Minimum Effort: Office Sim

You have a job. You do not want to do it. Minimum Effort is a satirical workplace strategy game. Every workday runs from 09:00 to 17:00, and everything you can do with those 480 minutes trades three things against each other: the time it saves you, the output it actually produces, and how conspicuous it makes you. The goal is not to be good at your job. It is to find the least amount of work that survives. HOW A DAY WORKS • Do the work, fake the work, or avoid it entirely. Looking busy covers part of a shortfall when the boss checks the deliverables. It never files the report. • The boss patrols the floor. When he walks past in the middle of something you get a couple of seconds to look busy — and less time the hotter you already are. • Repeat an act and it gets riskier every time. The fourth bathroom break is not the first bathroom break. • Colleagues talk. Each one has their own trust in you and their own doubts, and a rumour that crosses the floor twice reaches the boss's office from a direction you were not watching. THE PEOPLE Your accomplice will cover for you. The overachiever notices an unearned win. The snitch keeps a note of when people leave their desk. The gossip has already told two other people. You can chat, delegate your work, ask somebody to cover, genuinely help them — or put your name on their work, which they never forget. PROMOTIONS ARE A TRAP Every rung on the ladder pays more and expects more. Getting promoted is easy. Staying just competent enough not to be fired, one rung higher, with a bigger quota and the same amount of effort — that is the game. FOUR CAREERS • Corporate — easy. Meetings, decks and a quarterly review nobody reads. • Startup — chaotic. Twelve people, no structure, and everybody notices everything. • Consulting — medium. Frameworks, workstreams, and never being the one with the answer. • Investment banking — extreme. Enormous money, enormous work, and an associate who never leaves. Corporate and Startup are included. Consulting and Investment Banking are unlocked together by the Career Pack: one purchase, not a subscription, nothing recurring. THE ONLY SCORE THAT MATTERS Total money earned, divided by hours you actually worked. Retire at the top of a ladder having been paid for years and worked for weeks, and the number on your record board will say so. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO No account and no sign-in. No server. No analytics, no advertising, no third-party code of any kind. Your careers are saved on your device and nothing about them leaves it. Minimum Effort is a work of satire. The offices, the colleagues and the careers are invented, and nothing in it is advice about a real job.