Google PAC-MAN Cost 4.8M Person-Hours

The folks at Rescue-Time, who make software that helps you (and companies) figure out how you spend your online time, did a modest calculation based on their user base and concluded that Google's playable PAC-MAN doodle cost the world over 4.8 million person-hours of productivity last Friday. "Google PAC-MAN consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6M daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a cost of $25/hr. (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate). For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get six weeks of their time." Also, Google made the doodle permanent.

Comments

Yum, numbers are tasty

[masterwit]

Well it seems I skewed the statistic quite a bit..
Now the real question is, how many more hours will it consume talking about how many hours it consumed?
Begs the question doesn't it?

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[WrongSizeGlass]

These numbers are tasty, but they also are misleading and jump to conclusions. They're assuming everyone who tried GoogleMan was at work? I wasn't ... I guess I'm the only person who uses Google for non-work purposes? They really aught to try to break into the "home users who use search engine" market, who knows, they may be able to significantly expand their user base.

They're assuming 36 extra seconds per visit, too. If you "count to 11" like they suggest, counting to 47 will demonstrate that they're guestimating far too much time was spent on GoogleMan.

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[PRMan]

I was on vacation also, and all 4 family members tried it.

How many kids played this?

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Grishnakh]

These numbers are tasty, but they also are misleading and jump to conclusions. They're assuming everyone who tried GoogleMan was at work?

That's irrelevant if you're a salaried worker. Instead of playing Google Pac-Man at home, you could have spent that extra time at work getting work done for your employer. Wasting your time playing a game like that is like stealing from your employer!

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Samah]

Begs the question doesn't it?

No, it doesn't!
http://begthequestion.info/

Re:Yum, numbers are tasty

[Grumbleduke]

So, some people* essentially made up a load of numbers to generate a catchy headline, throwing in some "back of the envelope" calculations to make it look real. That's never happened before...

But, oh look, it worked. Even the BBC bought the story and they generally try to be factually accurate. So, before long it will probably be included as an amusing anecdote in every story about loss-of-productivity-at-work, or the dangers-of-being-on-the-Internet and that sort of rubbish.

It is amazing how far one made-up number can go. How long before some company sues Google for loss of productivity? That could be fun to watch.

*not just anyone, people from a company that specialises in "Time Management, Productivity & Project Tracking software"... but no, they can't have any ulterior motive in exaggerating the "time lost" due to a website...

Competition

[natehoy]

Still pales in comparison to the average Slashdot Idle story...

Re:Competition

[XanC]

Not only that, "person-hours" is one of the stupidest phrases I've run across in a while.

Look, there's nothing wrong with "man". It referred to "human" long before it referred to "male human". Just live with it: the word is man-hours!

Re:Competition

[clarkkent09]

I still think it's worth going an extra mile to please our politically correct and feminist colleagues. After all it's not like it takes much effort and it does help create a happier and more harmonious workplace. That's why I prefer using the term bitch-hours. I hope it catches on.

Re:Competition

[DragonWriter]

What the hell was wrong with "x hours of productivity" which came long before "man-hour"?

It fails simple dimensional analysis. N hours of operation of a facility employing M persons obviously is NM person-hours of work, not NM hours of work.

Re:Competition

[JoshuaZ]

Look, there's nothing wrong with "man". It referred to "human" long before it referred to "male human". Just live with it: the word is man-hours!

Unfortunately, there's a fair bit of evidence that small differences in wording can have a lot of impact. For example, if little children are asked to draw a picture of a "firefighter" they will be more likely to draw a female than if they are asked to draw a picture of a "fireman." So even if "man" can be used to mean person, subtle human irrationality still has an impact.

Re:Competition

[retchdog]

Maybe it should fail simple dimensional analysis because, hey, smashing people and hours together doesn't always generate productivity, unlike how force and distance always generate work.

It's more subtle, needs certain assumptions, and it's not at all clear what the scaling law should be. Kind of like how in some cases but not all, the effective distance travelled is proportional to the square root of time spent travelling.

Re:Competition

[XanC]

I would say the irrational thing is to draw a female fireman, whatever the reason.

Re:Competition

[pookemon]

I agree - especially given that these "People" wasting "Person-Hours" are not playing "Pac-Person".

Pac-person - a gender neutral abstract object of a neutral colour moves around a maze not eating vegan dots (or stripes) while not antagonising the neutral "ghosts" (or any ethereal creature) who wish only to have lunch with Pac-person and not harm them in any way. Game does not include a "score" function as scores are considered "competitive" and detract from the non-judgmental attitude of the Pac-person game.

Re:Competition

[twostix]

You fall into the tired old trap of the left in thinking that children are mindless automatons that will do whatever adults program them to do.

