I'm thinking about making a game about working in a cubicle. I'm hunting for interesting places in day-to-day white collar work where game mechanics could be interesting. Here are some examples that I've been considering: 1.) The work day itself Workers are always under time constraints of some sort. The day starts at a certain time, the day ends at a certain time. You can always work longer hours, but that will start to degrade your performance, especially in the long term. There's a great short term bonus vs. long term penalty tradeoff here. 2.) Assignments In some types of work, assignments come in at very regular intervals, and some take much longer than others to complete. It's possible to increase your skills by doing harder assignments, and doing assignments on time makes you look good to your boss. You might also want to hand off long, boring assignments to coworkers. 3.) Morale A bored worker's performance isn't as high as an enthusiastic worker's performance. There's a constant battle to keep morale up so it doesn't affect preformance, but spending too much time goofing off and keeping morale high will also affect your performance. 4.) Coffee Coffee seriously increases your productivity, but you can build up a real dependence on it quickly, and on occasion it's not available. 5.) Promotions Employees want to be promoted upwards in some fashion, or at the very least, they want a raise so they can buy nice things. So here's my question. What other aspects of the workplace would be good games in of themselves or could be an interesting part of gameplay?

Maybe something to do with the water cooler?

Nothing passes time like downloading porn.

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Original post by Dancin_Fool Maybe something to do with the water cooler?

Water coolers are useful. Maybe the closer your desk is to the water cooler, the more likely you are to overhear gossip? Oooo, corporate gossip. Maybe you can try to learn gossip about another player and use it to blackmail them into doing work for you.

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Original post by tstrimp Nothing passes time like downloading porn.

See 3) Morale.

trading and buying with the stingy supplies guy

Sounds like you need to read some Dilbert comics.

7.) Escape.

There's a great Hummer H3 commercial [Quicktime file] patterned after The Great Escape. Watch it for inspiration.

Maybe you should add a breaking point to the workers, so if they get overworked they go psychotic, and your player can eithier go psycho or you can save the day and get in good with the boss. Office shootings happen now-a-days so it would be somewhat realistic, at least add a lil bit of that good ole violence and gore factor.

How about some good ol’ LAN games!

Why is it that office workers, and espeally techheads like me working in an outsourced I.T company, are never allowed to install games on their machines?

Damn the mangers who obsess about maintaining a “professional image”.

How sweet it would be to run a quick tournament each Friday, where about 50 people put in 5 bucks each, winner takes all - except they might have to buy drinks afterwards :)

Does anyone work in such a Utopia?