WB: Empire has caused many students to flunk out, and even a few divorces. I've received some angry emails over these.
This part resonated: my father had various issues over the years (we suspect undiagnosed depression but he refused care) and Empire was one of the games he'd spend days on. Growing up, it took me a while to realize that the problem wasn't the game but the personality trait which lead to that behaviour cropping up anywhere possible.
I found the mention of a Wang word processor interesting as that was one of my dad's employers. They apparently had quite a few management issues but he had some stories about one of their better salespeople — this one guy apparently had legendary expense claims but was also frequently the top performer in revenue. When word processing was a department in a business, it was often run by an older woman who'd come up through the ranks and while they had a high-sounding title they often weren't given a lot of respect by the other department heads and a lot of the other vendors more or less followed that with a take-it-or-leave-it approach. This sales guy would do things like rent a helicopter to take someone from LA to lunch on Santa Catalina to discuss a deal or see how things were working out at an existing company — simultaneously far more than the internal rules allowed but also a tiny fraction of the profits they made from a major company buying Wang hardware globally.
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This part resonated: my father had various issues over the years (we suspect undiagnosed depression but he refused care) and Empire was one of the games he'd spend days on. Growing up, it took me a while to realize that the problem wasn't the game but the personality trait which lead to that behaviour cropping up anywhere possible.
I found the mention of a Wang word processor interesting as that was one of my dad's employers. They apparently had quite a few management issues but he had some stories about one of their better salespeople — this one guy apparently had legendary expense claims but was also frequently the top performer in revenue. When word processing was a department in a business, it was often run by an older woman who'd come up through the ranks and while they had a high-sounding title they often weren't given a lot of respect by the other department heads and a lot of the other vendors more or less followed that with a take-it-or-leave-it approach. This sales guy would do things like rent a helicopter to take someone from LA to lunch on Santa Catalina to discuss a deal or see how things were working out at an existing company — simultaneously far more than the internal rules allowed but also a tiny fraction of the profits they made from a major company buying Wang hardware globally.