As a new employee at DMC, everyone gets a welcome party that they can either plan themselves or combine with another new hire. What you may not know is that employees in regional offices get TWO welcome parties, one in Chicago where we train initially and one when they get back home. As a Boston employee, I was thus afforded two opportunities for introductory fun and merriment. As a semi-competitive nerd, I wanted both of my parties to feature some relatively non-traditional games.
A Whirlyball Welcome
For my Chicago party, I teamed up with Xuelong Mu from New York to host an evening at WhirleyBall, an entertainment complex located a block away from the office. WhirleyBall is best described as a mix of lacrosse and go carts with a little basketball thrown in. Nobody is actually good at it, which means everyone on a team has to work together to score points. After the WhirleyBall game, we played laser tag in the same complex, which was far more physically demanding. I did pretty well, but this may have been due to a malfunctioning vest that boosted by health a few hundred percent.
Mindtrek VR Madness
While Whirlyball has been done before by previous DMC employees in Chicago, by Boston party was a brand-new experience for everyone. I worked with Nick Hensel to schedule a night of virtual-reality gaming at Mindtrek VR in Woburn, MA. We started off the evening by grabbing some Chipotle to fuel ourselves for what was to come next.
We split up into two teams of seven and each got to play two games in MindTrek’s arena. The games were fully immersive, but to an outsider we looked like a bunch of weirdly dressed people standing around in a warehouse.
Our first game was Zombie Survival, a 15-minute fort defense game where we desperately tried to prevent the undead from overwhelming our position. The was quite a bit of screaming whenever a zombie managed to sneak up behind someone without them knowing. We managed to survive, and soon it was time for the next game.
For our second round, we played Singularity, a space shooter where we played the role of space marines investigating a non-responsive station. We battled robots and even had a boss fight against the corrupt AI. After the second game, we got to compare our scores, both against each other and all other teams that had played those games. One of our teams (sadly not mine) placed 22 out of about 3000 teams! Having done DMC proud, we decided to call it a day.
Day to Night Fun
My first few months at DMC have been great, and I’m excited for what the future holds. It’s fun to be part of a company that works on really cool engineering problems during the day and then hangs out and has fun together at night.
Learn more about DMC's company culture.