
Can gaming become the happy-hour for remote teams? - linhub
https://fpetra.dev/post/189220264349/remoteandgaming
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vidanay
Gaming is not universal. I personally don't like any FPS gaming; I'm not good
at it, and it gives me nausea.

To me, this would sound like "mandatory fun time."

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dllthomas
I think your argument applies at least as strongly to Happy Hour.

In both cases, parameters should be picked to accommodate the preferences of
as many people as possible, the experience should be set up to allow some
participation by those unable to participate fully, and it should be optional
in the first place.

~~~
leetcrew
I don't think the argument applies nearly as strongly to happy hour. if you
don't like drinking, you can still enjoy some food and talk to your coworkers.
I understand it's not very fun to be sober around a bunch of drunk people, but
they really shouldn't be having more than a drink or two at a company event in
the first place. I guess it's especially tough on recovering alcoholics, but
no more than the entire outside world.

~~~
dllthomas
Depending on the game and setup, you can probably talk to your coworkers
during the game without actually playing. This should be taken into account in
selection of game and setup.

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leetcrew
I was thinking about it in a remote context. personally I find sitting in
discord but not playing the game is a lot more boring than being at a bar and
not drinking.

at an irl event with games, it's not weird at all to socialize without
playing.

~~~
o-__-o
We host lan games after hours and welcome spectators, they can watch and
communicate with the dead or just hang out on slack.

We also do Netflix night, where we all watch a movie at the same time on
fridays around 330 and talk about it in slack

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eecc
As a European I keep failing to understand this insistence at keeping
employees in the loop 24/7\. Don’t you have a social life or identity outside?

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sesuximo
I can't speak for every American but usually things like this are optional and
I'm pretty happy to go if I have nothing else to do

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justinhj
Ultimately not everyone will want to take part and the ones that do will form
a clique that is in the know. I’ve experienced this and other unofficial
cliques over the years. People who smoke was one; people at all levels of the
company forced into a small area a few times a day. They were always well
informed. Another is people who like to come in late and work all evening.
This excludes those with family, and I worked at several places where
important meetings and work were done after 6pm

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11eleven
Side note: I found it quite difficult to read the article with the fast motion
animated gifs.

I noticed that animated gifs are increasingly used to "spice up" content, but
in reality, their motion is distracting and can make it hard to read the
surrounding text. A relevant still image works fine.

~~~
Larrikin
Its extremely frustrating that all the browsers removed the escape key trick.

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the_pwner224
What was the escape key trick?

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icebraining
Historically, in IE and Netscape/Firefox, pressing escape would pause all
gifs. Webkit-based browsers don't have that functionality, though, and Firefox
removed it seven years ago.

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0db532a0
Unless you’re happy with playing a supporting role, gaming should be left as
an activity for friends only. Higher-ups do not like being shown up by lower-
downs. This doesn’t only apply to team sports.

I learnt this by coming second in a solitary, competitive sport for the
Christmas event, which the higher-ups were into in their free time, and which
I had no experience with, as a new, young employee. I came first in a
similarly solitary sport we all participated in the following year.

My project manager had been going around telling everyone how good he was at
this sport, how we shouldn’t even bother. This encouraged me to make even more
of an effort. He came second, his manager third. He and a few others booed me
while I received the trophy.

It didn’t last long there. Just let them win.

~~~
icebraining
Sounds like a good learning experience. Cocky arrogant people will generally
resent you for showing them up, you should only do so if you don't mind the
possible consequences.

Better to learn that in an inconsequential game than in a project, where you
might weeks or months of work shot down (even at the expense of the company).

Thankfully most of my bosses weren't like that, they had their flaws but I
never feared such pettiness. If your local job market is good, don't settle
for that crap.

~~~
0db532a0
I learnt that both in the game and in the project. I'll probably never learn.

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mr_tristan
As a remote engineer these days, not sure a gaming session with my team is
what I need on top of work. I do my own gaming, and have pretty different
preferences from everyone else. We do physically get together 4x a year, which
is honestly more then enough to develop strong social bonds.

