Synthesis Studios

At Synthesis, Wednesday is recess day! Each week, we spend an hour acting slightly more like children than usual and partake in the time-honored post-lunch activity of recess. Depending on the weather and average laziness level of the office, we either head out to a field with a random assortment of sports equipment or stay in and play video games.

Well, that’s the theory at least. It’s actually a lot harder task than you would expect to tear the engineers from their coding.
But, when successful, here is a sampling of the games we have in our recess arsenal:

JEREMYBALL
JeremyBall is a playground game that calls for fast running, quick reflexes, shrewd strategy, and, sometimes, a protractor. Much as the wise Calvin devised Calvinball, our very own Jeremy has created a ridiculous namesake sport. He came up with an initial set of parameters and they have organically grown more and more complicated over the past year. Michael, our intrepid intern from last year, actually spent a while writing down the rules on our internal wiki. Given the length of his documentation, I will spare the gory details of the game play here.

However, to get a basic idea of what the game is all about - imagine baseball, but instead of a baseball, you have both a Frisbee and Nerf football; instead of bases, you have character-themed dodgeballs; instead of organized plays, you have a flurry of projectiles and haphazard running. Can you picture it?

HORSE/ROUND-THE-WORLD
These are really just the standard schoolyard games made more interesting by the fact that none of us are very good at getting a basket. It’s actually probably for the best that we don’t play in an actual schoolyard since small children would almost certainly put us to shame.

FOAM BASEBALL ATTACKS
Every once in a while you will hear a crash and scramble of footsteps… followed by a scream. That’s when you go back to work, knowing that it was just someone throwing a foam baseball at someone else’s head.

Though, technically not a recess game since it’s played at any time, this is a well-loved pastime in the office. I don’t know where the foam baseball originally came from but I do know that it is wise to remember who the last person was to have it. Flinching is not an unusual automatic reaction to coworker visits.

ROCK BAND
When the weather is crummy, we stay inside and bring our rock band (the Synthesuckers) on tour. We belt out the words to songs we’ve never heard before, get shin splints from the drum pedal, and save fallen comrades when a song is tough. Unfortunately, I think we haven’t played since a particularly painful experience repeatedly trying to beat the ten minute epic “Green Grass & High Tides”. The memory of that trauma should subside soon, I hope…

NINJA TENNIS
Before Rock Band arrived and became the star of the Synthesis video game lineup, the indoor-recess (ahem, Wiicess) game of choice was Wii Sports. More specifically, it was 4 player Wii Tennis played with 2 people. Controlling one player with each hand, Tucker and Jeremy championed the introduction of this utterly confusing game to the office.

It’s just not enough to simply be challenged by your work — ideally, you’ll also like it! We try to do the most possible to ensure our workplace is fun. Once a week, we have recess; on sunny days we walk down to a nearby playground, and on the rainy ones we plug in the Wii. We also have lunch together every Friday, a time we set aside to catch up with each other — and oftentimes we go off on some really ridiculous tangents, which for some reason frequently include topics like zombies.

A healthy work environment is so important, and it’s about more than Rock Band breaks. That’s why we signed up with Boston Organics to have fruit delivered to our office on a weekly basis. Each Wednesday we receive a goody bag of sorts, which contains a mix of apples, oranges, bananas, several different types of pears, berries and kiwis. (We put in a request for fruit we could eat with one hand, so we could work and snack; otherwise we would be knee-deep in watermelons, cantaloupe, pineapples and honeydew.)

One of the nice things about Boston Organics — aside from the bonded door-to-door service — is that each piece of fruit in our weekly box has been approved as being organic by autonomous groups like the North East Organic Food Association. In addition to that, not only are we getting truly delicious fruit but also really fresh fruit. The turnover on Boston Organics’ produce is incredible; frequently the fruit is in the company’s hands for less than a day, delivered from their participating growers on the same day as distribution. Whatever hasn’t been shipped out to clients is donated to Food For Free, so our contribution goes towards fighting local hunger issues.

Having fresh fruit in the office is wonderful, and makes it easy to maintain a healthy work environment as well as a healthy lifestyle. Of course, it would be better we took the extra step to eliminate the candy tray, but we’re not extremists. Not to mention it’s hard to kick a daily banana-and-peanut-butter-cup habit.