Play at work without damaging your career

March 7, 2010 4:28 PM

Can't You See I'm Busy? Let’s face it; we all want to relax every now and then, but still want to appear professional or busy! That’s why all [these] games ... are designed in a way that nobody can see that you’re gaming. In fact, your boss and colleagues will think that you’re working harder than ever before.
posted by crunchland (24 comments total)

that's pretty good.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 5:04 PM on March 7, 2010

Reminds me of Ghostzilla.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:07 PM on March 7, 2010

Sure beats rapid toggling between Tetris and dBaseIV. Oh yeah, that was in 1991.

If you need to hide your gaming at work, you should be fired.
posted by fourcheesemac at 5:09 PM on March 7, 2010

A girl I was seeing a while back mistook a Nethack game for programming-related work the first time she saw it. I've since wondered if I couldn't get away with playing it outright in certain office environments. Just one terminal window open next to a text editor, a browser window, and maybe a spreadsheet or two...
posted by weston at 5:37 PM on March 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

If you need to hide your gaming at work, you should be fired.

This seems to be part of the reason why these games are designed, not entirely seriously, to help you avoid getting caught.
posted by Hicksu at 5:37 PM on March 7, 2010

This would never work because people would actually look intense and interested in what they saw on the computer screen which would obviously give them away...
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 5:39 PM on March 7, 2010 [5 favorites]

Thinking about the fact that so many need surreptitious gaming to make it through their soul-killing jobs (myself included) makes me want to get out my pitchfork and foment some goddamn revolution. Or go live under a bridge.
posted by emjaybee at 5:45 PM on March 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

A girl I was seeing a while back mistook a Nethack game for programming-related work...

That was my first impression of C too. "Why is there SO MUCH punctuation, especially on a line by itself?"
posted by DU at 5:48 PM on March 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

Considering that it unexpectedly played an ad before the game, with audio, I'm glad I wasn't using this site for its stated purpose.
posted by Kalthare at 6:05 PM on March 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

seems like office workers would need to do more typing than these games require xD
posted by rubah at 6:28 PM on March 7, 2010

> I've since wondered if I couldn't get away with playing [Nethack] outright in certain office environments.

One of my husbands regularly has a telnet window open at work. It connects to one of two places: a remote server running Tinyfugue, with which he mucks, or to a different server that runs Crawl, a Roguelike.

So. Yes, yes you can.
posted by egypturnash at 6:31 PM on March 7, 2010

Make one that looks like Final Cut Pro, then I'm set...
posted by nathancaswell at 9:07 PM on March 7, 2010

One of my husbands

what
posted by Nothing... and like it at 9:35 PM on March 7, 2010 [7 favorites]

Pretty funny. It would be cool if you could upload and play with your own documents.
posted by roll truck roll at 10:06 PM on March 7, 2010

what

"Carmine said one boy... here are two."
posted by weston at 1:09 AM on March 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Now I know I've been up too late. I'm trying to figure out how hard it would be to tweak nethack so that you start out with 1-2 husbands as pets, rather than a dog or a cat.

That's probably already in Slash'EM, anyway.

I think I prefer real life to nethack; my real cats don't scavenge all the food that they see quite as fast as nethack pets, nor do they attack hobbits and gnomes. (To the extent of my knowledge.)
posted by sebastienbailard at 2:29 AM on March 8, 2010

Make one that looks like Final Cut Pro, then I'm set...

Nonono you're thinking too small. You need a solitaire program that can be skinned to look like Excel, AutoCAD, Outlook, Quicken or insert specialized program of your choice.
posted by edbles at 5:23 AM on March 8, 2010

Already blocked here on the firewall for being in the "Games" category. I guess I should become actually busy.
posted by Xoder at 6:01 AM on March 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

> what

They came as a matched set.
posted by egypturnash at 7:15 AM on March 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

can someone explain to me what If you need to hide your gaming at work, you should be fired means? does it mean that you guys go to work to play games? and your boss is cool with that? if so, i want a job where you work. because that just sounds like crazy talk to me.
posted by msconduct at 7:36 AM on March 8, 2010

Dwarf fortress recently added a text-mode, so that should help.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 9:17 AM on March 8, 2010

can someone explain to me what If you need to hide your gaming at work, you should be fired means?

It means that fourcheesemac will be 1,103,227^th against the wall when the revolution comes.
posted by clarknova at 9:23 AM on March 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

It means that fourcheesemac will be 1,103,227th against the wall when the revolution comes.

Nonsense. We'll deal with him as we deal with all apostates; give him a short sword, and throw him into to a 10'x10' room where the orc guarding the chest can take care of him.
posted by sebastienbailard at 1:42 PM on March 8, 2010

I don't even have a job or a boss to worry about and I just wasted half my day playing one of the games.
posted by _paegan_ at 3:03 PM on March 9, 2010