Games in the Workplace?

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?"

Comments

Suggestion

[athakur999]

Suggestion to all game writers. Allow your game to have a customizable title bar name. That way, when someone glances at your computer, they don't see "Minesweeper" in the task bar. Instead, they see "Q3 Earnings Report.xls".

Re:Suggestion

[(void*)]

I can see it now ...

Boss: Hey, Jeff, Let me use your computer for an email - I left my laptop back in HQ.

Jeff the sys-admin: Ehhh ... (Quickly hits minimized) OK - here you go.

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!

PQ

[dragonfly_blue]

Well, as a matter of fact, I'm playing Progress Quest right now, and I'm at work. What's cool is I can keep playing if the boss walks by, but by switching to another task on my screen I can make it appear that I am actually working! Alas, it is Windows only, right now.

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?!?

PS-XDoom

[ulbador]

My favorite game to play at work is always PS-Xdoom. If my boss happens to walk around the corner, all I need to do it shoot a RPG into the group of process monsters, and wh00p, my X session gets killed, and I'm at a terminal looking like I was actually doing something

Re:More like: Where's the Work?

[Chicane-UK]

Parties, chicks, and drugs... right buuuuuudy? :)

Re:Also a couple of Work friendly games

[blibbleblobble]

Emulators? We don't need no damn emulators! Just get a job at a games company, and you can have a real SNES on your desk...

Games for who?

[prakashj79]

Where are the games for the worker?

For the non-worker you mean...

There is a thin line between laid back and laid off

Re:Ah - the secret is to..

[Anonymous Coward]

have a Windows key on your keyboard - then you can just Windows+D to get back to the desktop quickly.

I tried this and it doesn't work. Maybe because I'm using KDE.

Re:Tiny Windows games for workers

[limbostar]

No kidding. A lot of that site is designed under the assumption that everyone has Javascript enabled.

<noscript> motherfucker, do you speak it?

Re:The way we got around it...

[Jenova]

well, that reminds me. Having to do my school project with a bunch of people screaming their lungs off playing Quake really got me cheesed off -- so I had my own games to play with them.

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 :)

This is a great game!

[Hard_Code]

<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>
...

Re:Also a couple of Work friendly games

[freeweed]

I don't think there are too many game dev companies still producing software for the SNES... :)

games for the worker?

[primus_sucks]

Where are the games for the worker?

Don't you mean games for lazy bastards:)

Re:Two things

[realdpk]

"You wonder why your company's stock is in the toilet"

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:At my work

[Shiny Metal S.]

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.

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.

I wish more work places would take this example.

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?