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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?"
As much as I like playing games at work when there is nothing to do, I would be just happy having a job at this point. 4 months of unemployment are enough for me!
Why was it I went to college again?
Its a call center.
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.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
have a Windows key on your keyboard - then you can just Windows+D to get back to the desktop quickly.
Video Game cheats, hints a
Emulators!!!
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.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
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".
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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. :-)
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
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?!?
Free music from Jack Merlot.
If your employer is not enlightened enough that you have to hide your gaming from them, the you probably should not be doing it in the first place.
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.
At my school there is an absolute no-games-on-computers, ever policy in force; at the end of term though we all felt desperately in need of some BZFlag action. Being the Computer Society, we decided the way ahead was to set up a USB QuickCam connected to a Linux machine with motion detecting software (apt-get install...) aiming right at the bottom of the door; we then wrote a quick app to be executed when motion was detected which would send a specific broadcast packet on the network and a daemon to run on the client (also Linux) workstations which, on receiving the packet, would execute 'chvt 1' immediately. Having set all of this up (in about half an hour - frenzied coding!) and opened emacs/top/something-important-looking on virtual console 1, we all got down to playing BZFlag - and lo and behold, as soon as anybody walked in the door every single screen simultaneously switched to the text console and we all looked deeply studious... Worked like a charm :-)
...is a brand new turn-based strategy game. It definitely allows for a quick alt-tab back to something that appears to be work. Unforutunately, you are sort of locked into turn-based strategy games when you are looking for something that allows a quick escape. For just about everything else, quick escapes put you at a serious disadvantage because losing track of where you are could spell death (or the equivalent in the game).
Bugger off early on that Friday Afternoon? If your company has dial-in access, just claim you're going off to work from home. Or as we like to call it, "Work from Home." You have to say it with the quotes. What you neglect to mention is that you plan to stop at the pub on your way home and might dial in to check your E-Mail if there's anything particularly important that might be going on. The video cards they install on work machines tend to not be able to push the pixels fast enough for the really good games anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Well, first of all we had (have) quite a lax policy on games. Do your job and do whatever you like. However, most of the time games we're allowed after hours only.
:). But the boss had an ace up the sleeve. He used to scan the network for Q3 servers with that tool from GameSpy that is otherwise used to "lawfully" find servers :). He said nothing, but at the end of that month penalties poured in :))
:)
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
__________
Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace!
From the number of nasty replies, I have to wonder how many ppl are at work as they reply to this, while I sit home on my PC with the NHL playoffs on the TV in the background. Simple fact is, everyone needs a little break now and then. Look how many people spend hours a day here on slashdot. Gaming or looking at slashdot- either way you're still not doing "work", so get off of your high horses already.
Obviously you never worked end-user support for a certain well know big name company (who shall remain nameless). Most of the time, we had exactly enough work for 3 people. But there was at least 1 if not 2 people for every floor in the building.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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. ;-)
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
The Sims is a perfect game for the workplace. Why? Because you can enable your Sims to have some intelligence for themselves and the game proceeds while you answer that phone call or speak with the boss. Granted, this intelligence isn't very high, but you don't need to babysit them and the game doesn't require total concentration. Just queue up some actions for your Sims every 20 minutes or so, and you are good to go.
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!
Quick look back:
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!
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Uplink is a great workplace game. Its fun, adds stress to a stressless job, and is rewarding at the same time. Hell, even bosses would like that game.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
As games are starting to require more memory all the time, you can't simply save & exit or minimize one without a significant amount of waiting and/or rattling from your hard disk. By the time the game has disappeared from view, your boss may already be onto you. And then there's the Windows taskbar, prominently displaying the game's minimized icon.
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...
Hee-hee. Dying tickles!
Nethack is the best.
No one at my call center knows what it is.Also if you stop playing, you don't get killed.
--- Evil robots don't kill people, Mad scientists kill people.
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.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
First, it's called Solitaire.
