Quote:We confess to having burned a few good man-hours in the philanthropic interest of supporting Google’s nostalgia-fueled enthusiasm, but Rescue Time did a bit of data-crunching this week that’s got the blogosphere all tripped-out about how much productivity businesses lost on account of the game.

The scary stats (assuming, per Wolfram Alpha, that Google had 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23), lifted directly from Rescue Time:

o The Pac-Man game consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention a typical Google Search gets in a day)

o $120,483,800 is what it "cost," assuming the average Google user "costs" $25/hr (roughly 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).

o For that cost, you can apparently hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to its mop-wielding help, for six weeks in total. o $298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of Pac-Man players have an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

In lay terms, this means Google Pac-Man "cost" businesses 4.82 million hours and $120 million in productivity. That is, if you assume employees are working all hours that appear on their timesheets. But come on, we all know better: social networks alone apparently cost companies $2.25 billion in worker productivity.

But then again, the morale tradeoff can result in an overall productivity boost, according to some, and even improved staff retention, claims Wharton.

Rob Wrote: I didn't get it.

Rob Wrote: No kidding, I was the first to make a thread about it. I don't get what's the point of the article.