There's a new game taking America by storm called Office Worker. This massively multiplayer game simulates an office environment, where players roleplay as workers at a company. The gameplay entails being given tasks that you have to do, responding via the in-game email system. The tasks given out are decided by line managers, who are at a higher level (which the game calls paygrades) than the people below. The idea is to get to paygrade 99, where a player will be the boss and decide on the overall direction for the company.
This highly addicting game has millions of players from around the world playing as office workers. In between tasks, workers are free to socialise in the office lobby, trading hints and tips, as well as recruiting players for your clan (called 'departments' in the game). This is a highly realistic simulation of an office, with 3D scans of different office environments influencing the background scenery and office furniture. The work that is done correlates to real world office tasks, from collecting and analysing data to creating marketing strategies for the next quarter. The simulated work tasks are so realistic that people are logging their game experience on their CV's, and getting hired because of it.
Microsoft quickly partnered with the Office Worker devs so that they have licenses for the MS Office suite in the game (albeit a much more streamlined, stable version as to not crash it). Part of the Terms and Conditions when players signed up clearly state that it was for entertainment purposes and players wouldn't be paid actual money for anything they did in-game, but economists have calculated that millions of dollars worth of labour take place every hour, for free.
This caused a bit of tension between players, with one group taking it extremely seriously, and the others acting more chaotic. It was no secret that the animosity between the groups was there, with dedicated players shouting at others for jumping on desks and obscuring monitors, or making hundreds of cups of coffee and blocking doorways. The develops had to walk a thin tightrope between the seriousness of one group and the freedom of the others. The players who took it less seriously were rarely promoted, sticking at the first paygrade for a majority of their play time. Some had actually carried out work to get to higher positions, only to make the lives of the serious roleplayers hell. Walking through the corridors and meeting rooms, this friction was palpable, with the proximity voice chat feature picking up snatches of conversation about financial forecasting and simultaneously capturing teenagers shouting memes at each other in a meeting room they had barricaded themselves in.
I hopped into the game to find out more about the psychology between the two groups. My first contact was called Craig Snaithson, paygrade 20 Office Wellbeing Manager. He gave me a tour of the virtual office, a skyscraper made of hundreds of floors overlooking a city, giving me some advice on how to progress in the game.
“You need to take this seriously, this is actual work we’re doing.”
“I thought it was just made up.” I say. My avatar is a lanky geek with a white shirt, black trousers. We walk through an open plan office, where dozens of other players are in cubicles.
“On one level, sure. On another, this game is the only way for some people to get actual work experience. Everything you do here correlates to the real world.”
“What do you do in the real world?”
“I got a long-term health condition, but I used to work in an office. For me it goes the other way, I bring my professional experience to the game, help out new players like yourself, it makes me happy I can do some good for people still.” His avatar says.
“Why do you think so many players want to do this fake work?”
“You got people writing job applications with AI, candidates are selected by the companies AI, then people are interviewed by AI, giving answers via AI, and so on. What makes this work any faker than out there?” he says. We stand by a window looking down at the virtual city. “You have a job?”
“I’m a travel writer.” I say. He laughs.
“Maybe you’d get along with our guys and gals down in marketing. You got experience writing copy?”
“Nah.”
“That’s the thing, you can learn! We actually have some really experienced people playing the game, the best in their field.” He says, drinking from a mug of coffee.
“Wow.” I say. And I meant it. I still couldn’t wrap my head around why anyone would spend all their free time playing a game where they did work. But one thing was for sure, the day you don’t understand something and think its stupid is the day you start turning into an irrelevant old man who will be quickly left behind with the constant advancement of culture. You might not like Labubu, but you damn well better buy one!
I hit the offices at the lower levels, with the highest concentration of trolls, griefers and other dickheads. They exploited the underlying mechanics of the game, from the ability for players to move furniture, to editing and deleting other players work, to standing outside meeting rooms playing music over their mics. I try to catch one of the players for an interview, but the first person I speak to turns out to be a ten year old boy.
“67, 67!” he shouts, his mic popping as his avatar twitches backwards and forwards.
“Why do you guys play this game and not Roblox or whatever?” I say. A few more players gather round us, doing the in-game emotes. They had originally been implemented to celebrate in-game wins, such as finishing a complicated piece of work or managing to negotiate an interdepartmental policy. I was surrounded by players emoting ‘Awesome Job’, giving a thumbs up animation. The attached sound file, a little trumpet, keeps playing again and again, cascading over each other in a confusing noise. I try to escape but the other players have blocked me in. I have to shut the game down and start it up again, finding myself in the lobby, wondering how some people had poured thousands of hours into the game already. I had to admit something to myself – I just didn’t get it. But that was okay. I didn’t expect people to understand my work, not everything needed to be for everybody. Although there was something I found curious, beneath all the 3D models of office workers, the tension between the trolls and the try-hards, the bizarre partnership with Microsoft – what was everybody working towards? What was the nature of the work that required so much labour, multiple times bigger than some of the biggest employers in the U.S.? I decided to go meet the boss.
