High-tech falls for the net

At the local research center for search engine Google Inc., the ping-pong table occupies a place of honor, below a colorful mural of Fenway Park and the Boston skyline. The office killer app is "the ladder," a custom program designed by software engineer Kayi Lee that schedules weekly matches and ranks employee players, including site director Steve Vinter. A onetime junior city champion in Ann Arbor, Mich., Vinter challenges all comers. "People are playing four, five, six times a day," he said.

"The real goal is to play against Steve [Vinter]," joked Josh Marantz, a technical staffer for Google's Friend Connect social networking project. "I've played everyone but Steve."

Upstairs in the same building, VMware Inc., a leader in the hot field of virtualization software, is hosting its own table tennis tournaments, and hoping to show up the Googlers this summer in extramural competition. "Bring it on," said Julia Austin, VMware's senior director of research and development, who boasted that her company bought its ping-pong table before Google moved in last year.

The craze is spreading through the tech community, where the clack of balls bouncing from paddle to table provides welcome relief from long days spent sitting at the screen and keyboard. Down the street in Technology Square, Forrester Research chief executive and avid player George Colony put a table in the cafeteria. Data storage provider EMC Corp. has one at its Hopkinton headquarters, three at other Massachusetts sites, and two more at its North Carolina and California outposts.

"Table tennis is perfect for high-tech offices," said Anthony Chen, a software developer intern at VMware and one of the best players in the Cambridge office. "You just get up from your desk and play, and then you go back to developing software."

The popularity of ping-pong ebbs and flows through history, from its 19th-century roots as a game played by British colonial officers posted in India and South Africa, to an early association with high-tech among the dot-com crowd in the rush of the 1990s.

It was introduced in the United States in the 1890s by the Parker Brothers toy company of Salem. It got a boost in prestige from the ping-pong diplomacy preceding President Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972. More recently, it's been embraced by celebrities ranging from singer Jimmy Buffett to retired football player Tiki Barber, and become a new favorite of techies who tired of the foosball craze.

The revival of the game is showing in increased sales to both tech firms and established companies, according to Scott Grimm, owner of Total Table Tennis of Erieville, N.Y., an online distributor of tables and related equipment. "Table tennis is popular at technology companies partly because of what you call the nerd factor," he said "It tends to be a game for people who aren't into football. You can be any size, shape, or age, and still play."

The irony of the rise of ping-pong from the family rec room to office icon among the technology-forward set is not lost on the players. That it is wholly divorced from the digital world they inhabit almost every waking hour is the source of the renewed attraction, some suggest.

"We spend a lot of time staring at the computer," said Google engineering assistant Lauren Hannah-Murphy. "This is getting away from it. A lot of people who work here played ping-pong growing up."

At the Google table this month, Hannah-Murphy and software engineer Chris Danis were keeping up an intense volley of ping-pong - and chatter. Hannah-Murphy let loose with a backhand swing, slamming the ball. Too high.

"Table, Lauren, not my face," Danis taunted.

"But it's much more exciting to hit you," Hannah-Murphy snapped back. And the furious exchange resumed.

When Google and VMware were setting up their offices here, they each polled employees as to what games should be included, and in both companies, the top choice was ping-pong. At the VMware research lab, which moved into the building in 2006, the company's architect was instructed to design a game room big enough to accommodate a table. It gets heavy use as deadlines for software releases approach and developers write code late into the night, Austin said.

"It's a good way to get your body moving when you've been sitting in front of a screen for hours," she said. "Ten years ago, you might have seen more foosball and pool. Now, technology companies are building space for ping-pong."

When VMware players were told recently their regular afternoon game would have to wait - the table was being moved to accommodate a visiting speaker - they were so distressed that a policy was implemented. "Right now, when we're going to have a speaker, we give our players ample notice," Austin said.

Another factor in the local resurgence of ping-pong's popularity, Austin said, has been an influx of Asian-born players working at Boston-area companies. Many employ a "pen-hold" paddle grip, giving them more flexibility than the "handshake" grip of American players.

Table tennis equipment distributor Grimm, himself a former information technology manager for a company in Syracuse, said companies - especially high-tech companies - have made up a growing share of his customers since he purchased his business in 2003.

"A lot of high-tech companies are buying the tables to give them an edge in attracting the best talent," he said. Internet portal Yahoo Inc. even inquired about buying a batch of tables emblazoned with the company's logo to donate to tech-oriented colleges such as Carnegie Mellon and the University of California at Berkeley.

Grimm said many employees grew up playing ping-pong at school or at church. "I was a legend in my garage," he recalled.

VMware's Chen, who doubles as a computer science student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a Butterfly paddle with hard rubber and a special cleaning solution. To him, the magic of ping-pong is its speed and unpredictability, not unlike the fast-changing software business.

"You think you have the advantage, and the next second it's gone," he said. "Because the volleys are so quick and the balls are a couple of grams of weight, a slight movement of the wrists can affect your point. Even a draft in the room can mess up your game."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.