Yes, yes I do make up games.

I used to work in an auto parts factory when I was in college. I ran an injection molding press. These presses would usually have two or three molds on a rotating platter. The basics of the job were as follows:

• put some metal bits on the mold
• hit two buttons at the same time (for safety's sake)
• the platter would rotate and a set of finished parts would show up in front of me and be unseated from the mold by little pins
• grab the (exceptionally hot) finished pieces off the mold and put them in a bucket
• repeat ad nauseum for 8 hours

So, in order to make this, moderately, more interesting I started figuring out how many pieces I could make in a minute by timing the number of pieces I made over 5 or 10 minutes and then figuring the average. I would usually do this calculation every 30 minutes to an hour and I would track how I was doing over the course of the evening. In the last hour of the night, which was always the worst, I would compute my average for the night and see if I could beat that in the final hour.

I would also try to memorize Walt Whitman poetry on my breaks and the recite it to myself when I had become bored with doing math and watching giant pieces of metal spin around in circles.

These days, I give into boredom and surf the net a lot more easily. However, when I'm given a particularly tedious programming task, I recall the advice of my mother-in-law (a former COBOL programmer). Every day she would come into work and look at the task in front of her. She would then make it a game to try to accomplish that programming assignment in less than a day. Even if it was something that was in theory a two or three day assignment, she would try to do it in a day. Eventually she hit a point where she was able to accomplish just about anything thrown at her in a day. So, I suppose, it was a good thing for her because she was able to alleviate her boredom and improve her skills at the same time.