the Lithuanian company that created and markets Airplane Chefs and a handful of other titles. Sitting in front of a desktop computer in Nordcurrent’s surprisingly quiet Vilnius office, in a neighborhood that is a jumble of glass corporate towers and residential housing, Kushnir spent a recent afternoon looking for programming flaws as her online avatar zapped pizzas and loaded them onto trolley carts. The work is absorbing, which makes it a good way to focus on something other than why she’s in Vilnius and how she got here.
"Whenever I think about work,” she said during a break, "I stop thinking about what is happening in Odesa.”