Maybe you wouldn’t grumble about going back to work on Mondays if your office had putting greens and slides, meetings were held in tree houses, and you could work from ski lift pods or ball pits. Some of the perks at the world’s most fun workplaces – mostly made up of tech companies, natch – include three free meals a day, nap areas, fish tank relaxation rooms, full bars, arcades, skate ramps and spiraling slides worthy of theme parks.

Chartboost

Based in San Francisco, the world’s largest games-only technology platform worked with Blitz Architecture to create a fun, interactive environment for employees and visitors alike. Chartboost’s headquarters include a ‘photo op’ wall with an 11-foot-tall dinosaur, a game room with a ball pit and a giant LEGO wall, and five conference rooms with classic game themes like Donkey Kong, Super Mario and the Legend of Zelda.

Red Bull

Red Bull’s Mexico City office boasts a grassy hangout spot full of swings for meetings, while the Santa Monica location features an incredible skate ramp that runs through the entire interior.

Missing Link

South Africa’s Missing Link, a presentation strategy company, sourced salvage materials to put together a fun and imaginative office in just six weeks. The results include a treehouse, fire pole, playground slide, shooting range and caravan.

YouTube

YouTube’s main headquarters in San Bruno, California mixes work and play with a massive red slide, a putting green, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, nap pods and bicycles and scooters to get around the sizable complex.

Google

Google is renowned for having not only an enviable range of employee perks, but also some incredibly creative work environments at their offices around the world. The Zurich location is particularly noteworthy with its fish tank relaxation room, ski lift work pods, slides, karaoke room and multiple game rooms.

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Work Perks These 13 Offices Are Way More Fun Than Yours

Fantasy architectural structures inspired by M.C. Escher provide a playful setting for a fun iOS puzzle game called Monument Valley. Even if you aren’t big on playing games on your phone or iPad, it’s worth checking out just for the dazzling structures alone. Each architectural landscape is like a painting you can interact with.

The object of the game is to solve sculptural puzzles to rescue Princess Ida, a little girl who needs to reach the top of the monuments. “There was once a princess who fell in love with geometry,” reads the press kit that comes with the game. The makers of the game include programmers with an interest in art, and artists with knowledge of programming, bringing these two worlds together to create a game that’s truly a visual wonder. Everything in the game works mechanically, but also looks incredible.

“The idea of the project was that every screen could be a work of art in itself,” says designer Paul Wong. “And so we work really hard – I think it’s a different way of approaching making a game. Every screenshot could be printed out and hung on a wall.”

The more of the puzzles you solve, the more of Ida’s story and that of the abandoned Monument Valley you unveil. Some of the individual levels of the game are so complex, they took months to complete. Monument Valley is available via iTunes for $3.99.

It doesn’t matter where you go in the world: it seems like litter is always an unwelcome part of the scenery. The Swiss city of Lucerne decided to do something about their litter problem by enticing residents and visitors to have fun while throwing their rubbish away. The initiative is called “Lucerne Shines,” and in the many years since it was implemented the city has seen an exceptional response.

(all images via: Freshome)

The project saw 16 public trash bins converted to public game stations. You won’t find any fancy touch-screen games, though – these games are all about cleaning up your mess and leaving the city a little prettier than you found it. From short mazes to free-throw lines to hopscotch, the initiative appeals to everyone who likes to have a little unexpected fun in the middle of an otherwise-ordinary day.

The project is a follow-up to a more general city cleanup initiative. The original effort saw a huge reduction in the amount of waste on city streets, but Lucerne was still spending an astonishing amount of money on litter cleanup every year. The city then had the brilliant idea to use fun as an incentive…and suddenly, the citizens of Lucerne just couldn’t wait to pop their trash into the waiting receptacles.

How would you like to be jailed underground on a planet where the surface is too scalding hot to touch, or locked up in an asylum with the most depraved of criminals, where the corrupt guards are just as crazy as the inmates? Real-life prisons are scary enough, but some fictional prisons take the terror of being locked up to a whole new level. These 13 nightmare prisons from films, novels and comic books go beyond a mere lack of freedom, introducing man-eating monsters, mental manipulation and unexplained medical examinations.

Limbo – THX 1138

(images via: benjaminharlow)

A dystopian vision of the future made in 1969 by pre-Star Wars George Lucas, THX1138 takes place in an underground city where citizens are forced to use drugs that suppress emotions. The prison in THX1138 is a bizarre white wall-less ‘limbo’ world where lawbreakers languish, subjected to interrogations and mysterious medical examinations.

Fiorina ‘Fury’ 161 – Alien 3

(images via: moveedo)

In Alien 3, heroine Ellen Ripley awakens from hibernation to find that her space ship has crashed on the planet Fiorina ‘Fury’ 161, a bleak rock with blazing hot temperatures during the day and freezing temperatures at night. No life exists here – except for 22 maximum risk prisoners being held in a correctional unit, and a handful of overseers. As if that weren’t bad enough, Ripley has unwittingly brought an alien egg to this prison planet, resulting in one gory death after another.

