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Designing A Corporate Game Room?
douglawson writes "We're designing a virtual PC team game room for the corporation I spend my days at. The idea here is to create an internal space for team gaming, both for recreational and executive team-building events. If you could dream, what would be in your ideal space? What games, what seating, what sound system, what else?"
My first thought upon reading this was team based games, mostly FPS or RTS -- Tribes2 and Starcraft popped into my head immediately.
But upon rereading it, I can't imagine why you'd bother, from a corporate perspective. Unless you're planning on pitting department against department or project team against project team.
(I totally get it from a recreational point of view; but I can't imagine a corporation shelling money or space for this unless they've just got too much to burn.)
If you're deadset on the competitive game play, I'd split it into two or more rooms, of course, so that teammates could talk to eachother without having the "enemy" overhear. And, you'd want, whatever game you picked, some method so that people could store their profile, so that no matter which computer they sat at, they'd have it set up to their liking. Windows on a domain can do this with roaming profiles, or if you have a small number of games, you can simply see how they store their config files and write a small app to fetch someone's specific files from a repository and overwrite them on a computer.
Actually, just the opposite. We played Quake3 together a bunch where I work. (Only past tense because we have moved on to other games). Those were some of the best times because of the extremely simple gameplay, very large possible player limit and short amount of time required to play.
Also consider Enemy Territory. I really promotes teamwork, and, best of all, its free. Outside of an FPS, when are you going to be able to feed your boss a rocket then have a good laugh about it later? Just remember, don't get too heated because you are still at work and can't be sexually harrassing people when you make them your bitch.
Ok, if you're serious about doing this kind of thing (and others have more than adequately covered the reasons why or why not to), then have you considered buying a Xbox or PS2 instead of PCs? They'll need less maintainance and are styled more toward same room playing than PCs. You'll need one or more consoles, and some large TVs. This'll be a lot cheaper than PCs too -- even with a large (50") TV, you can skimp on the TV -- you don't need high def, and large SDTV sets are dirt cheap now - under $1k. Heck, one TV and console per seat would probably still be cheaper than a high end gaming PC.
If you are going with PCs, don't even buy speakers for them. Buy decent quality headphones instead, but ones where you can still hear the rest of the room. Nothing's worse than a half dozen PCs playing sound through speakers for the same game -- since the sound is invariably oriented toward the individual player on the PC.
Consider how you're going to divide the room up -- if you have competitive games, then you'll need to provide some dividers to ensure you can't "cheat" by looking at a competitor's screen, or by overhearing shouted instructions/information. Doing minimal soundproofing that's configurable will be a hell of a challenge if you want to do this right.
Chairs? Buy what ever is the office standard. For God's sake don't buy better chairs for the gaming room than the rest of the office. That'll just piss people off and you'll either end up with the gaming room chairs disappearing (and regular chairs appearing if you're lucky) or people spending more time than you expect in the gaming area just because the chairs are more comfy.
Games? Consider co-op vs computer oriented games heavily. That's pretty key for team building. For after hours playing, employees are more likely to want competitive games though. I'd actually suggest UT2003 here for both -- the Invasion mode (in one of the free expansions) is a decent co-op mode, while every other mode is obviously competitive. There are damn few co-op modes out there now, at least if you want decent computer oponents (UT2k3 doesn't have decent computer opponents... it merely relies upon tons of enemies which get tougher and tougher).
If you go with PCs, you'll probably want some way of displaying the action from any one PC on a large screen for observers. Just get PCs with svideo output, a switchbox (either with remote control or accessible by observers), and an aforementioned large screen TV. Consider that you'll want one screen per "area", with the ability to easily block off viewing a competitor's screen.
I'd honestly consider ditching running competitive games, since that's where most of the difficulty comes in if you want to do it "right". That or do it and tell people not to cheat by the obvious methods, or to deal with it occurring.
If you have any local LAN parties or gaming cafes, go to them and see how they do things. They're in this for the competition/money and certainly know more about this than I do.
We don't have a corporate room for gaming, but a bunch of us at work get together about once every 2 to 3 months for a LAN session (out of hours), and we have a all-day on-site LAN game which is corporatly approved (well, they provide the overhead projector for the day). This is something we all talk about, look forward to, and has become one of the highlights of our team. Additionally, it's an event which has brought us a little closer together than NOT doing it. We've done the wine tours, hiring a boat and having BBQs, but this single yearly event gives a new spin on our interpersonal relasionships.
Two thumbs up for the original corporate who's going to try this out. It's always a pros and cons thing. If the pros of the activity outweigh the cons, then it's a goer.
Robert Anton Wilson