A lot of people hovered on Google's homepage on Friday to check out the interactive game the search engine giant put up to celebrate Pac-Man's 30th birthday. Some only lingered for seconds, while others played for several minutes. Not such a big deal, right? But what is a big deal is how many man hours Google visitors spent playing the game collectively - and it's a big honking number!

According to a study by RescueTime (that I found in [URL=http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20005958-52.html]this story on C|Net[/URL]), Pac-Man on Google burned up 4,819,352 man-hours and a $120,483,800 in lost productivity. RescueTime quipped that, with the "money" burned up from people playing the game, one could hire every single Google employee and all its top executives and founders (Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt) for six weeks.

What the study doesn't show is that works generally waste time doing things when they should be working, like surfing the web, watching videos and internet TV, playing games and much more. On Friday the average user spent 36 seconds playing the game. Another little wrinkle pointed out by C|Net is that some users couldn't figure out how the heck to stop the game from running in Google.

Certainly some technical difficulties might have sullied the results that RescueTime counted. And what's the deal with RescueTime anyway? They count wasted work time like the game industry counts sales lost to piracy; that time would have been lost anyway reading multiple copies of memos from idiot bosses, trying to get the copier to work, or trying to find a useful search result on Bing..

[url=http://www.gameculture.com/2010/05/26/time-waster-pac-man-google]More...[/url]