Google and Pac-Man

Google's "doodles" - the changes to their logo they make every so often to celebrate some national or international event, holiday, or hot news topic - have quickly become legendary. In fact one of the only complaints I have with the iGoogle home page is that we never see any indication that there's a new doodle to enjoy.

Last weekend, two legends collided. It was the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, widely regarded as "the game that started it all" (even though, being first released in 1980, it trailed Space Invaders by two years), and in celebration Google installed its first fully interactive doodle - a working copy of Pac-Man with the maze spelling out "Google" and whose gameplay faithfully reproduced the original, including ghost behaviours, fruits, and even the original bug that corrupts the screen on the 256th level.

Media coverage suggests that the game didn't start playing unless you pressed the Insert Coin button (which temporarily replaced the usual "I'm Feeling Lucky"), but this certainly wasn't true for me. Maybe it's different on Chrome, but the game started right up after a short delay and I reached instinctively for the arrow keys (I was a huge Pac-Man fan) and began playing immediately. I reached the fifth level, which I was pretty pleased about given that I haven't played for, like, 20 years. Some things never leave you.

But celebrating Pac-Man's 30th birthday, and Google's inventiveness and sense of fun, is only part of the reason for this post. And it's the "sense of fun" angle that I'd like to concentrate on first, because to me that's what it was all about. It was a weekend, Google's doodles are a fine tradition that always raise a smile in our house, and this particular doodle gave Google's users the chance - briefly - to relive a much-loved time in their youth when it was OK to while away a few hours chasing an animated cartoon mouth around a maze.

So it was with a dawning sense of OMG that I read some of the 571 comments posted on the news article I found on the subject. Many of them mirrored my own reaction ("wow" "cool" "brings back memories" etc) but fully half of them were complaints about the noise, about the intrusion into their browser space, about the waste of time and money, and any other possible thing you could think of to complain about and even some that would never occur to most people I know. Incredible.

These comments drew stinging reactions from the supporters of Google's efforts, as you'd expect, with people pointing out variously that Google (and all its services) is free, that doodles are only ever up for a day (or two at most), that all computers are equipped with a "mute" function, and that in the end if they weren't happy, why didn't these people just close their browsers or navigate to another page? But all of that common sense couldn't hide the fact that there are vast numbers of people out there who have utterly lost their sense of humour, of fun, and of celebration. And what's worse, they're not even prepared to sit quietly while those of us who haven't lost those things get on with it.

It gets worse.

Someone who must recently have had a humourectomy has now calculated the world-wide LOSS OF PRODUCTIVITY that the Pac-Man doodle caused. Yep. Five million man hours, apparently, giving a total monetary value - based on a low-to-average U.S. salary - of $120 million. A figure arrived at using some broadly-drawn assumptions on the amount of time usually spent on the Google home page versus the amount of time spent there when the Pac-Man doodle was active.

Oh dear. Oh woe is me. For a few extra seconds, all over the world, people weren't making money. Strike us all down with a bolt of lightning. Good grief. One of the saddest aspects of "this modern world" which has crept up on us during those thirty years since Pac-Man arrived, is that too many people have forgotten there is more to life than making money. Lift your heads up from those desks, people. Take your noses from the grindstone for a few precious minutes and have some fun ffs.