I Played Roblox at Work
And it was encouraged
A couple weeks ago, I had to run a two-day team meeting. These things already contain more than enough stress down from planning the agenda, gathering information for presentations, finding a team building event that doesn’t suck, and even trying to figure out meals, especially with a vegan on the team.
Adding to the stress was a weird two-hour block slapped down on the second day, labeled only as a “Company-Wide Virtual Event”. This was following our global town hall, which was coming from New York City, which wasn’t a usual location. As the date approached, we found out it was because our CEO would ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange.
We all went into parsing every word of the announcement and invites, trying to figure out all the talk of celebrating the future while looking back our past and such. The possibilities ranged from announcing a major acquisition, perhaps even a merger, or our CEO stepping down to truly start a new era of the company.
Instead, we got a shiny new slogan. That’s it. As for the virtual event, we were given an invite to a custom Roblox server, featuring our CEO as an NPC.
I shit you not.
All of a sudden, our meeting turned into an impromptu LAN party as we all tried to install a video game on our heavily locked-down corporate machines (which went as well as you’d expect). The other piece of hilarity was that we just had a company-wide ban on accessing even our corporate Google Drive and Gmail unless it was on a company machine just the week prior. No more personal PC use, which would’ve been nice because I guarantee my gaming & streaming rig would’ve saved me about 30 minutes of fighting with whatever corporate rule/policy that was blocking my trip in corporate Roblox world.
Compounding the hilarity for me is that I’ve banned Roblox in the Tex household. It’s the same reason Fortnight is banned: the entire economy of the game is based on suckering people into microtransactions. I didn’t want my kids asking me to buy that crap nor ask people for the virtual currency as gifts when they could play much, much better quality games without that BS.
Yet, there I was, running my blocky virtual ass through these obstacle courses. Maybe I’ll have my kids farm the coins as some point because…
I’m such a hypocrite.
I Also Presented Extra Life at Work
One of the social committees at my work decided to do a “Not-So-Tech Talk” in which anyone could sign up for a six minute slot to present literally anything.
Of course, this meant I donned an Extra Life eSports jersey and took advantage of the captive audience to tell them all about Extra Life.
The end result was $35 in donations (that’s one shrine and korok for the next stream!), but more importantly I won the “Most Informative” presentation which hit the goal that I really wanted: letting people know that Extra Life exists and how they can join.
I got a couple emails about it too. It was a perfect boost to start the holiday weekend.
I don’t write about this to toot my own horn, but rather to encourage everyone reading this to talking about Extra Life where ever you can. I’m constantly surprised at how well it’s received and how people start looking into it themselves after they hear me talking about it.
That’s how this whole thing went from small, in-person events, to a $100+ million juggernaut.
Fundraising Update
As of today, I sit at $14,665 raised (remember, I have $62 sitting on Tiltify, so gamin4aven.org won’t match). That’s just $335 short of $15K.
Let’s hit that and I’ll toss back another Golden Triforce in celebration.
Weekly Schedule
Notre Dame’s season has come to a close so I’ll resume full focus on Tears of the Kingdom. There will be one final sim before I lay my copy of NCAA ‘14 to rest after over a decade and I should have that scheduled come next newsletter.
I’m also re-working my streaming/VoD scheduling graphic now that my streams are simulcast in multiple places, so hopefully I’ll have that ready for next week as well
Streaming Dates
Tuesday, 9 PM CST
Thursday, 9 PM CST
All streams are simulcast on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter (so I can keep wasting Elon’s money on bandwidth).