Poll Reveals People Working From Home Are Just Straight Up Playing Video Games Instead

The world has altered drastically in many, many ways since the pandemic kicked off, but no doubt one of the biggest changes is how many of us have been working from home regularly. Cereal at your desk, working with a big fluffy dressing gown on, or perhaps even working from bed? The possibilities are endless, and I won't judge you for participating in any or all of those.

But here's the big question - how many of you have been gaming in work hours? Be honest, this is a safe space. And, we may actually already have the answer, thanks to a big poll conducted on ResetEra - it looks like a lot of people are guilty.

If you're one of the many people apparently playing Elden Ring on work time and want to get a bit of rune-farming in, check out our guide below for the best spot to do it.

At the time of writing, there's just short of 1700 votes on the poll, and of those, almost 70% of people said that they play video games when their employers think they're working, at least in some capacity. 13.9% of people said they do this often, and a further 30.4% said they do, but not super regularly. There's a bunch of more specific poll options, but only 32.1% of people said that they never game on work time, which is rather telling.

The question was originally posed by ResetEra user Skel1ingt0n, who'd noticed many of the people on their Steam friends list were online and active during work hours, and wondered how common it was: "I've started to notice literally dozens of those on my friends list [...] are regularly starting up video games during the work day. Now, I'm aware that not everyone works a straight 9-5, but I know for a fact many of these folks have a white collar, 8am to 5pm office job that is currently WFH - and they'll be in games for literal hours," they said. "Not 45 minutes over lunch - but Elden Ring or Halo Infinite or Tunic or Ark or whatever else for a couple hours at a time, often in multiple blocks."

Gamers have been confessing to their ways on the thread: "Guilty as charged," admitted Anustart. "I do that sometimes. My consoles and TV are next to my work station, so I can get in a quick game or two during downtime. I won't let work get backed up to play however," said GlitchyDegree.

So, that's a significant amount of people who are probably out there getting paid to play video games as we speak - after all this time, clearly they've not been caught out yet. Maybe make sure that you have yourself set to offline on Steam if you have any of your employees added there though, eh?

Topics: Steam