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

Well..

[zapfie]

If I recall correctly, the games that come with Windows 2000, when minimized, appear to be open Excel documents. =)

Re:At my work

[Kasmiur]

Since its a outsourceing call center the client pays the company X amount of dollars to have X people answering calls. Since we do support for a cable system in Arizona often we get people calling in to order pay per view or when there is a problem in the area they will receive 50 calls at once. When its middle of night and your tv goes out you don't want to wait more than 5 minutes to get help or a answer

Re:Ah - the secret is to..

[Chris Pimlott]

Wow, all these years using Windows and I didn't know that. Thanks for the tip!

Re:this is why the economy is so bad now

[Matthew Weigel]

I fully understand overstaffing call centers, so that peak time is handled well. This is good customer service, and on the surface it's not a bad idea, especially when the customer is paying for it anyway.

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.

Yeah yeah... this is why Apple went out of business a decade ago - they charged more for a better product, and since people never want anything but the lowest price product, nobody bought Macs in the previous dip in the economy.

What's that you say? Apple is still in business, and is the only computer manufacturer that has so much demand they're having to increase prices!? Surely that's not possible...

The one thing that bugs me more than all the libertarian geeks is the libertarian geek that doesn't understand economics. It might just happen that the time wasted waiting for an understaffed help center to get around to the customer is actually costing that customer more than the extra cost of helping to pay for an overstaffed help center. It might just happen a lot, actually... or at least enough that there will always be enough customers who are saving money by spending it intelligently.