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.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
It seems the masses have flocked to Yahoo Games for worktime leisure. I've played many games of spades (at work or at home on my off days) with people who keep insisting that the play get a little quicker because they're at work and need to get back to productivity. I just laugh and tell them to get a job like mine where they pay me to do nothing (:
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
There is a new version of xquake that allows you to set a variable fastquit. a simple config like:
:)
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
"i can never say no to anyone but you"
I am a firm believer in playing games in the workplace. As a manager of software engineers, I want people working for me to really be into computers, to be the type that notice every little thing. I want them to be people who know how to have fun. I want them to be creative people.
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.
NetHack. The levels are randomly generated, there are surprises at every corner, and most importantly of all, you can minimize it. Also, if your boss has poor eyesight, he may just see that it's a text console and actually say, "Keep up the good work." Don't try to play Q3 or UT at work, as they are impossible to keep hidden on the computer since they're 600+ megabytes each. Hovever, NetHack fits on very small media, including a floppy.
For the non-worker you mean...
There is a thin line between laid back and laid off
With profound apologies to whomsoever this sig originally belonged.
Back in the day, we used to rename our binaries so that when we ran 'tf' (TinyFugue, a MUD client) or 'nethack' or 'slirp' (a user-mode PPP tunnel for dialup users), the sysadmin running 'top' would see 'emacs', 'gcc', and 'spice', etc.
I play Scorched Earth and Sim City on my palm, sometimes bejeweled! (but bejeweled! got old).
-motardo
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.
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`
I used to be an "alt-tab" slave myself, but its WAY to obvious... the boss materializes in your doorway and you fumble for the right keys, that's rookie ball... the pros know that mapping the depression of your mouse wheel to "alt-tab" is far more efficient and less conspicuous. Works great for the occasional pr0n fix as well :)
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
...But here at BioWare, we're always playing games. I don't just mean the games that we're working on, I mean that we're allowed to play games. We have a foosball league, and several of us are currently involved in an NHL '96 (yes, for the Genesis) tournament. Of course, when we're in crunch, we're discouraged from playing games too much, but even then it's generally accepted that the less stressed out we are, the better we work.
:D) at your desk, you should be questioning what value you're bringing to your job, or what satisfaction you could possibly derive from a job that leaves you so bored.
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!
I could be wrong, but I've heard you can play a lot of games (even FPS ones) in the dock in OS X.
c-hack.com |
and that's on fridays, after work, and against most people you work with, including your boss.
sic transit gloria mundi
At a job I had a while back I would spend tons of time playing znibbles with cowowrkers. On the day before everyone got off for 4th of july, a bunch of people played half life on the 5th and 6th floors. Great please to have fun, but unfortunately the site was closed down at the onset of the dot-com bubble burst. Guess it made since, not only were people playing way too many games, but we would buy a couple of 60,000 dollar tape jukeboxes so we could be lazier, and sun enterprise servers to do work that coul dbe done much cheaply on other systems.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
...you used to be able to get games on EPROM. To execure the game you just did a SYS ???? where ???? was the address of the code in the ROM. No need to boot a program off disk (which took an eternity those days). Nobody had any clue it was there as it was tucked away in an unobtrusive part of the memory. Nobody could accidentally stumble on it. I think it even returned your screen to its previous state as soon as it quit.
-- SIGFPE
No kidding. A lot of that site is designed under the assumption that everyone has Javascript enabled.
<noscript> motherfucker, do you speak it?
this is a sig.
Oh, but working where I work is more fun than any computer game could ever be! I get my entertainment from my positive work environment, grey Lexus, and cult-figure nerd/Chairman!
My is Redmond beautiful today, too!
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
they're installing 32MB GeForce cards in the pc's here at the hospital i work at :)
<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>
...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
... all the .COMs who could afford to hire programmers who sat around playing games all day at work have passed on. And you wonder why they don't make games like this anymore?
Where are the games for the worker?
Don't you mean games for lazy bastards:)
Your company sounds miserable -- do you like it? I'd never _ever_ tolerate working at or running an organization that has such a draconian attitude towards its workers. Firing people for playing games (unless they didn't do their jobs ever) is wrong.
