As well as the expected 'bonding' (e.g. using America's Army to learn about teamwork) one company issues staff with tokens for performing their jobs that can be exchanged for time playing videogames. Personally, in these uncertain times, I would prefer money. Perhaps that's just me.

At Kotaku towers, of course, we are the exceptions that may prove the rule. Our jobs here involve a lot of gaming and the systematic absorption of gaming culture via machines like the ones they use in A Clockwork Orange. You could probably issue us with tokens that we could exchange for some time operating a photocopier or doing some filing.

How about you lot? Does a bit of causal gaming help you through the working day? Can you sharpen your boardroom skills in a first person shooter? Answers in the comments, if you please.

Does Gaming at Work Improve Productivity? [PC World]

The offices, technically for Spike Digital Entertainment and GT, were actually still in the decoration stage of things. A team of artists were wallpapering and painting every square inch of the place with splashes of color, style and culture. Among the pop video game references I noticed were a Mario and Luigi, some Space Invaders, Billy Mitchell (complete with a bottle of hot sauce) and a Gears of War cog. In fact there were way too many references for me to list, so instead I took a bunch of pictures. See how many you can find and if you're into office pics than you have to check out our MASSIVE compilation of Work and Play photos of some of the top people in gaming.

Source and Image: http://www.chapter6.net/index.php/150/jim-halpert-john-krasinski-from-the-office-looks-like-luigi/

Peter Rakos' new feature on Gamasutra is proof that Microsoft Office spreadsheet app Excel has some solid calculation chops, enough to generate rudimentary 3D objects that could make gaming applications. Sure, you may know about Excel's hidden flight sim, but Rakos shows that the Office staple could be a respectable engine for user created games. The above clip shows off the Excel-native Cell Graphics capabilities, with a second clip in his feature looking a bit more impressive. Very cool stuff and worth the read.

Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine? [Gamasutra]

I finally posted my Work and Play pet project last Friday. If you missed it, it is a collection of photo galleries showing off the office desks and home gaming set-ups of a pretty huge selection of game developers, journalists and industry folks.

Over the weekend I managed to gather up a sizable addition to the already big collection and I spent today updating it. New additions include folks from Neversoft, NetDevil, Kojima Productions, Harmonix, THQ and even a shot of Masaya Matsuura's desk, the man behind PaRappa the Rapper.

For those of you who keep track of such things, we're now up to nearly 60 galleries from 23 studios and 10 publications, as well as the industry folk.

Hit up the link to scout out the new pics. And don't worry, I am working on a way of doing a mammoth reader gallery showing off the same sort of images.

Work and Play: Inside the Lives of Gamings' Greatest [Kotaku]

Don't get us wrong. We're not asking nor begging for a confrontation—we're just saying that if that little alien decides to animate, go rabid and go on an office-destroying rampage across the US, who are we to use our mad Space Invaders skills to stop him?

CUBESDAY: Win a USB Missile Launcher! [via hawtymcbloggy]

We'll be so much better off having a presence over there and really controlling the marketing, PR and creative... It's mostly about us trying to give our developers the best deal we can across the PAL territories too, when doing a co-publishing deal, it's really hard to do that.

Good for you, Mike! You go over there and show those UKers just what Gamecock is all about. I was lucky enough to get over and check out Gamecock's offerings at E3 and was really impressed by the innovation and originality that shined through in all the titles I saw. I'm glad to see them doing well enough to be able to make an expansion like this and look forward to seeing their many projects come to fruition.

Gamecock Founding UK Cockpit [Next Generation]

The Sony Online Entertainment-Denver folks were kind enough to have me by their office last night, and then to a suite to watch the Rockies game.

SOE-Denver just moved into their new digs and the place had that new office smell, it also hadn't yet been SOE-ized yet. Sony was still in the process of sending out some neat SOE-flavored decorations. Brian Crecente