The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours

http://blog.rescuetime.com/2010/05/24/the-tragic-cost-of-google-pac-man-4-82-million-hours/

by jazzychad • 16 years ago

169 59 16 years ago

blog.rescuetime.com

doki_pen• 16 years ago

Oh yeah, I definitely would have been productive for those 15 minutes if it wasn't for pacman. </sarcasm>

jheriko3• 16 years ago

When 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"

revaaron2• 16 years ago

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."

jheriko3• 16 years ago

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)

exit• 16 years ago

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.

davidblair• 16 years ago

I hate the nickle and dime approach to productivity. In fact, the happier I am the more I get done.

notauser• 16 years ago

That's true, but the time-tracking approach encourages me to work hard for a while and then switch off and do something else.

Nothing sucks my motivation more than sitting around for 8 hours thinking I'm working and getting nothing done.

joe24pack• 16 years ago

that's why I do the low-tech paper, pencil and time pomodoro technique, especially when working on drudgery tasks like database conversions.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

Further, the "figures" don't take into account the possibility that someone who choses to spend time in this way might be impelled to not spend time in some equally "unproductive" fashion during some other part of the day.

revaaron2• 16 years ago

Am I the only one who didn't see this? I never go straight to http://google.com, but use the search box or vimperator's ":open google search terms." To think, I had to lose productivity in traditional ways...

pavs• 16 years ago

You can still play it. They made a permanent place for it here: http://www.google.com/pacman/

According to their blog post its staying there: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/pac-man-rules.html

streblo• 16 years ago

I played it for about 15 minutes and really enjoyed it. Tragic.

brown9-2• 16 years ago

And 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 RescueTime user spends 4 and a half minutes on Google each day, an extra 36 seconds isn't going to destroy the economy.

tjmaxal2• 16 years ago

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.

webwright• 16 years ago

Thank you! :-) Yeah, more time is "wasted" getting coffee every day. We thought it was a lot more interesting how LITTLE actual time was spent on Google search and how the Pac-Man logo resulted in a 15% bump on average time logged.

nandemo• 16 years ago

This seems fairly common on HN: sarcasm and subtle humour just goes over (many) peoples' heads, and people keep discussing it as if it were serious.

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.

ezy• 16 years ago

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.

dobbse• 16 years ago

I 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...

sebastian• 16 years ago

I 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.

hugh32• 16 years ago

For 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.

minouye• 16 years ago

IMO watching the Super Bowl is time well spent...

Charuru• 16 years ago

Wrong audience.

Sukotto• 16 years ago

How many of those things impact productivity during work hours?

jorgeortiz85• 16 years ago

Mexico shuts down during Mexican world cup games. People don't work, there are literally no cars on the street.

treyp• 16 years ago

i don't like the throwing around of the term 'wasted'

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?

malnourish2• 16 years ago

I agree. I always here about how people "waste time" by enjoying themselves. Since when is enjoying yourself a waste of time?

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.

hugh32• 16 years ago

Of course I was being facetious in describing them as wasted, just as the original article was. If you really thought of every moment spent at leisure as "wasted time" you'd go mad.

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.

noonespecial• 16 years ago

Won't someone please think of the ghosts!?

How many ghosts were tragically chomped in the pursuit of this so-called diversion?

malnourish2• 16 years ago

We would like to see this statistic.

Sincerely, People for the Ethical Treatment of the Super Natural.

jasonlotito• 16 years ago

PETSN doesn't sound right.

People for the Ethical Nurturing of the Insubstantial Supernatural sounds better.

praptak• 16 years ago

Dude - chill down, they are dead already. This is what makes them ghosts!

peteforde• 16 years ago

It 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.

timmorgan• 16 years ago

I still got everything done on Friday I thought I would, even though I spent about 15 minutes on Pac-Man. But I don't build widgets, so it may be different for people who do tiny, Mechanical Turk type tasks.

tjmaxal2• 16 years ago

Seriously, The whole post is just a sarcastic joke. He even says so in the first comment. How could you guys miss that?

protomyth• 16 years ago

what % is that of March Madness?

kmfrk• 16 years ago

It's okay; they were waiting for Battle.net to work in StarCraft 2 again anyway.

jcl• 16 years ago

Of course, that's not including the time lost to support calls:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9177261/Google_s_Pac_...

10ren• 16 years ago

504,703,000

Are there really half a billion people online? (let online visiting google on a particular day)

alex_c• 16 years ago

A lot more than half a billion.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

hackermom• 16 years ago

People would of course spend their usual "recreational minutes" away from work on whatever else, regardless of that Pac-Man version.

_bfhp• 16 years ago

There needs to be a tradition in this world. One hour out of the day, everyone stops everything and does something productive. Read a book for an hour. Code for an hour. Do something, or it's a faux pas.

zackola• 16 years ago

Time well wasted.

msie• 16 years ago

I am not a resource, I am a free man.

crsmith• 16 years ago

I spent more time reading this article than playing Google Pac-Man.

mtarnovan• 16 years ago

Yeah, let's make the workday 16 hours long instead of 8. That would save uncountable billions every year, right ?

kingsley_20• 16 years ago

Does anyone else thing that this was a massive experiment? I mean, Google MUST have lost some revenue. This is the first time that they've added anything interactive to the home page. They must want to learn something enough to do that.

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.

bobbin• 16 years ago

> I mean, Google MUST have lost some revenue.

Maybe an employee developed it in his 20% of time and they put it up because "why not?".

megablast• 16 years ago

I think he means lost revenue due to people not searching and clicking on ads as much.

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.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

This was just googles stealth entry in to the gaming market.

Wait until next week, when you'll see donkey kong on the homepage and no searchbox.

anemecek• 16 years ago

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

Bertrand Russell

nir• 16 years ago

I understand RescueTime wanting the exposure, but it's too bad many people and publications will now take this number seriously, as if it has any meaning, just because they were given a number to hang on to.

tszming• 16 years ago

Why no one mention how many hours people spent on facebook everyday?

Ans: over 8 billions minutes => 133M hours per day.

jodrellblank• 16 years ago

Made it onto the BBC News site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10153286.stm

The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours

Related Stories