
The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours - jazzychad
http://blog.rescuetime.com/2010/05/24/the-tragic-cost-of-google-pac-man-4-82-million-hours/
======
hugh3
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.

~~~
treyp
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?

~~~
hugh3
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.

~~~
ugh
Many people would say the hours where you are productive in order to rake in
some money are – in some sense – wasted.

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.

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

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

------
brown9-2
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.

~~~
tjmaxal
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.

~~~
nandemo
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.

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

------
noonespecial
Won't someone please think of the ghosts!?

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

~~~
malnourish
We would like to see this statistic.

Sincerely, _People for the Ethical Treatment of the Super Natural_.

~~~
jasonlotito
PETSN doesn't sound right.

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

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

[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9177261/Google_s_Pac_...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9177261/Google_s_Pac_Man_freaks_out_Firefox_users)

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

------
kingsley_20
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
> 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
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.

------
jacquesm
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.

------
timmorgan
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.

------
dobbse
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...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html)

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

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

------
revaaron
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
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>

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

------
nir
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.

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

------
detcader
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.

------
ezy
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.

------
peteforde
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.

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

------
sebastian
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.

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

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

------
10ren
504,703,000

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

~~~
alex_c
A lot more than half a billion.

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

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

Bertrand Russell

------
zackola
Time well wasted.

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

------
protomyth
what % is that of March Madness?

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

------
jheriko
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"

~~~
revaaron
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."

~~~
jheriko
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)

~~~
qw
I guess it depends on what work you do. If I worked a 100% of the day, except
for lunch break, my brain would be fried after a few days. 5 minutes an hour
doing something else actually makes me more productive.

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.

~~~
jheriko
5 minute breaks are effective for refreshing yourself and I do the very same
probably about once an hour but this is a luxury of my workplace and is
generally not allowed in manual work - in some situations - e.g. assembly
line, it is crucial that no one take breaks for very long - asking to go to
the toilet can get you fired (I've had this happen to the guy working right
next to me once). I think we've probably tested methods to "perfection" over
the last 5k years or so. This is part of why there is an invisible barrier
between office and shop floor so often - because office guys get a lot of
slack and have easier jobs by many measures. Just being allowed to sit whilst
you work can seem like an incredible luxury to some of these guys stuck
standing at an assembly line or running around a warehouse filling orders. And
I'm sorry, but I'm a programmer - you can train someone to be a programmer,
and most office type jobs on the fly just as easily as an assembly line worker
- they won't be great but neither is the assembly line worker when he starts
out - in both cases it takes years of practice. The difference, to me at
least, seems to be artificially imposed by a combination of broken
supply/demand models and general misconceptions - programmers are in huge
supply, we just pretend they aren't. Most people rely on programming skills in
everyday life - they just aren't told it that way.

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.