I exit the elevator and into the bosses waiting room, finding it filled with other players wondering the same thing. After overhearing conversations, it was clear a majority of these were journalists from places like the New York Times, the BBC, Reuters, Fox, whatever. They were all clamouring in the anteroom wanting to interview the player at payscale 99, the one who decided what the company did, relaying tasks to the senior directorate below him who in turn relayed further tasks to the managers beneath them and so on, all the way down to players just starting the game and having to make people coffee or sort out A/V equipment. The receptionist was being mobbed by more journalists, trying to bribe them with real-world money, even job offers to be the PA for executives, but they resisted.
“The boss is currently in a meeting. If you leave your contact details, someone will get back to you shortly.” They repeated, again and again. I could see waiting was futile. The thing I had that all these journalists didn’t was that I knew about computer games. I used a Hex editor on a second laptop to insert some code into the game, making my avatar 500 metres tall. For a moment there was a flash as the geometry of the 3D model expanded rapidly, though nobody seemed to notice. I then simply walked through the door to the bosses office and shrank myself back down to normal size.
The bosses office was at the top of the skyscraper, a dark dome with a single window overlooking the city. From this height you could also make out distant mountains and an ocean tiled with a 64x64 animated water texture. There was a big oak desk by the window, with the boss sat in a leather chesterfield chair. She looks up.
“Who are you?”
“Nevermind that, who the fuck are you?” I say.
“I’m the boss. I’ll ask you again, son, who are you?”
“I’m someone looking for answers. Like what does this company actually do?”
“We work.”
“Doing what?”
“I’ll say it again. We work. As in, WeWork. Heard of it?” she says.
“The coworking space provider? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Before the pandemic, we were on track to be the biggest provider of workspaces globally. 2020 changed that. Sure, there’s Zoom, Teams, but none of it really gets to the heart of working together. A few years ago we started exploring virtual office spaces, making a tech demo to show investors what was possible. That tech demo turned out to be a big hit. So much so, it grew into the game you’re playing today.”
“How does that relate to what the players are doing though? Finance, marketing, HR, IT, what’s the purpose of it all?”
“Oh that? It’s nothing, less than meaningless. The actual work is training the next generation of workers on our platform, the whole thing is one big Skinner box aimed at positive reinforcement.”
“I don’t get it.”
“That’s why I’m the boss and you’re just some bum. Look out into the real world. People can’t get jobs, nothing you learn in school prepares you for work. But one thing they can do is play games for 12, 14 hour stretches. By making work a game, we don’t need to pay. In fact, they pay us.”
“Eh, people will get wise to it.”
“That won’t matter. Within ten years, most businesses will be on our platform. Totally remote office work, disaster proof, safe from pandemics, warfare. You’ll even be able to work interplanetary.”
“You’re forgetting how fickle gamers are. This is popular now, give it a few months and they’ll move onto the next thing.” I say.
“Next quarter we’ll be releasing new features. The good boy update will bring in office dogs. The next one, people will be able to use the in-game currency out in the city below us. They’ll be able to buy apartments, cars, go on dates, whatever they want. By Christmas we’re going to roll out our own internet system inside the game, the walled garden to end all walled gardens.” She says. I shake my head in reality. This sounded like hell, but she had a convincing argument. It seemed the world had destined itself to gradually get worse and worse, designing a corporate panopticon where no doors were locked but there was nowhere to escape.
“There’s something you should know.” I say.
“What’s that?” she says.
“I’ve been livestreaming this whole conversation on Twitch.” I say. I had the second laptops camera pointed at my main screen, watching emotes fly up the screen. I expected the boss to say something, but instead she disappears, logging off. She didn’t know I only had two viewers, and I was pretty sure one of them was me, but it didn’t matter. There was just one last thing for me to do. I use the Hex editor again, this time making my character 10,000 metres tall. I stand outside the skyscraper and begin to speak, my voice amplified to the maximum the game allowed, overriding all other audio.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” I say, then spam the ‘Awesome Job’ emote until the servers start to melt.
This whole experience had made me reevaluate my place in the world of work. I was my own boss, my own worker, my own shareholder, a single unit of economic prosperity amongst a sea of human shit. Nobody liked working, but everybody liked faffing around. Maybe the key was to work less, sleep more. Nobody knows.
