Normally, while I work, I’d be listening to almost nothing but videogame music as it is scientifically the best type of background “noise” to jump start your brain into KICK-ASS-WORK mode. Today I have The Office DVD commentaries. Why the change?

Well, despite the fact that being raised on videogames means I am acutely aware AI will inevitably go crazy and take over the world, I’m working on my AI assistant for Games Done Legit. AI is creating a big firestorm in the non-business, fan/hobby worlds I dabble in, but that’s another blog post.

Do I want machines thinking for me? I mean, no more so than they already do. And I’m a writer, too, so I really don’t like the dystopian image of AI creating written content for other AI to scrape for SEO and stuff.

But do I enjoy my business struggling to keep up with the 10 million things I can or should be doing everyday? No. I just get farther behind in a cycle of “I suck at this,” “I hate ADHD,” “Why do I enjoy DDR more than sales calls,” etc., which does not motivate me to catch up. Quite the opposite.

So luckily a friend who’s a developer and AI expert had a conversation with me, and gave me a folder of directions to point AI to, and step-by-step it just tells me what it needs. It’s pretty amazing so far but setting up still was about 20-30 hours of work for me before I could do anything cool with it.

But it’s a great way to start the day to actually have a “real” assistant be like “here’s what you HAVE to do today, and here’s priority in your inbox, and here’s what coming up”. But most importantly, you can fire-and-forget a lot of asks and tasks and it just does it.

And while there are growing pains, you’d have the same thing being in a new, real person for the first time. I had a great kid as a paid intern for two summers so I know how great this can be when someone (or something, I guess now) is up to speed.

So, while I go back and forth chopping off daily tasks and wish-list stuff with AI, I was like, yeah, DVD commentaries. Educate as well as entertain.

I can only even write this right now (with a big event tomorrow, and all the email/logistics/quotes I’m catching up now) because AI is popping away and I can check back in every now and then. (And I turned off the commentary to write). So that right there is great.

A funny thing that happened too ties into the ever-present caveat of AI too of “sometimes it makes up crap”.

On the first episode of The Office Season 3, where Jim transferred to a different branch and new characters are introduced, in-show he talks about how every plays Call of Duty against each other on their (apparently nice-ass) work PCs to waste time. And he sucks ass at is somehow.

I told AI to file this nugget of “videogames in media” away for a blog post or something. It told me Rashida Jones was new in Season 2 and not 3 and that I might be wrong basically. I asked where they got the info from because lol it is incorrect. It’s funny that, like every alpha asshole you’ve ever met, AI corrects but glosses over its mistakes a little too quickly.

Anyway, I’m not going to even talk about how I find it 100% unbelievable that Jim is trash at videogames.

But the cast talks about how this is in the show because after the pilot, the show writers all started playing CoD sometime after the pilot.

I’ve done LAN Halo for one team-building event over the years, for an I.T. team. It’s not something I suggest because I feel it might be really tough for someone who doesn’t play modern games or is used to a modern controller.

But obviously in their case,  the writers had so much fun with it they worked it into the show, and the cast used as an ice breaker for team-building as a by-product!

I think that’s the magic of videogames, and that’s why everything I do with Games Done Legit, I start with an activity designed and engineered to be fun from the get-go. The problem with a lot of modern apps and experiences is that they are designed to be addictive rather than fun.

I talked about this in my Disrupt HR talk recently. Addictive is like gambling — you feel compelled to keep doing something. you don’t maybe even enjoy.  That’s totally different from something your brain interprets as fun. Like OG videogames.

It’s also always nice to see videogames shown in a positive light (just as they really are). I love that they really are all playing CoD on the PCs. You can tell because 2000s-era LCD monitors are so cruddy, you couldn’t have faked the image quality they had. They really set up teams with the characters’ names and they are really playing. (Andy’s avatar is actually “Here Comes Treble”, the character’s singing group, which I don’t think had even been mentioned on the show yet!)

Sometimes when I mention DDR people mention the movie Grandma’s Boy because a character plays on a home version. He’s supposed to look impressive but he’s really just flailing his limbs while failing badly (like anyone would playing the first time). Lame.

I just care about videogames so I appreciate when someone else cares to, as The Office clearly did, and the game isn’t just a prop or punchline. Videogames deserve better!

Just some notes about something fun I found. Hope you enjoyed it! Keep playing!