Bureaucracy is a funny thing. It’s supposed to make our lives easier by compartmentalizing things and preventing redundancies, but in China (and most places in the world) it just gives bureaucrats more free time at work.
Looking to see where Chinese tax payer money is going the city of Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, did a study on what kind of video games government employees enjoy during their “office hours”.
Interviewing 27 city level employees at 15 different departments and 28 prefecture level employees at 9 different district level departments discovered that gaming takes up at least 30 percent of a government bureaucrat’s time. A few months back we reported that a Shanghai weather man was caught playing the Chinese card game Three Kingdoms Killers while at work (our top photo). Of course this doesn't mean that all bureaucrats waste their time at work gaming.
According to the study, the games that government employees play the most are broken down into three categories, casual games, flash/webpage games, and online Multiplayer Role-Playing games.
Casual Games:
The favorites of older civil servants, these games are often simple leisure games such as Mahjong or Doudizhu! (斗地主). Under this category also falls mobile gamers who secretly play on their mobile devices.
Flash games:
These games are often web-based games similar to Farmville. These games are supposedly easy to close and to hide from the bosses during work hours.
MMO games:
For some inexplicable reason, some civil servants claim that they play client based MMO’s during work hours! It’s almost unbelievable that they would play games like League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients without getting caught.
[调查：公务员上班究竟在玩哪些游戏？] [ Tencent]
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