I can remember playing PAC-MAN when I was a child, eating the fruit, chasing ghosts after eating the 'power pellet', and trying not to get captured by them when they turned back to their colorful origins. They created a playable Google Doodle of PAC-MAN, for the 30th Anniversary of the game.

After all, having happy employees is a good thing.Google has done it again- only this time, it was better than ever. Still, I suspect that many, many more people had a great time with the Google experiment, and I bet even most businesses didn't mind too much. And some companies and government agencies surely had to figure out how to disable Google's home page because of policies banning game playing at work. Later in the day, Google modified the game so that the sound could be turned off, but before that happened, a lot of people certainly struggled with that. What's more interesting to me is how much time people lost because other people were playing Pac-Man, or because they couldn't figure out how to stop the game from running automatically and playing its theme music.Īfter I wrote about the release of the remake, I got a flood of e-mails from people complaining that they couldn't figure out how to shut off the game, and the music. Clearly, that number is an average, and so it masks that fact that some people probably lost most of their day Friday to Google's remake of the 30-year-old game. After all, how much time does the average person spend not doing work when other time-sucks come along, like presidential elections, sports championships, 'Lost' finales, the death of celebrities like Michael Jackson, and so on.

Still, it's hard to get too worked up over 36 extra seconds of time someone might have spent on Google.

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