PROGRAM RIDS PCS OF PLAY : SOFTWARE WIPES OUT WORKPLACE GAMING.

Byline: John H. Cushman Jr. The New York Times

Diablo is a role-playing computer game. Diablo Canyon is a nuclear power plant. In Gary Maier's opinion, the two should never meet.

As a computer network administrator at Pacific Gas & Electric's power station, Maier wants his megabytes used for producing megawatts, and for nothing else.

So he installed Antigame, a clever (or, some would say, diabolic) program that automatically erases game software from computers and their networks.

``We are not here to play games,'' Maier said, ``and games will not be tolerated on the network.''

It is no secret that workers play computer games on the job. Microsoft Windows software, which is preinstalled on most computers, contains various game options. A 1995 survey by Coleman & Associates, a market research firm in Teaneck, N.J., found that of respondents who used computer games, 23 percent said their most recent game was played at work.

Privacy advocates say that they don't find software like Antigame very disturbing, but that companies should have guidelines on its use.

``Employers have a right to know if their employees are goofing off,'' said Stanton McCandlish, program director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that seeks to protect privacy rights. ``But employees have a right to know when they are being monitored. Companies should have a clear policy on this.''

Companies say it is more than an issue of wasting time. Memory-hogging games can engorge precious hard drives, they say, and, when played often or by many contestants at once, can bog down entire networks as central processors ship 3-D graphics back and forth.

Then there is the software piracy problem: a company could be held financially liable if discovered harboring unregistered software on its computers.

``I believe there is a time for play and a time for work,'' said Yossis Hollander of DVD Software of Irvine, which markets Antigame. ``Would you put a poker table, a pool table and a roulette wheel on your desk? You'd be thrown out.''

At Diablo Canyon, Maier said he was more concerned with wasted computer memory than with wasted time.

``I'm not a cop,'' he said. ``I don't tell people how to use their time. That's not my job; that's their supervisor's job. My job is to be sure that when someone needs some drive space, that it's there.'' (He said his networks totaled more than 380 gigabytes of storage capacity.)

Some people fear that blocking employees from playing games will remove a key outlet to relieving stress, making them less productive.

``Bean counters, beware,'' warned a reviewer on the Hotwired site on the World Wide Web. ``Install this software, and watch your productivity walk right out the door.''

Maier disputes that. ``Everyone needs to find a way to reduce stress, or whatever, but I don't think using company tools is a way to do that,'' he said. ``If you want to take a walk, take a walk.''

In any event, DVD Software's $60 program is doing a brisk business in this niche market one that it shares with a few other products, like the competing Gamewarden, which even allows a network operator to limit the times when employees are allowed to play games, or to set a maximum amount of time that they can spend surfing the World Wide Web. (Details of the products can be found on the Internet at http://www.antigame.com and at http://www.gamewarden.com.)

``We have about 1,000 customers, from large to small corporations, universities and government agencies,'' Hollander said. ``You would be surprised who is using it, from the smallest high school to technology companies like E.D.S.'' He said Amoco, Disney, Aloca, Union Pacific and Monsanto had also bought the program.

A spokeswoman for Monsanto, however, said the company decided not to use the software because computer managers said there was no sign of any problem with employees' playing games on company time.

DVD software is part of a new breed of family enterprises that have sprung up around the computer industry - often, as it happens, churning out the very games that provide grist for DVD's mills. Hollander is an experienced programmer; his wife, Dana, started the company along with his brother, David.

The software works similarly to anti-virus programs by searching out signature blocks of computer code that a game program stores on a computer's hard drive. When a signature is detected, Antigame scours the computer's directories and removes the entire program. Alternatively, the software can be set to report the offending game without deleting it.

This approach helps the digital predator pounce on even the most elusive prey. For example, users cannot simply hide the game Tetris inside a computer folder marked with an innocuous name like ``olddata.txt,'' or change Sim City's name to ``New York'' to escape detection. Nor can a game be hidden merely by compressing it, the company says.

The code-sniffing approach has also made it easier for the company to modify the program as new games appear. Customers notify the company when Antigame fails to detect a game; the company writes a modification to the software and posts it on the World Wide Web, so its customers can download the improvement. At last count, the program could detect 6,000 games.

In a test last year, a reviewer at Government Computer News, a trade publication, called the software's performance ``admirable but a bit sketchy.'' The review said the program searched out and destroyed well-known games like Doom and Wolfenstein, Minesweeper and Solitaire, but others got away unscathed.

``It will never catch every game,'' Hollander conceded. ``It is a constant chase. You keep adding to the database.''

The most likely games to escape are the relatively rudimentary programs called shareware that are written by amateurs and often distributed over the Internet. And because the software runs only on microprocessors made by Intel, Macintosh users are off the hook. So are workers who play games over the Internet, because the computer codes for these games are not permanently stored in a machine's memory.

Could Antigame misfire and accidentally delete, say, the final draft of a user's tax return?

``Very unlikely,'' the company's on-line literature says. ``However, we do recommend making a backup prior to activating Antigame.''

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Photo

Photo: Gary Maier used Antigame to rid Contra Costa's Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant of computer games.

New York Times