:-) At the time Google was pretty reasonable about people doing what ever it took to become more productive. And it wasn't exactly 'hard core' playing, it was simply a tool that provided the necessary engagement motivation.

Not unlike processing all of the works of Shakespeare into bags of words and n-gram vectors and correlation maps to get a handle on how you can slice and dice documents for search. Nobody expected the time spent slicing and dicing Shakespeare would generate useful work product, but it did help train you so that you could generate useful work product.

And like the Shakespeare exercises, once the benefit was realized you moved on.