Azkaban Prison – Harry Potter

(images via: harry potter wikia, random film stats)

You might think, Harry Potter is a kids’ story – how scary can this prison be? For starters, Azkaban is a remote fortress in the middle of a roiling sea holding the likes of Bellatrix Lestrange, a deranged murderer and torturer. Then there are all those creepy ‘dementors’ swirling around in the air beyond the prison, ready to suck out the soul of anyone who comes near.

Minority Report

(images via: screencap – dreamworks)

So-called criminals are apprehended before they have even committed a crime in Minority Report, where three psychics called ‘precogs’ warn the authorities of events which may come to pass. Not only are citizens imprisoned for acts they haven’t actually carried out, they’re tossed into a bizarre facility where they’re kept in individual pods, seemingly peaceful yet perpetually bombarded with images of the crimes of which they’ve been accused of contemplating.

Crematoria Triple-Max Prison – Chronicles of Riddick

(images via: riddick wikia)

Described as ‘hell on earth’, Crematoria is a ‘triple maximum security’ prison, reserved for the most dangerous criminals and located deep inside a planet with a surface so extreme as to be uninhabitable. It’s so blazing hot during the day and freezing at night that there’s only a 20-minute period when travel on the surface is even possible. Staying alive is a daunting enough challenge, let alone trying to escape.

The Dark City

(images via: weblo)

No sun ever rises to illuminate the shadowy world of Dark City, where inhabitants become temporarily comatose at night while mysterious beings called Strangers alter not just the city, but the identities and memories of the people. What the Dark City denizens don’t realize (spoiler alert!) is that they’re all trapped on a prison planet where they’re the focus of one big alien experiment.

Blackgate Penitentiary – Batman

(images via: comic vine)

Located on a small island in Gotham Bay, Blackgate Penitentiary is the home of Gotham City’s slightly less terrifying criminals like the Penguin and Catman spend their time (the others, of course, are held in an even more frightening and far more well known facility). Blackgate is rumored to make an appearance in the upcoming Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises.

Asylum Prison – Blindness by Jose Saramago

(images via: monsters and critics)

A sudden plague of blindness spreads across the globe in the novel Blindness by Jose Saramago (and the film based on the novel, starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo). All those afflicted are forced by the government into isolation in an asylum, which becomes a chaotic, gloomy and hopeless prison.

Cthon by Piers Anthony

(images via: wikimedia commons)

In this 1967 novel by Piers Anthony, the underground prison known as Cthon houses criminals that get more dangerous the further one travels beneath the surface. Somewhere in the bowels of the prison, labyrinthine tunnels are rumored to hold the one and only escape route. Too bad they’re also apparently home to a man-eating monster that kills escapees one by one.

CryoPrison – Demolition Man

(images via: wikimedia commons)

Two men – one a true criminal, the other a falsely accused police officer – are sent to ‘CryoPrison’ in 1996, where they’re cryogenically frozen and rehabilitated through subconscious suggestion, ‘implanted’ with new interests and hobbies to replace their criminal impulses. They awaken in the year 2032, when crime seems to have been abolished, and find that their minds have been manipulated in all sorts of disturbing ways.

Absolom – No Escape

(images via: imdb)

Though arguably not the greatest movie ever, ‘No Escape’ (released in some areas as Escape from Absolom) features an irrefutably terrifying prison – an island where the worst of the worst criminals engage in brutal fights… and sometimes eat each other.

Torture Prison – V for Vendetta

(images via: imdb)

Rounded up for her role in a brewing revolution headed up by a mysterious man in a Guy Fawkes mask, Natalie Portman’s character Evie is hauled into a dark prison, interrogated and tortured. While the experience isn’t quite what it seems, it’s transformative, and still utterly terrifying to anyone who has ever feared persecution by a totalitarian government.

Arkham Asylum – Batman

(images via: joystiq.com)

If you’re in Arkham Asylum, you may not be in the sort of mental state that would allow you to even notice the corruption and depravity that’s going on all around you – but not everyone at Arkham is actually crazy. This psychiatric hospital doesn’t just hold patients in need of care, it imprisons criminals that aren’t quite sane enough to be kept at Blackgate Penitentiary. In the game Batman: Arkham Asylum, fires that break out at Blackgate necessitate moving many of the Joker’s goons to Arkham which leads, of course, to utter chaos. The game allows players to virtually explore the asylum, confronting all of the horrors hidden within.

If life’s a game, you’re gonna need some bigger playing pieces. When the game’s Monopoly, you can count on at least one game geek artist to make your larger-than-life board game anything but boring: by building a life-sized, giant green Monopoly House.

Not Your Father’s Greenhouse

(images via: Canadian Art)

When artist An Te Liu (above) announced he was planning some “green architecture” for the 2009 Leona Drive Project, few expected the result would be a house painted green… ALL green. Yet that’s just what Liu built on a quiet residential street in suburban Toronto.

(images via: Kaeko, ‘Lil, Board Game Geek and Property Otter)

Dubbed “Title Deed”, the modified 1940’s “salt box” house was inspired by the iconic green plastic houses players of the board game Monopoly can buy for $100 each and place on their properties, thus driving up the rent other players have to pay. One wonders what other residents of Leona Drive thought about the idea… perhaps something along the lines of “Go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.”