I have three robust defiant boys with opposing personalities and beliefs that proves you wrong. If you tell my youngest to draw a fireman/firefigher he'll just as likely draw a car with a clown driving it (who incidentally will more than likely also be a man, perhaps you could give us the gender neutral term for clown..or your argument is a bit of BS).

Children aren't computers to be manipulated to your own creepy ends of making them not see reality- that firemen are 90% men - into what you want them to see - that you wish fire fighters were equal parts men and women (not reality). Something that is of course never going to happen as there's simply not an equal number of physically strong females on planet (oops there's that reality thing again).

So what if they draw a firefighter as a man...90% of firefighters in the world ARE MEN and no, it's not because of the tired old "oppression/inequality" drek trotted out day in day out by academia, it's simply because of boring old physics: women don't have as much muscle as men.

No amount of manipulation of the language and childrens minds is ever going to change that. Also there was a time where if your political beliefs required messing with kids heads your beliefs were seen as evil.

Cheers
Twostix

Re:Competition

[JoshuaZ]

No one is requiring anyone's political beliefs to mess with kids' minds. You are utterly missing the point and seem to be claiming that psychological studies are somehow evil if they use clever ways to see how children are primed by words. The point of this sort of study is that it shows that language use can have subtle impacts on how people think. In those studies, even when you change the wording, pictures of males are still much more likely to be drawn than females. The point that I am making, is that language use can impact how people think, even in subtle ways, so it makes sense to try to use language that distorts that as little as possible.

Re:Competition

[Gordonjcp]

If you tell my youngest to draw a fireman/firefigher he'll just as likely draw a car with a clown driving it
... and will go on to explain that the clown *is* actually a fireman, but he's a clown as well and isn't on fireman duty today. Yeah, sounds a bit familiar.

Hah!

[Space cowboy]

... don't be evil, indeed...

Simon.

Slashdot manages that every day

[Qzukk]

You should be ashamed of yourselves for reading my post when you should be off curing cancer or saving orphans or something useful!

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[antirelic]

Unfortunately, the hyper inflated concept of the unflinching, tireless, resolute worker is best left as a relic of the industrial revolution. Never in the course of human history, outside of the industrial revolution, has a human being been expected to produce "something" for 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week (and for some more than that). Such simple minded focus strips the mind of creativity; creativity which has dramatically advanced and improved the human condition.

I am a hard core capitalist and stalwart industrialist, but I am also a pragmatist. Non stop, widget production, should be left to the factory worker who needs to follow a standard script. Expecting an IT professional, a researcher, or an engineer to simply keep producing something measurable with each minute of the day shows a complete lack of understanding of your resources. I forget what the name of the study was, but it took three sports teams and show the level of performance improvements over a team that 1) vacationed for a week, thinking about the upcoming game, 2) team that unceasingly trained for the upcoming game, 3) team that sporadically trained for the upcoming game. turns out the vacationing team that spent some time visualizing the upcoming game, produced the greatest results, with the team that trained too hard had the smallest improvements.

Long story short, expecting factory worker performance from skilled workers, is as foolish as expecting a successful heart transplant surgery from a line backer.

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[izomiac]

Never in the course of human history, outside of the industrial revolution, has a human being been expected to produce "something" for 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week (and for some more than that).

The human body just isn't built for it either. Hunter-gathers that were able to survive to the modern era (i.e. in infertile lands where agriculture isn't possible) only spent about 15 - 25 hours per week gathering food. That's what our ancestors did for probably 100,000 years, and a contributing factor to why life expectancy dropped with agriculture (~100 hours per week). Unsurprisingly, it turns out we're almost all deficient in Vitamin D (lack of sunlight), get sub-optimal sleep (ditto sunlight), and even if you go home and exercise like a maniac, sitting for 8 hours a day is still bad for your health. It wouldn't really surprise me if the average office worker's 40 hours per week is really only 20 hours of real work. (At least for the average worker, if you stress yourself out, do mindless work, or really love your job I could see doing more.)

In other words

[aztektum]

People spent 4.8 million hours enjoying life rather than slaving away for the man :P

Re:In other words

[ink]

The free market can't exist without government regulations.

You earned your +1 Indignant mod though. Congrats! :-)

Re:In other words

[twostix]

Insane the mindless sound bites that go for +5 around here these days.

The "free market" is just two people exchanging one thing for another thing so of course it can exist outside of government regulation. Unless you're going to try and say it requires laws to compel people to trade. In which case I cite the last 20,000 years of human history.

The problem with the free market is that it's just that it's too rough and ready so some government regulation can smooth it out (or completely ruin it, or be used to kill competition or new entries as is often the case).

