Philipp has made a game he calls “The Google Adventure“, a choose-your-way text game.
The game invites you, a new Google hire, to make a series of choices that will supposedly lead either to fame or Plaxo. Five minutes in, I haven’t done much adventuring, so maybe someone can suggest a path that doesn’t have me getting fired for playing Minesweeper.
I remember seeing an online choose-your-own-adventure game that invited participants to write branches that weren’t written yet, a sort of wiki adventure, maybe we could try that, adding in all the different things that a Googler can do, like:
Build a wacky/useful/massive revenue project in your free time
Use your free 20% time to play with your kids, or volleyball
Run over a Google founder with a Segway
Get fired for blogging
Become a very boring type of superhero who hunts down search spammers and has only one very strong superpower: deindexing
Be older than most Googlers, hate the Google culture and sue them because you didn’t have fun
Snap your spine over a large, colorful ball and spend the rest of your life hooked up as an AI within a Google datacenter
Go on the Google ski trip, everyone gets trapped by an avalanche, and we find out what PhD brains taste like when you have to survive
Run a raid on Yahoo and steal their mascot. Realize Yahoo doesn’t have a mascot, steal Zawodny’s glider
Add AJAX to your kids mittens
Forget about your job and wait for your stock options to vest
Move to the Kirkland office and listen to jealous Microsoft employees
Date Marissa Mayer
Date Larry Page
Date Google Calendar (good luck!)
Aquire a promising startup, distribute their team throughout the company, and forget the startup ever existed
Discover you have a 187 IQ. Spend the rest of your career wearing the dunce cap
Come up with your own in the comments, or try to figure out which of mine actually happened.
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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