Likewise, web surfing is a tool -- not just a waste of time (though there are plenty of ways to waste time). If the company _really_ wants to prevent time wasting, they can install censorware that blocks the commonly-used time-wasters (match.com, lotsoftimewastinggames.com, etc.).
Anyway, sorry...I just hate reading about companies that still think that the stick is a more valuable tool than positive motivation.
--noah
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
Well Adam, let me tell you a little story...
I was consulting a few years back and we had just finished a project. Now, the way it works when you're a consultant in demand is that if the company you're at lets you go, someone else snatches you up.
So... they refused to let me go while they waited - for FOUR DAMN MONTHS - to start up the next project.
I sat with nothing but a shitty ass NT machine and no rights to do anything but surf the web.
I memorized PI to 101 significant digits. I studied for a Java certification. And in general I was bored shitless.
If I could have played games, I would have. And since there was nothing and I do mean nothing for me to do but wait, I would have been glad if the company had decided to ditch me. I spent tons of time surfing and doing nada. I went days in between even seeing anyone. Ack!
It depends on the company, as well. Some companies have a policy of "as long as you get your job done, we don't care where/how/what you do."
Those are the best companies to work for because
1. They have less attrition
2. They can also reduce the increase in compensation. (lower percentages for raises) After all, who's going to leave such a great culture? That's where the savings come in.
3. When it's time to bust ass, almost everyone does.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
FUnny you should mention that. Our entire QA lab one day consisted of 99% of the QA staff playing Bejeweled during lunchtime.
The popcap games are addictive, and wiht many of them on PDAs, you can do something during boring company meetings!
Your tax dollars (if you live in Missouri) hard at work.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Magic the Gathering is always a fun one. You can download a free graphical tabletop based freeware program that allows one to play with anyone over the Internet.
The program contains a working database of every Magic card ever created as well as a means to keep track of all the information required to conduct a full game, so you don't have to spend money on tons of cards in order to create an asesome deck.
Apprentice requires Windows 95, 98, NT, or 2000. Development for Macintosh, Linux, and BeOS will begin after Apprentice 2.0 is completed.
Ie, it never rains but it pours.
You have no idea what the back shifts are about do you?
they are only there for when something fuckups.
90% of 90% of nights they only need 1 person, nut when things fuck up they'll all of a sudden get 50 cals a minute, that's why they have 15 people on.
C'mon, the very name implies "These aren't the games you're looking for, you can move along".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Is working from home. The hardest thing to do is remember to shut the sound off whatever game you're playing when somebody calls.
The Internet is generally stupid
Wait a minute, I'm not sure if I understand... You won't get cought, because these are really small games? Are they so tiny that nobody will see them? Is it safe for the eyes?
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
A lot of that site is also designed under the assumption that everyone can see fonts smaller than pixels (which is actually quite a sane assumption, considering the fact that they provide games 4x4 pixels large). That said, as I am unable to read their website without getting my lazy ass off the chair and staring from the distance of 2mm from the screen using a magnifying glass, so my question is: are they available only for Windows? As for the Javascript, I enabled the damn thing, but I still can't see their screenshots. But then again I probably wouldn't be able to see them even if I could display them, if they are as small as fonts... Oh, well, it's only my own fault that I bought a 15" monitor having problems with sight. I should've bought 50" projector instead, then I wouldn't complain about incompetent web designers, like I always do...
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
Had an ALT-H command and you could choose the icon it minimized as. ALT-H minimized my game and made it look like a Lotus 123 spreadsheet icon. I wish they had this for everquest :(
'nuff said.
May we live long and die out
If I was an employee of a company I wouldn't play games, even if it was sanctioned in the company handbook. Two reasons:
1. First time your project slips, guess what (or rather who) is to blame?
Me: "I haven't completed the importing of the blah, blah data into the new system. It will be done by Friday."
Boss: "Well you seemed to have enough time to play Quake III all last week"
2. I could never look my boss in the face at a review and say "I deserve to make this much or this position", if he know I was playing games. (Even during lunch.)
