Games in the Workplace? 495
Anonymous Coward asks: "Back in the day it was not uncommon for games to contain 'Escape Buttons' and other commands to quickly exit a game. These games appealed to the Geek at Work as he could fill in his Friday afternoon and as soon as he heard his boss' shoes approaching, he could escape from the third dungeon and return to his spreadsheet. Yet games today are not allowing such activities to occur. Most games are requiring so much dedicated action that it is impossible to play a game and still switch back and forth without long delays. Where are the games for the worker?"
More like: Where's the Work? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why was it I went to college again?
Re:More like: Where's the Work? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:More like: Where's the Work? (Score:4, Informative)
I was just reading a history of the potato that made an interesting observation: how rare and new wages that allow one to get more than just food and a tiny bit extra really are. The debates during the 17th through 19th centuries in England and Ireland about the potato involved questions of morality: by introducing a subsistance crop that was cheaper to produce and had little market value, it drove down the price of labor to where the peasants had less market clout than before. The enclosure act already had reduced the food-gathering options of the peasantry.
The realities of the situation were pretty complicated: there were landlords, reformers, Irish, and English on both sides of the potato debate; it ended up involving Malthus and Ricardo, for whom the potato had symbolic force (for Malthus, it represented the minimal human, the man of appetites who would, despite all enculturation, follow those appetites to the detriment of the common good; for Ricardo, it represented a breakdown of the market economy by being a foodstuff outside the market.) Actually, I don't know what this has to do with the post I'm replying to. I'm kind of delerious: I just got Virtua Fighter 4 and Pac-Man World 2, and haven't been sleeping much. But it was a very interesting article.
At my work (Score:5, Interesting)
They allow the night crew to occupy themselves with games. Often they go a hour or so without any calls so it gets dull.
We have 15 people employed to work from 10pm to 6am and they take maybe 8 calls that last for 10 minutes each at most.
What do they do??
Well they each have several high level characters in diablo II. The work place took the stance that if it doesn't interfer and you can quickly jump back to your desktop to actually work they don't mind. Many games they have tried to see which ones work and some simply wont let you alt-tab out of it. Those games are not played and others are. Also the option to use the computer besides you is used if that computer is empty.
I wish more work places would take this example.
Re:At my work (Score:2)
this is why the economy is so bad now (Score:4, Insightful)
Letting your staff waste their free time 7 hours (or whatever) a night of vid game playing is a corporate strategy that will eventually land your company out of business, and all of your happy nightshift guys out of jobs.
One of four things will happen to you.
1) your client will tighten their belt, and go with a strategy that only has the 3 people working, and deal with the reduced customer service level.
2) your client will hire a smaller group of people to handle the business themselves, and bring it inhouse
3) another company who staffs 15 people will make a bid to only charge your customer for 4 or 5 people, and your customer will leave.
4) your customer that is stupid enough to pay you for bloat staff will go out of business
How does #3 work ? By making your call center staff DO SOME WORK while not taking calls. If there literally isn't anything for them to do but sit around and wait, then you have bloat in other areas.
Who is your customer ? The firm I work for is large and has our fingers into all sorts of stuff, I am sure we could service them better than you are
`let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the smurf`
Re:this is why the economy is so bad now (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:this is why the economy is so bad now (Score:2, Insightful)
This assumes the client can figure out how to manage support themselves. If they knew how to do that the first time, they wouldn't be outsourcing.
3) another company who staffs 15 people will make a bid to only charge your customer for 4 or 5 people, and your customer will leave.
No, they'll make a bid to charge for 15 people cheaper. The client believes they need 15.
4) your customer that is stupid enough to pay you for bloat staff will go out of business
Overstaffing a callcenter is far from the dumbest thing they're probably doing. Companies that understaff are probably more likely to go under, as all their customers leave.
Re:this is why the economy is so bad now (Score:2, Informative)
Not only will their customers, but the employees that work there will also. I work in a call center and I am almost ready to quit my job because of that reason.