A Home For Art

(images via: Sean Marshall)

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The houses on Leona Drive were built after World War II along with dozens, if not hundreds, of others all constructed in a similar “salt box” style by – coincidentally – the Salter Construction Company Ltd. The homes were economical in both style and cost: ideal for the many thousands of returning servicemen who were eager to resume their peacetime lives and livelihoods.

(images via: The Leona Drive Project, Sean Marshall and Kaeko)

Several families called the houses on Leona Drive homes, one for just over 50 years. By the early 2000’s, though, developers began buying up the remaining homes as North York’s expanding downtown extended tentacles into the surrounding neighborhoods.

(image via: Sean Marshall)

By 2008, a group of homes on Leona Drive was slated for demolition in preparation for a new townhouse development (shown under construction, above). The venerable houses would have one last gasp of notoriety before the wrecking ball swung their way.

(images via: An Te Liu, View On Canadian Art and Domicile)

The Leona Drive Project was commissioned by the L.O.T. Collective and involved 18 artists who were assigned one house each with which to make a statement on the suburban experience. Artist Ryan Livingstone, for example, affixed 10,000 whitewashed pennies to the interior walls of 9 Leona Drive – he states he was inspired by his grandmother’s frugal maxim, “Save your pennies for a rainy day.” An Te Liu was assigned 19 Leona Drive: that’s his caulk study for the house above.

(images via: Cool Picture Gallery)

The Monopoly House was never meant to have an interior to complement the exterior, but if it did, we think it might look something like the images above. And you thought Kramer had it bad when the Kenny Rogers’ across the street lit up his apartment with a glowing red neon sign.

Surreal Estate

(images via: Daily Mail UK and Loozrboy)

An Te Liu was born in Taiwan in 1967, emigrated to Canada and today runs the graduate landscape and architecture program at the University of Toronto. Liu received his commission to radically remodel the 36′ by 44′ house at 19 Leona Drive in February of 2009, and he was told at the time it had to be complete by early October. The timeline proved to be generous as the house completed its verdant transformation in a mere two months.

(images via: Ian Muttoo, View On Canadian Art and Uwajedi)

What does it mean? An Te Liu sought to evoke a darker sort of symbolism with “Title Deed”. By blowing up the tiny green game piece into gargantuan proportions, Liu implied that homeowners were powerless pawns in an unseen game played by the nameless, faceless “monopoly men” who orchestrated the 2008-09 financial crisis and accompanying credit crunch.

“Merely Pawns In Game Of Life”

(image via: ‘Lil)

The small and standardized style of the Leona Drive houses was suggestive to begin with. To quote Liu, “I had already seen a similarity beforehand but once we began the process of changing the house using wooden boards for the windows and removing all the exterior extremities, then the green painting could begin.”

(images via: TCP909, A.Centric and Ian Muttoo)

It may have looked and seemed a simple undertaking but the cost of creating “Title Deed” from the house at 19 Leona Drive was in excess of $12,000. Even so, it was a substantial sum considering The Leona Drive Project only ran from October 22 through October 31 of 2009.

(image via: Ian Muttoo)

Liu could have simply slapped a coat or two of green paint onto his selected house and saved a pile of cash – and not Monopoly money, either. As one can see, however, the clean, uncluttered look of the house greatly enhances its resemblance to a scaled-up game piece. Exterior protuberances such as TV antennas, satellite dishes and roof gutters all had to be removed. Window openings were blocked off and board cladding was added to smooth the overall look. Last and not least, multiple coats of green latex block-filler paint were applied in order to give the appearance of solidity.

(images via: Loozrboy and Mike Christie)

“We want to think about the 1940s and 1950s suburbs, which had an ideology,” stated Janine Marchessault of York University, who co-curated The Leona Drive Project. “There’s this imagination of a better life that these houses will offer you. There isn’t that utopianism in the new suburbs.”

Suburban Renewal: Cool or Cruel?

(images via: Miss_Michelle, Sean Marshall and Spacing Toronto)

Like all good things, The Leona Drive Project had to come to an end and as October’s autumnal orange faded into November’s steely gray, the houses on Leona Drive faded from artworks to eyesores. It didn’t take long for graffiti taggers to put their own stamp on the Monopoly House’s monotone mask – urbia meets suburbia, as it were.

(images via: Daily Mail UK, Akimbo, Broken City Lab and ‘Lil)

An Te Liu remains philosophical about the part he played in The Leona Drive Project. “Our homes are not necessarily what we think they are,” said Liu. “They are property just like in Monopoly to be remortgaged and used as collateral. Just as the sub prime mortgage crisis hit America and was caused by traders and bankers playing their games in Wall Street, so the common man was squeezed because of that.”

Hotel Hell

(images via: The Agitation of the Mind and VorMedia.com)

Some witty commentators have suggested the artist build three more life-sized monopoly houses and trade them in for a big red hotel. In response, we’ll just suggest you be careful what you wish for.