Those big TVs in meeting rooms aren't just for video calls and PowerPoint presentations. When the workday winds down, they can transform your office space into something unexpected: a competitive gaming arena that brings colleagues together. Sure, they're also great for watching movies or scrolling through photos from our latest remote week, but it was gaming that helped us create an engaging after-work activity with the effect of a mini team building event – (almost) every single day. What started as casual FIFA matches evolved into a company-wide phenomenon with its own rating system, trash-talking Discord bot, and genuine team-building effects – (almost) every single day.
I still remember the first game I played at the office. It was a quiet Monday evening the first week back at the office after the christmas holidays. Our boss had brought his PS5 and it had EAFC 24 installed. I hopped on a quick game with my coworker – and absolutely thrashed him. 8-2 for me. Filled with euphoria and adrenaline, I knew I had to persist this record of history. We had a flipchart standing around, so I took the next free page and wrote the result on there. It was the first of 174 lines on that page. In the following days and weeks, people started playing more and more – and writing their names on the board as well, to inform everybody of their victories.
After about half a year, trends were starting to show. Everybody started to get a feel for who was good and who wasn't. And I (clearly) thought that I was the best (duh?). But with the analog flipchart, there was simply no way to quickly sum up all the games and calculate who was ACTUALLY the best.
Fast forward another three months, our annual hacking week was coming up. The concept is simple, you get about a week's worth of time to "hack" together a small app and present it to your coworkers. The winner question was still bothering me, so I decided to come up with a way to digitalize our game data. The main issue I saw was coming up with a fair system that would not rely on absolute metrics like "games won" or "goals scored", as this would be unfair towards players that didn't play that often.
At the same time, people were playing a lot of chess in the office (which I could never quite wrap my head around) and I overheard them talking about their Elo scores. I started to research and quickly found out that a this way of calculating ratings would be a perfect fit. I quickly built a prototype and tested out a few scenarios. I was satisfied with the results and spent a whole evening manually typing all 174 records from the flipchart into a spreadsheet. With this initial data, I built a small app that would allow players to enter games and see their ratings. scoreably was born.
After the initial release, we've retired the flipchart and started tracking all our game results in the app. Games suddenly got way more intriguing, as winning against a high-rated player would yield enormous gains while losing to a cellar-dweller would be a humiliation – the stakes were high! However it would only matter to coworkers who'd also play the game, as other ones didn't bother to sign up for the app. That's when we introduced a Discord bot, that automatically reports results with (AI-generated) salty comments to a special channel, visible for everyone to see.
Looking back, this was by far my favourite side project I've ever done (and finished). It was a success from day one and the users are probably the most critical audience one could think of – fellow programmers. Their feedback made scoreably significantly better over time, and it's not done yet. Some things are almost impossible to implement with the current setup, and there's still things I just haven't got around to (yes, I'm actually working on real projects as well). That's why I've decided to take some time to collect all ideas and feedback to shape scoreably v2, which is coming later this year. If you are interested in the more technically focused article & goals for v2, stay tuned for a follow-up article.
Unfortunately, scoreably is currently only an internal project. If you'd like to try it, your best bet is to apply for a job at marqably and show us why your name needs to be on top of the scoreboard! ;)
