Computer Games: The Newest Threat to Democracy By Richard Craig July 18, 1997

In another bold, historic move to rescue and revitalize America, last night the Senate voted to remove games from all U.S. Government computers.

It's nice to know our legislators can think big when necessary, isn't it? Of all the problems facing this country, apparently the Senate believes the gravest threat to our government and way of life is some guy playing Solitaire while his boss decides what his next assignment will be.

Granted, we really don't want to be paying taxpayer money to people who goof off all day. But if supervisors aren't monitoring their government workers well enough to determine whether or not they're spending half their working hours playing Tetris, we have much bigger problems on our hands.

A move like this is so silly on so many levels that it's almost a thing of beauty. Let's examine it from the beginning. First of all, exactly who identified this as a major problem in government workplaces? My guess is that some hapless supervisor walked in on a few of his employees playing Minesweeper and went berzerk with moral outrage.

There are several possible root causes of his predicament -- the workers don't have enough to do (hard to believe), they've finished their assignments quickly (good for them), or they're fundamentally lazy employees. If the last of these is the case, removing games from their computers won't solve the problem -- they'll simply find something else to waste their time on until they're discovered and fired.

But for those in the second scenario, the good employees who get things done quickly, where's the harm in a brief diversion? As long as they do their jobs effectively and efficiently, why are we tossing them in with the sluggards? It can hardly help morale to know that a good employee could get in trouble for engaging in a little Pac-Man between assignments.

This leads to the more serious concerns here. First, the Senate bill would not only remove games from current government machines, but it would also forbid the government from buying any new computers that have games installed on them. As anyone who's bought a computer at any time in the last 10 years knows, you literally cannot buy a machine without a few games on it anymore.

So what will happen? Either we'll end up spending more taxpayer money to pay somebody to remove games from computers eight hours a day, or we'll have computer manufacturers producing special government models (with appropriate markups for modifications). Either way, the plan would hardly be a money-saving cure-all (as it's currently being advertised).

And what about the first legitimately good government employee who gets fired for sneaking a quick round of Dig Dug before lunch one day? Can you imagine the wrongful-firing lawsuit? It would undoubtedly end up costing us lots of money and (worst of all) make a few more lawyers richer. All of this because supervisors don't know their units well enough to recognize when productivity is down and how to increase it.

For people who allegedly want to cut down on bureaucracy, the Senate certainly seems agreeable to adding yet another superfluous policy. In the middle of all the legitimate wastes of taxpayer money -- the embezzling, the unnecessary departments and positions, the military and industrial boondoggles -- somehow computer games on government machines actually manage to create a stir.

With all of this in mind, there's only one thing I can say to the Senate and its members: You worry about the damnedest things.

©1997 Richard Craig. All rights reserved.

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