Re:this is why the economy is so bad now (Score:4, Insightful)
I know of one Chicago ISP that markets itself as being high-end. Not in a geek way, but in a customer service way. They're a little pricier, actually last I checked they were MSN/AOL priced for dial-ups and they have a call center just like the one described. Who would you rather give you 20 dollars a month to? 90-minute wait times to a stressed call center or to a place that gives its workers some leeway.
Lastly, how much do you think night-time tech support workers make? Trust me, it ain't enough to bankrupt any company and your customers will be thankful they can get a human voice on the phone who knows more than what the "troubleshooter script" says at 4:30am.
Re:this is why the economy is so bad now (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think cutting back on customer service is a good way to save money, think again. It's one of the reasons Qwest is going down in flames.
Re:this is why the economy is so bad now (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, Apple came fairly close to going out of business because of a severe lack of work ethic. I worked there in around 1992, and I found the place to be disgusting for anyone like myself who wanted to actually accomplish something. You could never find engineers at their desks, they worked 10, 4 & 2's (That's where you get to work at 10am, leave at 4am, and have a 2 hour lunch break in the middle).
That lack of work ethic showed itself to the public in a string of poorly conceived ideas that were poorly implemented -- almost destroying the trust in Apple's fanatic user base.
It wasn't until Jobs came back and started handing out pink slips left and right to all of the dead wood, that things started to change for the better.
As an Apple insider, I find your analogy to be without merit, and actually almost making the opposite point of the one you were attempting to make.
BG and Hiding windows from prying eyes... (Score:5, Informative)
First, Baldur's Gate has a great option... in the Options tab you can set BG to run in a window instead of full-screen. This can kill the playability on older PCs but BG isn't an action game so it's still a viable option.
Also many games support the (on windows) ALT+ENTER hotkey to switch between normal and full screen mode (like if you're watching a DVD or MPEG you can switch this way).
But whatever your game of choice, if, unlike at Kasmiur's, your workplace does not allow games, you might want to look into an insanely useful program called "Watchcat." First of all, it's FREEWARE. The program, either by clicks or hotkeys, will hide any or all applications currently running... so if you're a Solitaire freak and you hear someone coming up, smack that hotkey and not only is the game off the desktop, it's off of the taskbar too. This program ROCKS.
Here's a small article about the program on Tech TV [techtv.com]
Re:At my work (Score:3, Funny)
Excuse me, do you maybe need a 16th employee? I haven't played Diablo II yet, but I learn very fast. I have a long experience in RTS's and FPS's, as well as with MMORPG's. I also know the older technology like Sierra and LucasArts early software very well, some people say I'm an expert in that field. I am very laborious, I can play video games for 10 hours non-stop for very affordable prices. Learning new knowledge and skills is my hobby, when I was in primary school and in high school I learned how to play games all the time.
Yeah, tell me about it! Unfortunately most of my employers said that their companies need to be profitable or some other bullshit, greedy bastards! So anyway, where can I send my resume?
Re:At my work (Score:2)
The money that is being wasted is in the hardware sitting on the desk. They have systems that allow Diablo II to be played and the software needed to do business at the same time. It's your company's call, I just know if I was in charge, I'd be making different decisions.
Re:At my work (Score:2)
You can't have them vacuuming or dusting because they need to be at their desks, not to mention that they are professionals. Let them play, if the hardware can do it. If it can't, then let them read or something. Hell, board games wouldn't be out of line. As long as they answer their calls promptly, let them do whatever they need to to stay awake and alert.
Re:Fire some people (Score:2)
Ah - the secret is to.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ah - the secret is to.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ah - the secret is to.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ah - the secret is to.. (Score:3, Informative)
All open windows are minimized.
Perhaps its a new "feature."
Actually, this "new" feature has been in all Windows versions since 98, possibly even since 95. There's several more, like Windows + R (Run), Windows + E (Explorer), etc.
