Phil Nash

Posted on Sep 30, 2019

Untitled Developer Game

#discuss #jokes

Have you seen or played Untitled Goose Game? It is so much fun being a horrible goose gently messing with people's lives in a quiet village.

It got me thinking, what if you were the goose? What if you just wanted to mess with your colleagues or your office? What would you do?

(Obviously you wouldn't, you're a nice person, not a horrible goose.)

I started some ideas on Twitter:

What's on your to-do list?

HONK!

Top comments (38)

Yaser Adel Mehraban • Sep 30 '19

1- Get an empty 🍩 box and fill it broccoli, put it on your colleague's desk who loves donuts
2- Remove a couple of key caps from someone's mechanical keyboard
3- Cover their whole laptop monitor with sticky notes
4- Replace the toilet paper with duct tape
5- Put a note on the toaster saying it's voice activated and record the morning activities

I think I like being a goose 😈

Phil Nash • Oct 1 '19

4- Replace the toilet paper with duct tape

😱

You're more evil than I thought Yaser!

Yaser Adel Mehraban • Oct 1 '19

Pranks should be inspirational 😁

Dian Fay • Sep 30 '19

:%s/\(\w\+\)l/\11/g
:w

Phil Nash • Oct 1 '19

I feel like this is some vim trickery, but I'm having a time working out what it's going to do and how evil it is!

Mary • Oct 1 '19

This replaces every l (L) in every "word" with a 1 (one). So: let appleVariable = "goose!"; becomes let app1eVariab1e = "goose!";

Dian Fay • Oct 1 '19 • Edited

Importantly it doesn't replace the lowercase L if it's the first letter of the word, since many languages won't allow names to start with a number. So the code is much more likely to compile/run than with a simple global replacement, and the victim will find hunting the problems down that little bit harder.

Phil Nash • Oct 2 '19

That I couldn't see the difference between the l (L) and the 1 (1) in the code example makes this pretty evil! 😈

Dian Fay • Oct 1 '19

Try running it against a short text corpus:

const alpha = beta + gamma;
let delta = epsilon + zeta;
exports.result = alpha + delta;

Much the same effect could be achieved without the capturing group but it wouldn't be quite as sneaky.

Fulton Browne • Sep 30 '19 • Edited

find someone who left there computer unlocked switch everything to military time, Fahrenheit to Celsius, imperial to metric, and qwerty to dvorak. best day ever! (for me)

Phil Nash • Oct 1 '19

That sounds like an upgrade for their machine...

Ben Sinclair • Oct 1 '19

You mean you fixed a bunch of bugs?

Jing Xue • Sep 30 '19 • Edited

First of I'd like to suggest we keep it on the nerdy side. Things like "drop coffee cups in a river" really fall into the "horrible person" category. ;-)

One prank I actually did was stick a little piece of post-it on the bottom of a teammate's mouse, covering up the tracking camera. It took them quite a while before they figured it out. Of course I was careful and only did it on a slow day.

Phil Nash • Oct 1 '19

If developers turn coffee into code, then I feel it still fits in the realm!

That is quite the prank, did they find out it was you who had played them?

Jing Xue • Oct 1 '19

Oh I always came clean afterwards - would have been sabotage if I didnt, wouldn't it? :-D

Phil Nash • Oct 2 '19

It was an honourable pranking then! 👏

Nick Cinger • Sep 30 '19

Take a screenshot of someone's desktop. Use that as the desktop wallpaper. Remove all the desktop icons.
Hit the following keys on all the Windows machines in the office: "CTRL + ALT + Left Arrow"
Remove batteries from all the wireless devices (mice and headphones)
Put duck-tape on the bottom of all the wired mice.

Médéric Burlet • Oct 1 '19 • Edited

Add to this the switching of wireless mice from one desk to another

Phil Nash • Oct 1 '19

But not direct switches, at least a circle of 3.

Phil Nash • Oct 1 '19

The desktop trick is a classic. Removing batteries from wireless devices would cause an entire day of confusion. I love it!

Amara Graham • Sep 30 '19

Take away their adapters.

Phil Nash • Oct 1 '19

All out war on new Mac users, eh? USB-C has a lot to answer for!

Ben Sinclair • Oct 1 '19

All Macs since time began have required a little bag full of adaptors to work.

Amara Graham • Oct 1 '19

I've mostly avoided that with previous models that had an HDMI port.

Phil Nash • Oct 2 '19

My MacBook Pro 15" from 2015 has the perfect ports. Classic USB and HDMI.

I'm sure USB-C is in my future though, and I'll go back to the adapters.

Ben Sinclair • Oct 2 '19

I have this one at work. Needs a dongle to do wired networking (which is useful because of speed and the reliability of Macbook wifi)

Phil Nash • Oct 2 '19

Ah, ethernet to USB? Fair enough, I haven't had a problem with my wifi, but I do appreciate a good wired connection.

Casey Brooks • Oct 1 '19

Change Slack avatars to unicorns
Slightly adjust all the settings on the office chairs
Replace all the images in your app with pics of Nicholas Cage

And yes, I have actually done all these things to my coworkers 😈

Phil Nash • Oct 1 '19

We're seeing the real geese coming out in this thread aren't we! 😂

Lazar • Oct 1 '19

Find out which Linux distro your coworker uses.

Get a low profile usb that matches the color of his desktop or laptop. (Laptop is pretty easy to see though).

Download the exact version of his linux distro.

Flash it to your usb.

Then when he is not around, plug the usb in the computer, get into the bios and change the boot order so it loads it first.

I actually did it to my brother one time.

If you want to go even further build a micro-os that will only load the words "No bootable disk found..."

Phil Nash • Oct 2 '19

Oh wow, that's something! I feel lucky I use a Mac and (I hope) am not vulnerable to this 😄

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 • Sep 30 '19

In the linter, change from spaces to tabs.

Phil Nash • Oct 1 '19

Even better, the formatter!

Fred Richards • Sep 30 '19

Change user's passwords. To a long sentence. With a lot of spaces. And some shifted-spaces.

I neither confirm nor deny doing this in the past. #bofh

Phil Nash • Oct 1 '19

Sounds like a sensible password policy!

Michiel Hendriks • Oct 1 '19

Put data blocker USB dongles between people's mouse or keyboard. Bonus points to do this with the security officer.

Phil Nash • Oct 2 '19

Illicitly plugging something into the security officer's machine is definitely playing on expert level.

logo4poop • Oct 5 '19

I made this a game for some reason....
logo4poop.itch.io/untitled-develop...

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Untitled Developer Game

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