One thing my company did for a while was a “random coffee chat”. You could opt
in and get matched up with someone, and basically chat for 30 minutes about
whatever once a month. This was awesome, because I actually met very different
roles at the company, like sales engineers or the head of HR. Not exactly the
“social time” of happy hour but almost more valuable

~~~
codesnik
I've pitched that idea for my part-remote company, because remote workers
really left behind. I wonder, why just once a month?

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mr_tristan
Honestly, I couldn't see it really working much more frequently with some
functions and people spread out over timezones. It was common to not be able
to meet up at for a week or two with some roles - sales would be traveling,
too many issues, meetings. etc

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ajuc
When I started last job my friend who hired me for a small team hooked me on
dota2.

We played 1 hour each day in the break time. It was fun, but there were
downsides:

\- 1 hour later at home

\- addictive

\- it's very frustrating when you play well and lose

Eventually we stopped it and instead started play ing oing-pong with guys that
rent offices in the same building. It takes much less time, it's exercises,
and even if you lose it's all on you and there's much less competitiveness
than with dota.

Of course it wouldn't work for remote teams. If I can give advice - choose
games that can be over quickly (15 minutes not more, certainly not 1 hour),
and that aren't very competitive.

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freddie_mercury
A bit disappointing that the article doesn't discuss gender at all and whether
making Fortnite, which is 75% male players, a key part of company culture ends
of making it hard for women to get promoted, be recognized, etc.

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/865625/fortnite-
players-...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/865625/fortnite-players-
gender/)

~~~
Mountain_Skies
Even if you find a game that has a gender balanced community, that's no
guarantee that it will be as attractive to an equal number of each gender on
your team. Also if you're going for gender equality why would you not also go
for racial and ethnic equality too? At my last job we had three developers
from Nigeria. All thought games (excluding actual physical sports) were for
children and looked negatively upon adults who played games. How would you not
end up excluding them?

~~~
RHSeeger
Having been the person that despised going to the various sportsball games
that everyone at the company went to, and wound up being excluded without so
much as a second thought? I'm not sure I'd worry too much about excluding
them. No matter what you pick, there's bound to be some people that just can't
enjoy it.

~~~
kd5bjo
Why pick only one thing? If this is a weekly or monthly event, there’s no
reason it has to be the same every time; why not have a variety of events on
rotation so that you’re not alienating the same set of people every time?

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hmwhy
For someone who's tried seeking remote work (and kind of failed because most
of my colleagues don't work remotely), remote work is all about work-life
balance for me, and it signals that my employer intends to be lean and agile
(mostly small companies?) and/or values my work-life balance.

If it's done the way it's proposed in the article then I think I'd think twice
about working remotely for that company, this part is a particularly huge red
flag for me:

> Also, the founders (or management if it’s a bigger company) should signal
> that this is something good, encourage it.

It also feels a bit odd that a remote team needs to "foster cohesion". Isn't
the whole point that remote work is successful for some companies because the
people who are involved with it are good at communication, function
cohesively, and hyper-focused _when it comes to getting stuff done_?

Admittedly I have never worked a truly remote role, but the reasons given in
the article are all the reasons that I don't want to apply for a particularly
remote role.

Edit: typo (remote --> remotely).

~~~
astura
>It also feels a bit odd that a remote team needs to "foster cohesion".

Some people (in SV?) seem to be unwilling or unable to work on a team where
everyone just does their job, they want to be friends with their teammates as
well. They justify that with "team chemistry is really important."

I don't really get it myself.

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rdtwo
I think you all are missing the point of happy hour. It’s typically a place
where people talk about things that are inappropriate for work. The coworker
that sucks, the boss that’s bad the project that everyone knows is doomed.
Maybe you talk though a difficult problem and admit some level of failure but
all of these are inappropriate for gaming hour.

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buboard
Highfidelity is not mentioned. They started by building a VR alternative to
second life, but then they pivoted to 3d chat for remote teams. In fact i
think plain secondlife is a fun environment for a virtual team to socialize.
Teams can run the open source opensimulator server and use it as a virtual
watercooler.

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oneshot908
I know of a team at an AI-oriented company that uses Reinforcement Learning to
find cheats and exploits in 2600 games as their happy hour activity. No need
to work late (though one could), just start that training run and hope for the
best.

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chrisgd
I like the idea of trying to find a replacement for happy hour. I think the
better idea is taking that money and randomly distributing it among employees.
If the Company wasn’t going to pay for it, just letting me go home is a better
idea.