Re:Ah - the secret is to.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, you can have mIRC minimize to the system tray. AND you can change the icon it minimizes to. I just made up a blank grey square. Boss walks in, alt-space-m makes mIRC disappear - it's amazing how adept one gets at this
Considering how full of crap the average system tray is, a bit of blank space in it never aroused suspicions
Re:Ah - the secret is to.. (Score:3, Informative)
Alt-space-R - restores (unmaximises)
Alt-space-M - moves (use the cursor keys or mouse, enter or click to confirm)
Alt-space-S - sizes (cursor to grab edge, scroll in and out, enter to confirm)
Alt-space-X - maximises
Alt-space-C - closes. Yes, that's a destrictive shortcut next to another key, not bright...
This is saying there's a bunch of other keyboard shortcuts triggered by the Windows key. Off the top of my head:
Windows M - minimises all active windows.
Windows D - shows the desktop. Toggles.
Windows E - open windows explorer
Windows F - open Find Files
Windows R - open Run dialog
Windows Pause Break - opens System Properties
Windows F1 - opens Windows help.
There's probably more, they're just the ones I know
Long delay? (Score:2)
Re:Long delay? (Score:2)
>application calls my attention the only way to
>leave the game is to completely quit.
Or, of course, you can just alt-enter to window the game, then alt-tab to your heart's delight.
-l
The games are... (Score:2)
Anyway, Q3 or CS is unfeasible at work, part of the fun is the sound, which you cant enjoy at work, and the swearing and shouting and yelling.
We have a game afternoon. on fridays, after 'normal' working hours, everyone plops joined an officewide game of counterstrike. yelling across the office and cursing at the boss really relieve a lot of the stress built up during the week.
New game idea: Enron II (Score:5, Funny)
That's right, play games with spreadsheets. No need to switch the game off when your boss walks by. Hell, he may be a player, too.
Re:New game idea: Enron II (Score:5, Funny)
Re:New game idea: Enron II (Score:2)
Re:New game idea: Enron II (Score:5, Informative)
Open a new, empty spreadsheet. Select File menu->Save as... and then click the Publish-button. Choose Add Interactivity (or something like that), and save the file somewhere. Now open the file in Internet Explorer. You should see a spreadsheet inside the web-page. Scroll down to row number 2000 and column WC. While WC is selected, select the whole row 2000 (by clicking on the text that says 2000 at the right). Then, hold alt+ctrl+shift and press the office icon in the top left corner. The letter O drops an oil skid, H puts on headlights.
Now, this was directly from my memory. I'm not known for the best memory in the world, so search for Excel 2000 on www.eeggs.com and find the instructions there if it doesn't work.
Re:New game idea: Enron II (Score:3, Funny)
"You are in the depths of the catacombs at DeepDungeon:B10. You see passages leading to C10 and B9. Both passages are dark, and you can hear strange sounds from the direction of C10. Where do you want to go?"
<left arrow>
"You try to move to A10. That direction leads to a rock wall, and you are punished for your incompetence. The financial report you were working on has been deleted. Play again? (Y/n)"
Hmm... a *legal* way to get macro viruses onto machines?
- Jester
Not to be a jerk... (Score:5, Interesting)
psxndc
Re:Not to be a jerk... (Score:2)
That said, can't you convince your boss that a stress-relief game for 15 minutes is OK every few hours? Call it a "coffee break for your brain." Particularly if you spend most of the day hip-deep in code. Sheesh.
Re:Not to be a jerk... (Score:2)
A bunch of us tend to play games during our lunch hour. We normally play RTS types (TA rules!) but we're slowly working our way through Dungeon Siege at the moment. We've been playing just about every day since I started working there four years ago.
As long as I'm meeting my work commitments, I can do pretty much what I want, when I want. My boss knows that I also put in time nights and weekends when I'm behind, and that gaming time really isn't eating into my productivity.
