Games Businesspeople Play

Some talk about it; some don't. But without question, there are more than a few who are doing something other than VisiCalc down at the shop.

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By day, he pilots his company through production snares and personnel conflicts. By night, flanked by two comrades, he hunches over his IBM Personal Computer, charting a course that will uncover treasures buried deep in an underground cave. Like many chief executive officers, Bruce Williams, president of U.S. Tool Grinding Co., a 100-employee company in Desloge, Mo., plays microcomputer games. Unlike some businesspeople, he cheerfully acknowledges his habit. "It's just plain old fun," he says.

Estimating the number of entertainment disks bought by businesspeople for their own amusement is no easy task. "Probably in the neighborhood of 25% of executives have a game hidden somewhere in their drawers," says Dave Lee, owner of a ComputerLand store in Cincinnati. "You hear them talk to the salesmen about it when they're in the store on their lunch break. They don't seem to be proud that they're playing games. But I know they are [playing them]. I see the sales receipts."

The games businesspeople buy aren't predominantly the shoot-'em-up arcade types beloved by their sons and daughters. Nor, though they take advantage of computer memory and capability, are they played with paddles, joysticks, and the other paraphernalia that convert Apple computers into video arcades. In fact, the most popular entertainment program is, strictly speaking, no game at all.

Flight Simulator, published by Microsoft Inc., is "at the top of the list," says Ed Murphy, software-product manager for ComputerLand Corp. in Hayward, Calif. The program lets users "fly" a Cessna 182 Class airplane in "real time"; that is, it takes as long to go from Meigs field in Chicago to Willard Airport near Champaign, Ill., say, as it would in an actual airplane. The program allows users to operate in three modes: "easy flight"; a reality mode," where you have to worry about such details as running out of gas; and a World War I British Ace war game.

To fly right with Flight Simulator takes more than a little concentration. Patricia Asch, president of MicroImage Inc., a microcomputer consulting firm in Georgetown, Conn., pulls out her copy whenever she gets frustrated working. But, she says, the difficulty of the program generally imakes her frustration worse. "My brother's a pilot, and he adores it," she says. "But I crash continually." Still, she is hooked. "It's so realistic. That's what I love about it," she says.

Although Flight Simulator requires closer attention than some games bought by fun-seeking executives, it is not atypical. Many of the entertainment program that managers buy are "brain games," says Michael Backes, of Chess & Games Unlimited, a six-store, Los Angeles -- area chain that sells board and computer games. Generally, however, they don't buy these programs to give their gray cells a workout. The three primary reasons games sell to businesspeople, says Ed Murphy, are "entertainment, entertainment, and entertainment. Any other reason is strictly secondary."

Murphy does credit the "show-off impulse" with fueling some purchases, however. When businesspeople have a new computer, he maintains, they want something that can demonstrate to colleagues and friends what the machine can do. And, says Lee Davis, manager of Software Atlanta, a two-store retail software company, "showing your average cousin your latest Multiplan spreadsheet isn't going to impress him."

Bruce Williams makes no bones about finding games entertaining. When he brought home his IBM PC nearly a year ago, he played games for about 10 hours the first week. He enjoyed Air Traffic Controller, even though he killed 580 people in two hours. "I felt very badly about it," Williams says. He fooled around with Blingsplatz, an arcade-type program. "I didn't get much enjoyment out of that, because it wasn't a big challenge." But his hands-down favorite was the Microsoft Adventure game, a program in which players find mounds of treasure by solving a series of puzzles and riddles.

"When we first bought the computer," he says, "I would have computer parties. After we'd gotten the kids to bed, I'd invite two other guys over, and we'd work till two or three in the morning trying to solve the riddles of the game." Williams and his friends, a doctor and the vicepresident of a manufacturing company, played Adventure for two or three months, once or twice a week, before he moved his IBM PC to the office. "I guess we probably solved about 30% of the riddles until pressures of work and family took precedence over the game," he says. "There were some problems we spent five or six hours, sometimes several days, trying to solve." To track their progress, Williams and his friends kept a chart -- two big sheets of drafting paper covered with notes and maps.

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