I think you mean government *protection* which is of course what governments were created for in the first place, not to *make* a free market as you confusingly infer, but to protect the people in it.

Re:In other words

[ink]

So, your hypothetical (utopian?) free market can't exist without the regulatory _protection_ of a government? Talk about mindless sound bites... Let me know when you found your perfect country where anarchy rules, and everyone sings in harmony with their side-arms at the ready.

Ah yes, Rescue Time...

[yttrstein]

...monetizing bad math and improperly understood statistics since 2006.

Re:Ah yes, Rescue Time...

[carlzum]

That's true, you can't monetize person-hours unless you know the opportunity cost of that time. If those hours would have been spent watching TV, it's cost neutral (1 hour of leisure time either way.) Were executives and sales reps playing it work? That's a cost benefit. It saved the hours spent removing viruses and malware they would have downloaded surfing porn sites instead.

hour of pac-man != hour of lost productivity

[Anonymous Coward]

This is like all those bogus RIAA/MPAA/etc.-funded studies that assume a pirated copy is a lost sale. Much of the time spent on Google's PAC-MAN would otherwise have been spent on other internet time-wasting, not on productivity.

Re:hour of pac-man != hour of lost productivity

[_Sprocket_]

This is like all those bogus RIAA/MPAA/etc.-funded studies that assume a pirated copy is a lost sale. Much of the time spent on Google's PAC-MAN would otherwise have been spent on other internet time-wasting, not on productivity.

Great. Now some *AA is busy working on a study to show how much Google PAC-MAN cost them in sales. Way to go (don't expect to get paid for the idea though).

Probably true.

[exasperation]

But who cares? Sometimes you just have to stop being so serious and laugh a little.

If your company is concerned with this...

[dmomo]

Ban the use of Google at work.

Because, I'm sure Google doesn't give back in terms of productivity.

But really. This is hard to quantify. Half of my dev team was looking under the hood to see how it worked. Directly lost productivity? Maybe, but I think over-all it netted positive for the team. I would argue that this sort of thing is good for productivity.

Re:If your company is concerned with this...

[Darkness404]

Why would they need to though? The point is, the internet allows people to get information they need instantly. If you are an engineer, you need to convert things on a daily basis so of course those things are committed to memory, just like a historian might know that the First Battle of St. Albans took place on 22 May 1455. Everyone else though, could just Google the date.

All a human -really- needs to know is how to read/speak a popular language and critical thinking skills. The rest, in the 21st century will fall into place.

Who cares?

[MrEricSir]

It was on a Friday, it's not like anything gets done on Fridays anyway.

Humans are not engines

[Darkness404]

Humans are not engines. You can't just give us caffeine and sugar and expect us to work all that time. We require mental stimulation or else our work suffers.

What HR departments don't seem to understand is that we are not robots or programs. Put anyone and have them do a repetitive task, they will quickly get mental numbness and their productivity will suffer. Now take the person and give them some mental stimulation now and then and they won't make those errors.

If you want something that will turn out the same quality of work 24/7, get a robot or program. Humans aren't like that. And saying that it "cost" $4.8 million just isn't understanding humanity.

Re:Humans are not engines

[Grishnakh]

Even worse, the HR departments are the biggest offenders at wasting time. Those people don't do anything productive all day. They just sit around talking to people, contracting for inane "training" courses about workplace harassment and other common-sense stuff, putting up roadblocks for hiring managers trying to find good employees, etc. Most companies would be better off if they eliminated HR departments altogether. W. Edwards Deming was a fan of this idea.

Re:Humans are not engines

[El_Oscuro]

I thought we were. We reliably convert coffee and donuts into Powerpoint slides and meetings.

Wasted?

[SilverHatHacker]

Time that isn't spent productively is not necessarily wasted.

cost calculation?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so I'm just a really dumb C programmer, but I'm having a hard time parsing "cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate" and coming up with a value of $25/hr for any value of "pay rate". And I've wasted more time on this than I did futzing with Google's PacMan...

Nonsense figure

[JustNiz]

There's all sorts of incorrect presumptions by the original article author, like all the time spent playing Google pac-man was necessarily at work. Like nobody is playing it in their own time.

Another one is that people would do work if it wasn't for pac-man. Hell I'd just find a different distraction to avoid work if the pac-man game wasn't around.

Wait...

[Foozy]

it was PLAYABLE?? Oh Damn!

What about urination?

[AthleteMusicianNerd]

How much did people urinating cost?

10 significant digits.

[linuxwrangler]

I suggest that Mr. Tony Wright learn a thing or two about significant digits. What a glorious heap of bull to take input like "if we assume our userbase is representative", "if we take Wolfram Alpha at its word","approximate cost of", "about 11,000" and then assert a figure like $298,803,988. 10 significant digits?!? Right.