BTW, I'm a senior firmware engineer at a fairly large corporation, not some yahoo killing time between flipping burgers. Ah, it's nice to work for a place where adults are actually treated as such...
(Oh, and I've turned my boss onto reading Slashdot, so I'm not going to catch too much grief for that, either.)
Also a couple of Work friendly games (Score:3, Informative)
Many of the NES and SNES emulators will run in windowed mode or will let you freeze the game and alt tab out of it.
Also there are a few emulators with network enabled so you can play multiplayer with other people.
Also Diablo II works good.
Destruction Zone a old tank combat game from the old days of 94(still quite fun to play)
feel free to add to the list.
Also I imagine many people at work wont be useding win98. they are forced to use something along the lines of Windows NT or 2K based upon thier job.
Re:Also a couple of Work friendly games (Score:2, Insightful)
I've had better luck getting most games to run under Win2k than I did with any version of Windows before that.
WinNT 4.0 and under were a different story though.
Re:Also a couple of Work friendly games (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Also a couple of Work friendly games (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Also a couple of Work friendly games (Score:2, Informative)
What a fun website. Me and some friends spent many hours playing a networked version of the game.
Suggestion (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Suggestion (Score:2)
Re:Suggestion (Score:5, Funny)
Boss: Hey, Jeff, Let me use your computer for an email - I left my laptop back in HQ.
Jeff the sys-admin: Ehhh
Boss (sitting down): Sorry to stop your working.
Jeff (smiling ironically): No problem.
Boss: What is this - Quarterly Expense Reports. Why would a Sys-Admin like you have anything to do with Quarterly Expense Reports?
Jeff: Errrr
Boss: Come to think of it - I thought Accounting was still preparing them in confidentiality.
Jeff: Errr
.
Boss: What's the meaning of this? You must that corporate spy from our rivals, MeAc Corp!
Jeff: Nononono
Boss: You're fired!
Re:Suggestion (Score:2)
Quake 3 Earnings Report?
True story (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Tiny Windows games for workers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Tiny Windows games for workers (Score:2, Funny)
<noscript> motherfucker, do you speak it?
Be honest, now (Score:2)
If you're trying to put off finishing the boring project that you've been staring at until your eyes glaze over, don't fire up a game. Do something intellectually stimulating.
Like reading slashdot. :-)
PQ (Score:4, Funny)
The other cool part is if I forget to switch back to the game, my character just keeps pluggin' away, on some sort of strange magickal "autopilot", which liberates me from having to pay attention that often.
Also, it's all online, and you can compete against up to 65,536 other players simultaneously. Can't beat that! Can you? Can you?!?
Why game at work anyway? (Score:4, Interesting)
I personally never game at work, but I do pursue other extra ciricular activities, like playing with the latest mozilla or kde builds, resurrecting old hardware (currently an 8mm tape library) and learning new programming languages.
Besides, the machines at my work don't have good enough graphics cards to play anything interesting anyway.
Re:Why game at work anyway? (Score:2, Informative)
There are some very interesting text games like Nethack [nethack.org] and GnuGo [gnu.org]. Both are free and run on several platforms. And without graphics you're less likely to get caught ;)
The way we got around it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The way we got around it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Our problem was with storage of the game so that it could be accessed by the computers in the lab. I was making a hobby out of finding places on the network to hide the game where we actually had write privileges. We had a big Novell network running all the systems, and it was amazing how many places we had write privileges. We started, of course, with storing it on the local systems, but that didn't last long. So we started finding all the little nooks on the network where we could store something. Naming and renaming directories. Making hidden directories.
Damn, I miss that time. Well, not really.
-Todd
Re:The way we got around it... (Score:5, Interesting)
It drove me nuts to get a call that half the machines in the NT lab weren't working only to find they had run out of disk-space from the 50 different installs in C:\TEMP of Warcraft. I ended up have to write something that used Perl to MD5 checksum things to find files and flag them.
