To Play or Not to Play
It all seemed so innocent, back in the 1980s when Microsoft started shipping a simple game of solitaire with its Windows software packages.
The company reasoned that a computer version of the familiar card game would entice technophobes to use the mouse needed to make Windows work. First-time mouse users learned the techniques of point, click and drag by manipulating the computer cards on their screens.
From that modest beginning, some say, computer game-playing in the workplace has grown into a multibillion-dollar scourge, an addictive pastime that is sapping productivity and harming the profitability of corporations large and small.
As computers grow more powerful, the work force more computer-literate and the games more alluring and accessible, the fear of games in the corporate world has grown exponentially. Depending on whom you ask, those fears are either more than justified or entirely unreasonable.
Game advocates dismiss as alarmist the notion that workplace game-playing poses a serious threat to productivity.
“All it takes is a few employees or a few employers going overboard to come up with a doomsday scenario that probably will never happen,” says Garth Chouteau, spokesman for Total Entertainment Network, an online gaming service based in San Francisco.
Horror stories are out there, Chouteau acknowledges, but “the average employee who plays games at work is probably not less productive--and may even be more productive” as a result of playing games.
That is what Johnny Wilson, editor of Computer Gaming World, thought when he initially encouraged his employees to play games at work. After all, Wilson reasoned, at a magazine devoted to tracking the hottest games, where to buy them and how to win them, employees had to play. Recreational playing seemed a good idea.
“We started with what I thought were the most innocuous games, where you made a move and e-mailed it to the next guy,” Wilson says. “I used to allow that to go on all day long, starting in the mid-’80s.”
Wilson’s benevolent view began to shift, however, as the games grew more irresistible and more of his staff members began playing for longer stretches of time.
“I had people on staff who were not disciplined enough to get their work done before they went on to the next move,” Wilson says. “I got really upset when I realized that deadlines were being missed as game-playing expanded.”
Beyond the drag on productivity, Wilson says, “I got tired of buying new mouses to replace the ones that were thrown on the ground in anger, and I got tired of closing the door to the lab because of the cloud of blue language coming from the guys who were playing the games.”
In 1994, Wilson says, he banned even lunchtime game-playing of the popular networked game Doom and began restricting recreational gaming to after 5 p.m.
“There was some grumbling, but some said, ‘You know, we really were letting it get out of hand,’ ” Wilson says. Most nights, he says, several employees stay an hour or more after work to play.
Why play at work? One reason, game advocates and managers agree, is that the newer, more exciting games, such as Quake II--like Doom, developed by id Software of Mesquite, Texas--require a powerful computer with a lot of memory. Players sometimes just don’t have fast enough, strong enough computers at home to play the newest games.
But there are other attractions to playing in the office.
“Games definitely relieve stress, especially in the high-tech environment,” says Emily Cohen of Check Point Software Technologies Inc., a Redwood City, Calif., network security firm. “Everybody needs a break. A computer game can serve the same purpose for some people as getting a breath of fresh air.”
Cohen says the people most enamored of computer games, particularly the increasingly popular multiplayer games that allow several players in one firm or hundreds on the Internet to play, are software engineers. And software engineers, she points out, rarely have a productivity problem.
“We have a group of engineers here who keep a tent in their office. They sleep in it during crunch times,” Cohen says. Playing games makes no visible impact on their work output.
Problem is, the number of multiplayer games that can be played on a company’s internal network or on the Internet has exploded in the last two years, according to Chouteau. His firm is one of half a dozen that offer Internet games. None is more than 2 years old.
“At the moment, our service is very much geared to the avid game player, and that is usually a technical person,” Chouteau says. “We don’t have very many real estate agents as subscribers.”
But the company is working hard to make it easier for people who aren’t technically minded to play, he says.
“We hope that the whole phenomenon of playing games on the Internet will broaden,” Chouteau says.
And that, says Randy Smith, an avid game player and quality assurance specialist at Mindscape, a software company, may produce a nightmare scenario for employers. What happens if employees with less interesting jobs get turned on to Internet computer games?
“One of the problems I see is that the game-playing becomes very important, and that kind of limits the productivity over a period of time,” Smith says.
At Mindscape, he says, he and other game players devote their lunch hours to playing and stay after work almost every day to play for an hour or more.
“The smart thing for an employer to do is to set aside a certain amount of time for playing,” Smith says. “Otherwise, people will sneak around to play, and that is unhealthy.”
Employers should balance an impulse to restrict playing, Smith says, against the benefits he has seen grow from the games.
“When I came here, I didn’t have time to meet anybody,” he says. “This was my form of socializing. I would hang around after work and make myself a target. The games build camaraderie.”
