board games & golf

[brainwane]

I grew up understanding "golf" as "a game rich people play while doing low-key industry networking." Indeed I know at least one executive woman who learned how to play golf tolerably well in order to acquit herself well when invited to play by colleagues, clients, etc.

Here in NYC it feels like game nights/board game afternoons are the golf of the programming class. It's kind of assumed that you can play socially, there are gaming circles that also end up serving as industry networking. And you can invite a coworker to a game night and they'll understand that it's social, and not a date, and it's ok if they play really badly as long as they show good sportsmanship.

Is it like this in other cities too?

Edited to add: By the way, I am someone who loves a few board/card games and doesn't love most of them and is willing to play many of them if that's what everyone else in a group of visitors wants to do, and I believe I recognize many of their virtues and their downsides. What I'm specifically curious about is what other cities have this same kind of scene.

Comments

[selki]

It is not, in DC/MD/VA, though there are a lot of boardgamers here (and I am one). I have occasionally worked at jobs here where there was *overlap*. I remember playing Magic:The Gathering with a few geeks in a conference room after work in the late 90's. And at one job over a decade ago, one boss would regularly have teambuilding games (e.g., Robo Rally). But it's not a widespread expectation at IT companies here. The one job I had with mandatory "fun" instead put in your performance review whether you attended their charity marches and "happy hours" and "holiday" parties (raises and bonuses depended on being a "team player").

[brainwane]

Oh interesting. I see another person (removing username for potential privacy concerns) is having a different outskirts-of-DC experience above. Which of course speaks to the different experiences different people can have in the same metro area but in different circles, sub-industries, etc.

The one job I had with mandatory "fun" instead put in your performance review whether you attended their charity marches and "happy hours" and "holiday" parties (raises and bonuses depended on being a "team player").

OH GEEZ. Do they want Dilbert cartoons resentfully pinned onto every cubicle wall? Because that's how they get Dilbert cartoons resentfully pinned onto every cubicle wall.

[selki]

Dilbert cartoons were explicitly disallowed. The schadenfreude happy ending is that the mandatory fun company went for an IPO? and couldn't get funding in boomtime because VCs/banks took a look at their (non)professionalism including, explicitly, the merit review process, and said politely they didn't think the company would thrive under a more regulated format. I was at the all-hands company meeting where the CEO raved angrily about this to his "family", as he liked to call us, and I enjoyed keeping a straight face for it. He had put up a slide with a middle finger pictured at a previous company meeting after some negative reviews the company had received from anonymous employees on Glassdoor.