And its not like we had a no games policy, since I had no issues with the massive Xpilot games that would take place, I just had an issue with pirated games and the lengths people would go to in screwing up a machine to get them to run.
And also, because sometimes I'd get complaints from students trying to finish projects at the end of a quarter, only to find the entire lab occupied with people Warcrafting away. You may need a break from studying (although, I'd say probably getting the heck out of the University would have been a better break than sitting in same computer lab you spend 90% of the rest of your time in) but you don't need it at the expense of someone elses time. And despite all the calls of "oh, we'll get off the machine if someone really needs it" that never seemed to happen without someone having to call in a lab monitor who had to call me or my boss in.
Re:The way we got around it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and we never did have a problem with people wanting to do work and not having a computer. At least not that I knew of (and as I said, I was one of a few people "responsible" for the games). Mostly because use game players were polite and understood that the games always came second.
It's interesting, though. For some reason, Bolo on the Macintosh side was more or less sanctioned. Not sure why.
-Todd
Re:The way we got around it... (Score:2, Funny)
Wrote a remote shutdown program that responded to ping and installed it in the labs with help from fellow classmates. The minute someone plays games, his PC would mysteriously shutdown.
What great fun
Re:The way we got around it... (Score:2)
BZFlag sounds cool, if I could only try it...
What's the deal with this game. It crashes my Dell Lattitude PIII 650Mhz / ATI RAGE MOBILITY-M1 AGP2X
I know that Win2k isn't the world's stablest freakin' OS, but it rarely LOCKS UP so hard that I need to unplug it and take the battery out to reboot...
-Russ
Re:The way we got around it... (Score:2)
Re:The way we got around it... (Score:2)
Re:The way we got around it... (Score:2)
The sad part is that there is so much intelligence and know-how like this that is being wasted by risk-allergic, dull, no-imagination corporations that would rather have a second plate of sandwiches for the catered lunch meeting than invest in anything truly new or useful.
Anything really cool will require a 50-page "business case." Which, if completed, will be thrown in the trash and the idea still rejected.
It would be really nice if a job could be as rewarding as some of these spare-time (and brillian) projects we read about, but it seems jobs like that are so rare.
Re:The way we got around it... (Score:2)
Seems like this problem should work itself out then.
Heroes of Might and Magic IV... (Score:2)
Why not just... (Score:2)
How my bosses used to caught us (Score:5, Interesting)
Here are three funny stories about getting caught playing.
At this company I used to work for, the boss had a harsh policy on games and it started by refusing to buy accelerated cards. So much for Q3A... Well, however, we eventually elude him and tricked him into buying some. Six hours a day games were then not so uncommon, especially since we had a multiple floor building, the management on the last floor
Another funny story. We we're CTF-ing, all in the same room, a 4-4 game. I don't think a normal person could have resisted the shouts and yells that we're going on. On that particular day we thought our boss was out for the day, so we had an early start at around 4 pm. The truth was that he was out, but only to get out CEO from the airport. And most of us quickly exited the game when they entered our office when returning, except for this guy who keps on shouting : "Get the flag, get the f*ckin' flag!" with our boss and our CEO in the room. And when finally he saw we exited, he shouted, still not noticing the new commers, with his headphones still on his head: "Hey, whadda f*ck you exited now that I finally got the flag"... He turned blue two seconds later when he saw why we had exited.
At my latest company UT was the game of the day. And since our CTO played with us most of the time, we quite often broke the "games after hours" rule and played even in the middle of the day. On one of this occasions, out CTO joined the game with the nick of another casual player (thus we didn't noticed him), took the Sniper rifle and shot of on the guys in the head. Then the message flashed on the screen : "You're busted!"...