Bottom line is I never give them anything to hang over my head. Even if they want me to go to a conference in Florida during the middle of winter I act like I am getting screwed. Work should be as painful as possible (or look that way at least if you want to get an edge over your boss.)
Of course I like that employees typical burn company time and equipment. It makes selling myself that much easier. I am successful as an independent contractor because I try my hardest not to waste time. I have been well trained by the Army to avoid distractions.
I am not going to say grow up and all that. But I do think if you have time to waste like that, you're not balancing your time correctly. And as for talking to co-workers and snack runs as being just as time wasting. Rubbish! Talking to co-workers builds relationships which helps at the workplace (as long as it's not hours at a time.) Casual conversion while working can be mentally stimulating. And who can work without sugar and caffeine? If I feel I can't concetrate, I grab another Mt. Dew.
Not preaching, just my thought on the subject.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Lois, this isn't my Batman glass. - Peter
Why don't you do what I did, and take your life's savings to start a company. Pay people out of your own money while you don't make a salary for a year while you build your company up.
Then, let your employees spend 90% of their time playing games and screwing around. When you consciously realize where employment comes from and how it affects you personally, I think you'd change your shallow attitude.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
In-browser games are easy to hide and are good for short-term distractions that won't totally kill your "productivity".
...at least they're better than solitaire.
Multiplayer Mini-Golf
NetbabyWorld (not Mozilla-friendly)
Orisinal (little Flash games)
Spaced Penguin! (fun with gravity)
Just wish there was more out there.
\bind * quit
thats what i use.
works great.
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
Gaming at work?
Sounds very foreign to me. In today's competitive business culture, you need to stay on the front line. Having some spare time? Fine, read Sun's latest Java specs, or W3C's XML specification.
There are always stuff to learn and the more you know, the better you will perform.
Playing games will hardly lead to any promotions nor more interesting job assignments.
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
This
is not new technology. It's actually very outdated way to control text appearance. If you want to exploit technology, use XHTML Strict and Cascading Style Sheets.
But I wasn't talking about the way how the fonts are made smaller than the default size (size="+1" is the font larger than the user default and size="-2" is font smaller than the user default font, i.e. this size which I find the most readable - see my web design rules if you're not sure what I mean). I was only commenting the idea of using fonts smaller than the size which I have chosen as the best size for me.
Of course I can set my default font so large that when the size is decreased twice the result will be my favorite size. But this way the correctly designed websites would have fonts too large and it's completely backwards and doesn't make much sense.
I'm sorry if you found my comment offensive. I was mostly joking because I visited a website with tiny games and I found the fonts so tiny that I couldn't read anything, which kind of made sense, because people who play so tiny games obviously has to have great sight, unlike myself. The first thing I thought was that you may have set the fonts so small, so the people with poor sight (those who wouldn't be able to play those games anyway), won't waste your bandwidth downloading games to small for them to play, because they won't find the download links. I found that kind of funny.
As for the Javascript, as I said (please read my comment), I couldn't see the screenshots even after I enabled Javascript, so something is just broken. (JavaScript Error: http://www.tinywindowsgames.com/tiny/: document.all has no properties.)
Yes, most of people, but not everyone. Unless you use the <noscript> tag, you have to understand that those who don't have Javascript enabled, or those who don't use Javascript browsers at all, will complain that your website simply don't work, which is true however great working with Javascript it may be.
Just use <noscript> tag and your website will work great for everyone. People with working Javascript interpreters won't see <noscript>this code</noscript> at all, so your site will be exactly the same for those who can use it today. The only difference will be to those people who can't use it today. Please read my web design rules, I believe you'll find quite a few good points there.
I'm glad that you answered and I'm honored that you probably made your account just to answer my comment. The main reason I posted my comment (other than a joke about tiny games and tiny fonts correlation) was to ask if these games are available only for Windows, because I don't have Windows (I use Debian) but I'd like to check them out. So please tell me: what platforms do you support? Are those games released as free software (in the FSF sense)?
