Naughty Google! You’ve been wasting employees’ time by forcing them to play Pac-Man when they should have been searching for information that would helped their companies make more money!Or: Cool Google! You celebrated the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man by producing a superb playable version of the classic arcade game inside the Google logo! production of BANDAI.
While I stand firmly in the “cool” camp, probably for the first time in my life, a software firm called Rescue Time is jumping up and down in fury – quite possibly turning blue and wobbling a bit – and claims that Google’s Pac-Man gimmick cost the world economy around $120 million in lost productivity.
BBC News appears to have swallowed this story whole, with an article headlined “Google Pac-Man eats up work time” appearing on its site this morning.
The core of the story is that people normally spend 11 seconds on the Google home page; while the Pac-Man game was live, that increased to 47 seconds on average.
That data was for 11,000 users of Rescue Time software, and it extrapolates this to 504 million unique users who are being paid an average of $25 an hour.
The thing is, it really doesn’t work that way. It’s surely up to employees if they want to spend five minutes playing the game, and if at the end of it they feel more upbeat and cheerful then that’s five minutes well spent. Right?
Anyway, I confess: I completed a level. And I enjoyed it, goddamit. But what about you? And if you’re an IT administrator, have you considered banning Google in the same way you may have banned Facebook?
(Oh, and don’t tell the BBC, but you can still play the game at www.google.co.uk/pac-man).
*CHEERS* again for Google =p
