The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
blog.rescuetime.com
blog.rescuetime.com
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.
The amount of 'sick leave' around those days is also well above average.
Offtopic: the Mexico-Uruguay match will be fun :) (yes, Uruguayan here)
even if you mean 'wasted potential work time', who's to say that entertainment in short bursts doesn't increase productivity by preventing burn out?
This sort of talk is often directed at financially stable people, too. Sure, there may be "better" things to do with one's time, but we only have one life to live (that we can acknowledge, anyway) so I feel some leisure time is well deserved.
The vast majority of hours of anyone's life are "wasted" in one sense or another, so it's not my problem how anyone else chooses to waste theirs. I just hope that when I get to the end of my hours that the top few hundred of 'em will be enough to justify the hundreds of thousands I spent doing stuff rapidly forgotten.
Time in which you can do whatever you like is what life is all about. You are truly lucky if you can make money with that but most people cannot.
Nothing sucks my motivation more than sitting around for 8 hours thinking I'm working and getting nothing done.
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 RescueTime user spends 4 and a half minutes on Google each day, an extra 36 seconds isn't going to destroy the economy.
That stumped me for a while because people here are smart in general. I won't go into why I think that happens. My conclusion is that it's better not to post anything humourous -- unless it's obviously humourous.
How many ghosts were tragically chomped in the pursuit of this so-called diversion?
Sincerely, People for the Ethical Treatment of the Super Natural.
People for the Ethical Nurturing of the Insubstantial Supernatural sounds better.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9177261/Google_s_Pac_...
If so, what? One possibility is to see if increasing engagement time during a visit has any effects like increased ad conversions or increased time spent on consecutive sessions.
Maybe an employee developed it in his 20% of time and they put it up because "why not?".
Of course, it also drove a lot of people to google to check it out, hard to measure the good feelings towards google due to that. The images they display really does generate a lot of good feeling, for a tiny bit of work for google.
Wait until next week, when you'll see donkey kong on the homepage and no searchbox.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_be...
According to their blog post its staying there: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/pac-man-rules.html
Ans: over 8 billions minutes => 133M hours per day.
Are there really half a billion people online? (let online visiting google on a particular day)
Bertrand Russell
When I saw this at work I immediately and automatically thought "cool. i'll check if that's really playable at home later"
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)
Sure, when I'm in the zone and are lucky enough not to get interrupted I can program for longer periods of time, but I still need a short break now and then.
I don't know where you worked, and since I'm from a different country, the standards may also be different. But where I live, I can't think of a physical job where you are required to work at 100% capacity for a whole day, except for a lunch break. Short rest periods are required.
I live in the UK there are two standard formats for most grunt work - either 2 hrs work 15 mins break 2hrs work 1hr break UNPAID (i suspect not allowed - i think this depends on a legal loophole against the spirit of the law) 2hrs work 15 mins break 2hrs work - or 8 hours with just 30 minutes paid break to be taken in one consecutive lump. i've worked both - its still nothing compared to what most of the world (i.e. China, India and Africa) deal with. I'm one of the very most privileged...
Whilst you work discipline can be illegally strict because it is accepted and nobody questions things if "80% of places I worked were like this - they can't all be illegal" or "its been this way for years" or "big companies know better than to break the law" etc. I'm one of the fortunates with sufficient balls to stand up for myself - even then I don't do it every time that I probably should, but I've seen so many people (the vast majority) treated illegally because it is accepted by their peers, and they just tolerate it. When you explain how they can protect themselves they don't want to because they need the money and don't want to tick anyone off, job security really matters when people tell you you are unskilled and jobs are hard to find - it doesn't matter how many times I tell them I've never been fired for standing up for myself.
Its one of my personal pet peeves - hence the irrationally strong response to, at best, a vaguely related link.
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.