If your games work under GNU/Linux systems, then I'll be glad to check them out. If they are written only for Windows but they are released as free software, then I'll maybe try to port some of them when I find any time for that. Please tell me where I can find the working screenshots, I'd like to see how do these games look like in the first place.
Thanks and, once again, I'm sorry if you misunderstood my intentions, I really didn't want to offend you. Please don't confuse my post with the somehow more offensive parent post by limbostar.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
People who are just screwing off and not getting their job done should get axed. But over-focusing on where each minute of an employee's day goes and trying to account for every single penny of productivity is counter-productive as well. There are intangibles involved here; loyalty, effort, enthusiasm. And I've found, time and again, that companies that have happy employees who feel that they are trusted and valued get better results than companies that try to squeeze every last ounce of non-work related activity out of their zombies.
I'm at a place like that now (obviously there not very good at it, or I'd not be posting here right now). They do everything in their power to ensure that everyone knows they are here to 'work, not have fun' so they can get every possible ounce of useful work out of each of us. But if backfires, badly. I hate being here, I spend my time not being productive, but counting the minutes till I go home. I'm out the door right on time, every day. I never skip lunch. I never go that extra mile--it's been made clear that work is work, and so I make sure it doesn't impinge in the least on the rest of my life. Got a major systems problem at 4:58PM? Too bad, it'll have to wait till tomorrow.
Contrast this with the last place I was at. Man, I loved that job. We played Half-Life half the time, spent hours talking about trivia and tech, wandered in and out at random hours, and generally did a lot of things that would give more traditional business owners a heart-attack. But if there was a problem, we were all over it. I've never worked harder on anything in my life; I've never put in more hours anywhere. And I did it for a fraction of what I make where I'm at now. I would have done anything to keep that place afloat, and so would most of the rest of the staff, and consequently, we were extremely profitable. We got rid of dead wood, but having fun on the job did not necessarily equal a bad investment in someone. What it taught me is that you should be measured by what you accomplish, not how much time you spend doing it.
I left there for other reasons and I've regretted it ever since. But I see this phenomena with all sorts of different companies. The ones with happy, dedicated employees do better than the ones with mindless drones. You may be able to justify drones more easily to the accountants, but if you're really concerned about doing well, take the chance and try building a workforce that enjoys what it is doing enough to do it well and cheaply.
No relation to Happy Monkey
Sorry -- I'm a bit ahead of where you think I am. I did start a company, with my own money. I did pay my employees with my own money, and I did work for no salary for the first year. I grew the company to 31 people and sold it in February for a lot of money.
And you know what? I never ONCE considered implementing draconian policies like this. My employees played games (after hours, when they knew it was OK), used IM, surfed the web, and got all of their work done. The ones that didn't got canned (usually for more complex, but similar issues), and you know what else? My former employees constantly tell me that they'd work for me and my partners again in a SECOND and that they wish all jobs were as great as the ones they had.
I think my attitude is not shallow in the slightest.
--noah
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
OK. No problem.
I don't have much of free time right now, but I could take a look at the source of a simple game and see if I could port it. I don't know how your games are written but if it's standard C or C++ and if you have some internal frame buffer, than it shouldn't be hard to output that buffer to SDL window. Even if it had to be converted to different format with every frame, the overhead shouln't be high with small screen.
Actually, you may want to take a look at the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library. Using SDL, you could write portable games working under Windows, Linux, MacOS, MacOS X, Solaris, IRIX, FreeBSD, QNX, OSF/True64. Here's a short summary from SDL website:
I really recomend SDL. It's developed mostly by Sam Lantinga, who worked in Loki porting Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, Tribes 2, Heavy Gear II, Heretic II, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Railroad Tycoon II, Civilization: Call To Power and few other titles, and is now working in Blizzard on the World of Warcraft - in other words, he knows how to code games, and it shows with the SDL. Check out the games, demos and other applications which use SDL.
For the portable sound code you can use SDL_mixer and for more advanced effects I recommend the OpenAL which takes care for you about the 3-D sound effects in a similar fashion as OpenGL with graphics.
What language and libraries do you use anyway?
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$