Re:10 significant digits.

[YourExperiment]

Yeah, but when you see a number like $298,803,988, it seems a shame to just round it off to the nearest hundred million or so, what with the vast loss of accuracy that would entail.

I don't think so.

[Flammon]

If it wasn't Pac Man, they would have been playing around with something else. No extra time was lost.

Fortunately

[Dunbal]

Life isn't all about productivity, or it would be boring as shit.

Re:Fortunately

[Grishnakh]

It doesn't matter if your life is boring. Wasting time on games, or anything non-work-related, is stealing from your employer. Get back to work!

-- Management

Updated Synopsis

[meatpan]

"The desperate marketing team at Rescue-Time, who spread FUD about how you spend your online time, did a flawed calculation based on wild speculation and concluded that Google's playable PAC-MAN doodle is the reason why we haven't cured cancer."

The first thing I said

[rxan]

The first thing I said after wasting 15 minutes on Pac-Man was "I wonder if you could calculate how much money this game cost corporations around the world in wasted time?"

Re:Wasted? - RTFA

[Omnifarious]

If you read the article, the person who wrote it preemptively replies to the assessment with exactly that observation, except even better since it's backed up by data.

Wish somebody told me earlier

[EdIII]

I kept wondering how the fuck a Google banner could be responsible for lost productivity. I am on Google all the time searching for stuff and saw it once and thought cool and moved on....

Till today when I found out it was fucking playable.

So yeah, there is going to be some lost productivity due to this, but it will take decades for Google to get anywhere near the records set by Minesweeper and Solitaire.

Re:BREAKING NEWS!!!! MICROSOFT FIGHT BACK...

[Grishnakh]

I thought, knowing Microsoft, that they would instead make a unique game featuring Clippy or Bob or that little dog. And the object of the game would be to defeat the evil free-software hordes.

Muh-wah-hah-hah-hah...

[Jawnn]

[Dr. Evil voice] My most diabolical plan ever, wherein I will unleash on the world a computer program that will drain the world's productivity. Think of it. Meeleeyuns of hours of productivity sucked way by my marvelous creation... [/Dr. Evil voice]

Thats nothing- how much time to dissasemble it?

[acomj]

Someone seems to have taken a pac man rom and figured out how the game works. How the different ghosts move and follow you to why you can sometimes "miss" a ghost.

Facinating read... oddly hosted on someone's personal comcast account.

http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html

Take your time...

Ok, we brought this up...

[jra]

Can I just say that I *love* firefighting work, cause it's the last bastion of objective capability over affirmative action?

That unconscious guy in the burning building doesn't *care* that you're female, and can only drag 150 pounds; he still weighs 200.

And amazingly enough: the exams recognize this.

A better estimate: $0 person hours

[junglebeast]

This game only costs person hours if that time would have been spent towards labor if the game didn't exist.

People find distractions all throughout their daily lives, and it is silly to think that the existence of 1 more distraction is going to make a difference. Those people who felt like working kept working, and those people who were looking for a distraction found one, but they would have found one anyway.

Not mentioned in the statistics...

[Dahamma]

...is the additional 100 million hours of productivity lost from all of the imagination-less people posting, blogging, tweeting, and re-tweeting the same inane comment, "wow, Google's Pac-Man logo just ruined millions of dollars of productivity today."

Makes same wrong assumptions as MPAA/RIAA/SPA

[swb]

The RIAA/MPAA/SPA make the assumption that every pirated copy is a lost sale, and then complain loudly to government and in the media about their "lost revenue", even though they have no data (that they are willing to share...) that says those people with the pirated copies would have bought a legitimate copy if a pirated copy was not available.

This is the same problem with the Pac Man "lost productivity" argument; it assumes the time spent playing Pac Man would have otherwise been spent productively. At least as insane a judgment as the piracy claimants, if not more so, since it's easily reasonable to assume that people who fuck around, fuck around regardless and that some people may have played Pac Man instead of some other form of fucking off like 20 minute cigarette breaks, long lunches, bullshitting around the coffee maker, etc.

But it's a great publicity stunt on their part; there are a ton of companies out there with obsessive, micromanaging and dictatorial bosses who would love to hire them to help "find" all the unproductive employees and systems that they just know are costing them money.

And what about the gains ?

[unity100]

what about the efficiency gains due to decreased stress levels of employees ? something that affects everything ranging from reducing in-office quarrels to better communication ?

that's not so easy to calculate is it.

Re:Sorry to be pedantic

[TouchAndGo]

Your own wikipedia link indicates that using it as a synonym for raising the question is increasingly common, and that there's debate over whether the usage should be considered correct or not.