~~~
dijit
Better social cohesion makes the company perform better. Companies don’t
allocate money for no reason (sadly) and it’s shown that monetary incentives
only increase individual motivation so much.

~~~
chrisgd
Maybe there is proof to your first comment. I would remain more committed to a
job that randomly gave me $100 once a year than a company that sponsored happy
hours or (in the case of my last employer) had cookies and milk delivered. The
biggest driver of loyalty is job satisfaction and overall compensation is the
biggest driver of that after enjoyment of the job.

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needle0
For me, remote work was first and foremost the experience of continuously
being whipped around by timezone differences between me and the HQ, so I'm a
bit disappointed the article seems to not mention that aspect. I wonder if
asynchronous games can help for remote work in locations with a large time
zone difference.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
While it is a constraint for sure, it is not so different from accommodating
other people schedule anyway. As a professional, I am not available 90% of my
time to interact with others: I have things to do, and if you want to get a
piece of me you have to deal with my schedule. Same with my client. So what do
we do ? We plan, we make compromise.

Time zones managing is the same, it just add a bit more friction to the
process.

When I see people having problem with time zones, it's usually more a symptom
of an deeper issue elsewhere: bad organization, unhealthy communication
habits, unnecessary coupling between parties, micro-management, people not
doing their job and so on.

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virtuallyvivek
"We don’t want to get back to judge people by how much time they spend
working, but by the quality of their output."

Super important to mention this when advocating for more team building. If
anything, remote workers have a tough time unplugging.

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gfodor
Avatar based communication seems likely to be a key tool for remote teams for
a variety of reasons including informal hang-out time. We are developing
hubs.mozilla.com to help fill this need while not compromising on privacy,
etc.

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tpmx
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLqoJwJ-
KX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLqoJwJ-KX0)

Jim Halpert: "At the Stanford branch they all play this video game called
'Call of Duty'.. and they're all really into it. I'm told it started as a
team-building exercise. Unfortunately I really suck at it."

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big_chungus
But what if I don't play video games? I don't enjoy them and don't really like
them, and have moral objections to the content of quite a few. I don't care
about others playing them, but don't think my workplace ought to pressure me
to do so. Also, I don't want to spend several hundred dollars on graphics
processing.

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Mountain_Skies
Wouldn't Euro style games be better for team building?

~~~
tpmx
As a European I've gotta ask: What is a Euro style game?

~~~
Mountain_Skies
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurogame](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurogame)
Baasically, games that focus on cooperation and inclusion rather than winner
takes all type competition.

~~~
tpmx
Thanks. Or as we call them over here, "games". (Only mostly kidding.)

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fwxwi
I will never understand this trend where, during your worktime, you do lots of
stuff that have nothing to do with work. Be it gaming, playing pingpong,
getting drunk, rallying for your favourite political cause, making friends,
psychological therapy, or whatever.

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sys_64738
What about a remote game of poker? Better for drinking a pint.

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wallace_f
Gaming has kept a few teenage friends and I close for years.

I recommend not to play games like Dota which have a reputation for tilting
players, or any games with a particularly competitive atmosphere.

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oo0shiny
I'm really interested in seeing if some of my coworkers would be interesting
in something like this. What sort of games would you recommend?

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wallace_f
Actually I recommend trying different games, even in the same night. And some
of the old games are really good, like Command and Conquer, which seem to have
their own magic to them.

Have you ever been to Japan? They have gaming bars where you play Nintendo and
other console games while ordering drinks. They're really fun and better than
usual bullshit chats at bars or restaurants.

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draw_down
I joined a team that did this. Unfortunately I’m pretty picky about games and
hated the one they played. Tried to get into it for the sake of team bonding
but I just really didn’t like it.

~~~
linhub
Did you propose another game? If you did, what happened?

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throwawayhhakdl
Is this a bad idea? Probably. But I would also argue- vastly superior to golf.

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mrzool
I genuinely wondered if this was parody for a moment. How about stepping away
from the screen and unplug for a while, maybe even go outside and actually
talk to real people?

~~~
linhub
I totally agree that's really important to keep a balance and nurture irl
relationships. But, one has nothing to do with the other. It's supposed to be
at working hours in which you would still be at the computer anyway. And from
my perspective after working remotely for a while is that there's a point
where you want to know more about your peers and share some non-work time.