Well, however, I loved Q3 because you could do "bind ENTER quit" and it exited the game sooooo quickly. It saved me on more that a couple of boss-raides
Green Screen with Envy (Score:2, Insightful)
As a network administrator... (Score:3, Insightful)
For *n?x people, text mode MUDs are great games to play. They don't affect any security issues (they run on an external host), and if you really hear your boss coming in too late, it's just one out of a dozen xterms on your desktop, so switching to a different one won't be suspicious at all. ;-)
PS-XDoom (Score:4, Funny)
The Sims (Score:3, Interesting)
A friend of mine at my former workplace was very good at this. He had a laptop running the Sims all day while he sat in his cubicle pretending to work. The laptop was hidden by a stack of engineering equipment. It was funny watching the boss stop at his cubicle to discuss things. He had no clue what was going on!
Depends on the job and the boss (Score:5, Interesting)
Job #1: Satellite Communications Controller for the US Army Space Command. Lots of night shifts with nothing to do. Certain shift supervisors tolerated games as a way to keep people awake as long as the mission was not affected.
Job #2: Civilian Satellite Communications Controller (the former American Mobile Satellite, now bankrupt as Motient).
Again lots of shift work and hours upon hours of nothing to do. Lots of 3D shooters and Diablo. IT folks tolerated us as long as we did not screw up the PCs. Boss played stupid, he was only interested in people not getting in trouble.
Job #3: Web Applications Developer, the employer shall remain nameless. Boss-approved 3D-shooter games at lunch almost every day as long as it did not impact a project deliverable. Full cooperation from the IT folks. We would rotate between Quake III, Half-Life and Kingpin. Some high execs were popular for their Age of Empires games at lunch. The day the Sega Dreamcast was released we had ours FEDEXed to the office and paid for by the company (only console, controllers and memory cards, they told us we could buy our own $#^& games).
Workplace started eroding and then one day some guys got yelled at for playing Dreamcast at lunch. Eventually everybody left the company.
Current job: Another web shop that shall remain nameless. No gaming whatsoever, the corporate mentality is BILL BILL BILL (if you have read Grisham's The Firm you know what I am talking about). People prefer to bail out of the office for Starbucks or good food instead of eating in front of the PC just to play Quake III or whatever.
I personally tolerate one of my employees. He is a total slacker but he is a total genius on what he does, so if he wants to play a bit of Shockwave Pool at lunch then I could care less as long as he delivers on time.
There is a project manager that likes to play Shockwave games whenever a customer puts her on hold, which is fine since the clock is ticking and the customer is paying to keep her on hold.
I personally believe that with such high stress levels in my workplace an everywhere else, it is necessary to give employees some breathing room. Let them play a little bit. Let them take a walk around town and maybe grab a cappuccino on the way back upstairs. And don't count their lunch minutes. If the guys want to hit a restaurant once a week and spend over an hour there instead of the institutional 30 minutes (which is a retarded concept) then by God let them relax and eat something a bit tasty than a freaking burger.
Also, if the employees are done working and they want to stay after hours for a Quake III shootout across the network, then I am not only going to look the other way but I am going to make sure the IT folks leave them alone too.
Of course, notice that I keep saying it is OK as long as the deadlines are met. If we don't meet the deadlines we lose business and we all lose our jobs. Also, if you know a certain Project Manager is a total asshole, don't let him catch you!
Uplink! (Score:2)
Reintroduce the boss key (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the days of DOS, most Sierra adventure games came equipped with a solution in the form of a 'boss key' - F5, if I remember correctly. Quickly pressing the key when you heard your boss approaching wouldn't exit or minimize the game - this is 640k DOS, after all - but it would bring up a mockup screenshot of a spreadsheet.
Something similar could be used in modern games. It wouldn't actually exit the game, but it would very quickly display a fake workscreen without the telltale taskbar icon. It could even have a limited amount of interactivity or animation. If your boss asked you to punch up a different document, for instance, it could display a fake BSOD the moment you touched the Start button.
Then, you could make a big scene out of it, claiming that this always happens because your computer has far too little memory and the video card has no 3D capabilities...
