Dec 26, 2022 17:00:00

School officials have been asking how to stop students from playing a dinosaur game that can be played offline on Chrome.

When using Chrome, a web browser developed by Google, offline users can play '

Dinosaur Game, ' a game where users control a dinosaur and jump over obstacles. In the past, many school officials have asked questions about this game on the official Chrome forum, asking, 'How can I stop students from playing this game?'

462221 - Disable Chrome offline game (T-Rex) if device is enrolled - chromium
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=462221

When you access Chrome offline or in airplane mode, a dinosaur icon will appear on the screen. Press the space bar in this state to play the built-in 'dinosaur game.'

Obstacles will come towards the running dinosaur, so you can jump and avoid them by pressing the space bar.

The difficulty gradually increases, making it a simple yet surprisingly addictive game.

While Chrome devices distributed to educational institutions typically restrict access to games, there has been a lot of

talk in Japan about children secretly playing dinosaur games. In 2015, a school official posted a question on the official Chrome forum asking, 'How can we stop children from accessing offline Chrome and playing dinosaur games?'

Looking at the thread, we see comments from school officials such as, 'I was warned that the dinosaur game was distracting me during class. I'm looking for a way to disable it,' 'Is it possible to automatically disable the dinosaur game when enrolling a managed device?' and 'Students are using the Easter egg (dinosaur game) as a way to avoid doing their work at school, which is really annoying teachers and administrators.'

In response, Chrome spokesperson Edward Yang said, 'We had no idea this would happen, but we sympathize with the teachers. We will consider making a code change.'

The discussion continued in the thread, with comments such as 'They should display a message saying 'Disabled by administrator'' leading to comments like, 'For people who haven't seen the original dinosaur game, they should be notified that 'Fun has been disabled by administrator.'' and 'They should say 'Game has been disabled by administrator,' not 'Fun has been disabled by administrator.' That's in bad taste. If a parent is thinking of their child and telling them to do their homework before playing a game, they wouldn't say, 'You've taken away their child's fun.''

The Chrome team eventually implemented the change, allowing administrators

to disable the dinosaur game via Group Policy . However, toward the end of the thread, a user claiming to be a student commented, 'I'm a student and I take my school-issued Chromebook home. I don't play the dinosaur game at school, but I understand why you turned it off. But I want to be able to play it at home. I'm at home, so I want to be able to play it whenever I want.'

The statement was, 'Your school owns the Chromebook. They can do whatever they want with it, and you're just borrowing it.' 'If you really want to play games, get your own computer.'