Is that a spreadsheet on your screen - or solitaire?

"If you go back to the middle of the 19th century and the writings of Karl Marx, workers under the factory system would lose a considerable amount of their identity and a sense of ownership with what they were doing," says Bill Snizek, a work sociologist at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg. "What employers today have to decide is whether permitting employees at certain prescribed times to gain some amount of psychic enjoyment by playing games will make up for some of the lost identity and pride in work."

A central question is whether playing a hand or two of solitaire has a dramatic effect on the bottom line - or if it actually helps productivity by giving workers a low-stress outlet in otherwise frantic days. It all points to industry and government trying to make sense of how costs accumulate on personal time, and what role ubiquitous technology - with its entertaining byproducts - has on labor and productivity.

To Mr. Sepp at the Taxpayers Union, it's not just a matter of gaming opportunities; workers' own attitudes and industriousness are just as big a problem or a boon. "The question is: Should the rules and laws look at not just opportunity, but also motive and behavior, because, quite frankly, that's part of the problem," he explains.

It's a special PR problem, of course, for the state workers who toil in plain, tidy buildings that dominate this city. After all, though they keep the state running smoothly for the most part, the public isn't shy about expressing disapproval - as happened recently in Raleigh, when state and city crews couldn't stop a half-inch of snow from causing the city's worst-ever traffic snarl.

For their part, IT workers here in North Carolina say lawmakers are playing the wrong hand. Calling the proposed law a slap in the face, they say it plays into what they say are undeserved stereotypes of bureaucrats doing their jobs with blank faces and zombie-like shuffling across the floor.

Now, say some, state government is doing what private industry has long practiced: expecting more work from fewer workers. That leaves little time in the normal workday for twiddling thumbs.

"A popular view of government is that you sit around and take a day to sharpen a pencil, but it's not like that," says one woman in North Carolina's Department of Cultural Resources public-affairs office. "When I was not in state government, sure I'd see [some people playing games], but it's quite the opposite here. People are just scrambling to get their work done within a normal business day."

Labor experts say the efficiency tack is reminiscent of factory-efficiency studies in the 1920s, where analysts tried to break down the mechanics of assembly-line behavior - why does it take a certain amount of time for a worker to tighten a bolt? The problem? "Managers lost sight that workers are real people, not robots," says Scott Kirwin, the founder of the IT Professionals Association of America in Wilmington, Del.

"Managers, and in this case politicians, don't know how to effectively utilize the people they're in charge of - and that's one cause of offshoring these jobs," he says. "You have to ask yourself, if someone is so bored that playing solitaire is stimulating, then the problem is not with the game, it's with the job."

And despite employers' fears about a sinking bottom line, some say the legislation, if passed, would cost more than it would save, since the state would have to send out teams to each location and erase the games by hand. And what would stop workers from downloading them again?

Others insist the problem that the bill attempts to solve is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify.

"It's easy to allege that a lot of people are playing solitaire, but it's harder to document how many people actually are," says Dr. Burris, the coauthor of "Technocratic Teamwork.

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