Re:Reintroduce the boss key (Score:2)
Software expands to fill the hardware market. Microsoft is good at that game...
Terminal Games... (Score:2, Informative)
No one at my call center knows what it is.Also if you stop playing, you don't get killed.
Just don't play (Score:2)
Don't play, even if your employer says that you can do so after your work-time. Employers always change their mind after seeing an employee playing computer games inside the company dependencies.
I saw this happen with me, and with other friends of mine, so don't ever plan to play games inside the company dependencies. If possible avoid to tell anyone that you don't really trust that you like games, officially you hate computer games, and only your closest friends knows what you really like to do after leaving the company.
Too drastic? After passing through the acusations I have passed, and after two of my supervisors blame me and lie about what they allowed and didn't allowed me to do during work all I can say is, don't trust your boss.
Two things (Score:5, Interesting)
Second, don't you have a fucking job to do, you dirty hippy? I ain't paying you to frag the doofus in the next cubicle over.
First it was checking mail at work. Then getting around the proxy server. Now it's this bullshit. Christ, grow up. You wonder why you get downsized? You wonder why your company's stock is in the toilet? It's because you are doing everything at work EXCEPT work.
If the lazy SOB's who post around here spent half as much time working as they do bitching, complaining, playing games, posting here, etc. there never would have been a recession, pets.com might have survived, and Gnome and KDE would be fully compatible with packages completed for everything from Debian to Red Hat to *BSD.
Re:Two things (Score:3, Funny)
That's it, I quit! Oh look, the stock is up 75 points!
Yeah!
"Gnome and KDE would be fully compatible with packages completed for everything from Debian to Red Hat to *BSD"
I wonder how much of Gnome/KDE and other such packages were written at the workplace during breaks.
Re:Two things (Score:2)
That said, though, can't you find something productive to do with your 45 minutes of downtime?
Re:Two things (Score:3, Interesting)
Or take my job (Systems/Network admin), plenty of times where I just have to wait on something to finish. Like cutovers to faster connections (ie upgrading closets from 100mbit to gbit). It often goes something like this: I go to the BET and sit down near the switch that feeds the building. The other guy goes to the individual closets with the gear. He sets up what is necessary, calls me, and then we switch the fibres from one thing to the next. Now while he's walking around and getting things ready (this can take 15-20 minutes), I can't really do anything productive. It's not like I can leave, I need to be there to make the switch when he's ready. So I talk on the phone, or play games on an iPaq or something.
There are times when you just have to wait on something to finish and you really can't do anything else productive while you wait.
Yahoo Games (Score:2)
~LoudMusic
play QUAKE at work! (Score:4, Informative)
fastquit 1
bind F12 "quit"
and you're golden. the screen goes back into windows very quick, and no trace of the game is left. It works, trust me
People who play together create together (Score:3, Interesting)
I also want them to be productive, and certainly would not let game playing get out of control. But I would much rather my reports not wince and hit the Boss key when I 'catch' them goofing off [heh, do you think you actually fool us with that quick alt-tab?]. As long as they are getting work done, why not let them blow off some steam? Maybe even have team building exercises where teams compete against each other.
The perfect game for work: (Score:2, Insightful)
Games for who? (Score:5, Funny)
For the non-worker you mean...
There is a thin line between laid back and laid off
Games for the worker (Score:3, Informative)
They are web-games.
http://www.gamesville.lycos.com/
http://popcap
http://www.wagerworks.com/
http://www.zone
http://games.yahoo.com/
Microsoft Plays Linux Games at Work (Score:3, Informative)
"I am one of the support technicians for Loki Entertainment Software. This afternoon I received a message on my voicemail to call "Nick"--name changed to protect the victim--who was having trouble starting CivCTP for Linux on his Pentium III RedHat 6.0 system."
