You are a director filming the Marx brothers, and you have to herd all of them together before you can film them.
There are tons of independent NPCs, all doing all sorts of things, running from each other, fighting each other, etc.
As a technical piece, it's brilliant; as a game, it's less than enjoyable. Even playing with the walkthrough is hard; I recommend dowloading the zip containing the source and transcript, reading the transcripts, and just playing around with the actual game.