Slashdot Mirror
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
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 :-)
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!
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
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!
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
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.
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.
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`
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 |
<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?
'nuff said.
May we live long and die out