This, of course, is time spent on the computer. If 15mins more time on google replaced 15mins of time masticating a sandwich, rescuetime isn't going to know about it.
The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
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Re: The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
#12I think the author must have been channelling my mom from 30 years ago. I eventually won the argument with mom about the value of video games by making a profession out of bending computers to my will. The author should "waste" about 20 minutes watching "Jane McGonigal: How Gaming Can Make a Better World" to understand why Google's Pac-Man might have been an epic win rather than a tragic waste.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_be...
Re: The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
#13And what percentage of total work produced do those 4.82 million hours represent? You can't evaluate if it is a "tragic" cost or not without knowing the other half. From their writeup, sounds like average time spent on Google for that day went from 33.6 million hours to 38.4 million hours - an increase of 14% more time spent per person on google.com for a single day. This doesn't sound tragic to me. If the average Re…
I don't think you guys get the joke. They were being sarcastic about the whole "tragedy" they even said so in the first comment.
Re: The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
#14When productivity or work ethic really matters stuff like this has almost zero impact - if anything this just demonstrates how many people are lazy and unproductive. :) When I saw this at work I immediately and automatically thought "cool. i'll check if that's really playable at home later"
i don't think lazy coincides with unproductive as often as our society would like us to think. i think most unproductive people are just profoundly uninspired by what they find themselves doing, and the demeaning label of laziness is a tool to keep them doing it.
you convince someone that the problem is some vague but essential character flaw - laziness - and it discourages/distracts them from considering the possibility of addressing their external circumstances.
Re: The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
#15And what percentage of total work produced do those 4.82 million hours represent? You can't evaluate if it is a "tragic" cost or not without knowing the other half. From their writeup, sounds like average time spent on Google for that day went from 33.6 million hours to 38.4 million hours - an increase of 14% more time spent per person on google.com for a single day. This doesn't sound tragic to me. If the average Re…
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Re: The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
#16When productivity or work ethic really matters stuff like this has almost zero impact - if anything this just demonstrates how many people are lazy and unproductive. :) When I saw this at work I immediately and automatically thought "cool. i'll check if that's really playable at home later"
I don't see why what the first part (before the hyphen) has to do with the rest. I'd agree with the first bit, but not because anyone who dinks around a bit online at work is "lazy and unproductive."
I've probably overstated myself a bit, whilst failing to explain my opinion well because I was writing from an emotional response.
Dinking around online is lunch-time behaviour. If you really have nothing to do, why not take the initiative and do something productive for your employer instead of fooling around on the net? The occasional 5 minutes probably doesn't hurt, but that doesn't make it right either... an hour or two is totally unacceptable.
I'm probably bitter because I spent a fair amount of time in my younger years working low-pay bottom end jobs with lots of manual labour and "physical" engineering type work. There is no dinking around on the internet, and the amount of slacking that is typical in most office roles would result in prompt warnings and a firing, yet somehow easy-peasy office roles are paid more - even if they are similarly low-skill (data-entry, receptionist, office manager etc).
Even so, my "bad" youthful experiences are nothing compared to how, to a very good approximation, the entire human race earns their living.
Hopefully that can explain why my response was so driven by emotion rather than reason, and hence did not make perfect sense?
(I am a programmer now and I work in an office earning £25k - and yes, I do feel guilty about how much I get paid for such an easy job)
Re: The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
#17I don't really see what's tragic about it. People had a little fun for a day for 1/2 hour or so. Not the end of the world, not tragic at all.
Re: The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
#18For perspective:
Last night's Lost finale got 13 million viewers, 2.5 hours each, so that's 32.5 million hours wasted there.
The Superbowl gets ~100 million viewers and lasts... what, three hours? So that's 300 million hours wasted there.
The soccer world cup final is rumoured to get something on the order of a billion viewers, so... that's a lot of hours wasted.
And your entire life, if you never do anything in the least bit worthwhile, will be a waste of approximately 700,000 hours.
Re: The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
#19Won't someone please think of the ghosts!?
How many ghosts were tragically chomped in the pursuit of this so-called diversion?
Re: The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
#20It would be a pretty strange place for Google to be in if folks perceived them us having an ethical responsibility to steer us towards things they see as productive.