The Other Pong 98
theodp writes "Before there was Pong, there was Ping-Pong. Table tennis began in 19th-century Victorian England as a parlor game for the upper-middle class, with cigar box lids used as paddles. Today, as BusinessInsider half-joked, federal law requires all tech startups to have a functional ping pong table. Photographer Alec Soth discusses his love of the game in a NY Times interview and shares some vintage photos of the sport from his new limited-edition book Ping Pong. So, why do people — especially lots of computer programmers — get obsessed with Ping-Pong? Table tennis is 'a way to do a physical sport that has actual athletic qualities but is kind of contained,' explains Soth. 'There's a real mental element to it. It's not chess, but your brain is engaged. It's a break from neuroses.'" As workplace stress relief games go, a ping-pong table is also a lot easier to carry than an air hockey set-up or a bowling alley.
ping-pong and Thorazine (Score:4, Interesting)
My psychiatric training, including playing ping-pong with patients, was invaluable at an early start-up. Being good enough to *lose*, at will, while making the other person feel as if they'd earned the win was as much of an art form as playing with patients overdosed on Thorazine. They can get "tardive diskinesea", where physical motions are profoundly delayed from when they're intended, and aiming the ball to where their paddle will wind up, so that the game can continue cheefully, was the kind of skill needed to realize you *have* to leave bugs in your code so the system architect will feel empowered by fixing them, and will stay the hell out of insisting that you rewrite everything to some made-up-on-the-spot new scheme that you've already tried and know damn well didn't work 20 years ago, either.
All this tech-hipster crap aside... (Score:4, Interesting)