Busy Work is a fast-paced multiplayer game that makes a frantic and hilarious gameplay out of the monotonous aspects of office work. You and your colleagues (up to 6 players) compete to answer as many customer emails as possible before the morning meeting while constantly being interrupted with phone calls, pop-up calendar reminders, ‘urgent’ physical tasks, and more. Will you win the coveted employee-of-the-day bonus and lord it over your co-workers at happy hour?

Over an intense two-minute period, players sit at individual work-stations, furiously mashing their keyboards to ‘compose’ emails to customers while juggling various tasks. Example gameplay: you’re about to hit send, a message pops-up, reminding you that the meeting will begin shortly and that you need to finish all emails. You click “okay,” but immediately the phone rings. You answer the phone and read from the given prompt, while clicking “send” on the email. As soon as you hang-up the phone another message pops up, telling you to grab the “LL-78” form from the filing cabinet and bring it back to your station. Jumping up from your desk, you rush to the filing cabinet, frantically trying to find the proper form, and are back just in time to hear the phone ring a second time. Is it Friday yet?!

Busy Work was developed in the Whaaat!? Lab of the ATLAS Institute at CU Boulder

Busy Work won the Media Choice Award at the 2017 IndieCade Festival and was featured at the 2018 XOXO Festival in Portland, OR.