When I called him back, he thanked me for my quick response and said that he was new to Linux and wasn't sure if he'd installed the game right. He then said, "This machine is going to used for... well, I'm a Microsoft employee and my group is doing a usability study on Linux."
As it turned out, he had unpacked the tarball (I had to explain what a tarball was) on the CD by double-clicking its package icon in gmc and then double-clicking the install icon that came up. He had absolutely no idea where the game had been installed, and didn't know how to search for it.
At this point I pointed out to him that CivCTP came with a graphical install script, conveniently labeled "install" and placed in the same directory as the tarball. And in fact, in that same directory was a text file labeled "README" that explained how to run the install program.
I had him pull up a terminal window and run `sh install` (since he had a 4.5 GB drive containing only a fresh install of RH6, he wasn't too concerned with finding his previous installation just yet), and as the graphical install smoothly copied the files into their proper place, we chatted amiably.
Me: "So what kind of system are you using for this?"
Him: "It's a... [pause to read label on the case] HP Vectra."
Me: "Umm, what processor does it use?"
Him: "It's a Pentium III, uh... 450 MHz?"
Me: "Yes, PIIIs do come in 450 MHz."
Eventually, the installation finished. I encouraged him to grab the patch from our website, and he thanked me and hung up.
Ordinarily, I am very respectful to newbies. I don't even laugh at them behind their backs--especially if they have been looking through man pages and reference books trying to figure things out. This time I almost peed my pants.
Then the big question dawned on me:
What does it mean when Big Bill gives brand new P-III 450's running Linux to game-playing newbies who don't read reference books, manuals, How-To's or README's for a usability study?
Can you say "viable desktop environment?"
The soulution is... (Score:2, Informative)
Well, this may be a little skewed (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're playing a couple games of solitaire at your desk, or maybe something from Popcap games (http://www.popcap.com), nobody should care. If you're trying to make it through Baldur's Gate II (or, coming soon, Neverwinter Nights!
there's only one way to play games at work (Score:2)
Companies I have worked for... (Score:2)
I then killed a few months as a network admin for a industrail magnet research company. They primarily used office and autocad on their windows boxes, a cake walk of a job but they needed a relatively cheap administrator in case their server went down, so I killed quite a bit of time there with games. Of course, bein a cheap windows admin was only a holdover, so I quite and now work for a company where I don't ever play games. Get a lot more money, but still it is sad I don't get to cut back as much. of course the fun still comes in when servers go down. I think in the right context games can be very important in the geek work environment. Boost morale, build teams. It's worth sacrificing a little bit of productive time in order to reduce turnover and make people much more cooperative.
Re:Companies I have worked for... (Score:2)
Back in the old days of the Commodore Pet... (Score:2)
I am a mindless drone. (Score:2)
My is Redmond beautiful today, too!
This is a great game! (Score:5, Funny)
<read slashdot>
<read slashdot>
<quickly switch to code editor with complicated source file loaded>
<read slashdot>
<read slashdot>
<read slashdot>
<quickly switch to terminal and enter a frenzy of mundane 'ls', 'grep' and 'vi' and 'find' commands.>
<read slashdot>
<read slashdot>
<read slashdot>
...
In other news... (Score:2)
MUD (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Too Lazy (Score:3, Interesting)
Stop playing the game long enough to look at the options. The one I used could use any captured screen. It even came with the capture utility to save a capture to the game. Mine got changed daily.
Re:"Boss Key" (Score:2, Informative)
'course, Nethack is a game from way back, but it's still being developed so I suppose it counts. Won't run out of things to do either; it's pretty hard to completely beat the game, how many people do you know who have ascended with every class? Or even ascended with 1-2?
Re:Back to the old days... (Score:2)
If you want, I could dig it up.
On a side note, someone referred to games from "back in the old days" running in a window. Unless you were using an Apple machine, I'd love to know what your definition of "old days" is ;)
Re:Games on PDA! (Score:2)
-motardo
Re:Dont forget about the video card (Score:2)