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Boss Key

This is a special (perhaps undocumented) key in a game that will bring up a spreadsheet or other such totems that give the appearance that one is doing productive work. Back in the day (the 1980s) computers were something of a rarity and therefore the only place one might be able to play a game was at the workplace. Is this a problem? Depends on who you ask; here the author of the game "Moria" (1983) expounds on one side of the debate:

Around 1980 or 81 I was enrolled in engineering courses at the University of Oklahoma. The engineering lab ran on a PDP 1170 under an early version of UNIX. I was always good at computers, so it was natural for me to get to know the system administrators. They invited me one night to stay and play some games, an early startrek game, The Colossal Cave Adventure (later just 'Adventure'), and late one night, a new dungeon game called 'Rogue'.

So yes, I was exposed to Rogue before Moria was even a gleam in my eye. In fact, Rogue was directly responsible for millions of hours of play time wasted on Moria and its descendents...

Soon after playing Rogue (and man, was I HOOKED), I got a job in a different department as a student assistant in computers. I worked on one of the early VAX 11/780's running VMS, and no games were available for it at that time. The engineering lab got a real geek of an administrator who thought the only purpose of a computer was WORK! Imagine... Soooo, no more games, and no more rogue!

rec.games.roguelike.angband. Robert Alan Koeneke. Feb 21, 1996.

Naturally those in favor of games will desire a "boss key" to hide their activities, just as those opposed will want to purge games from their networks. Wage theft? There is quite a lot of that in America, and usually it's not in favor of those who play games on the job. These days games and computers are much more available, so one need not use work resources to play them; on the other hand, work has been creeping to cover all of private life. See for example the recent "right to disconnect" bill in California and the furor from certain tech bosses who might suffer from not being able to abuse employees quite so much as they are accustomed to.

An even older and as yet unresolved debate is what the purpose of society is; some hold that the purpose is work, and look down on the lazy and the degenerate not onboard with the whole "work yourself to death" thing. Other societies are more about living a good life, and may follow a Gross National Happiness or some other metric more or less opposed to 996 working hour systems.

P.S. Another reason a boss key may not be necessary is when the boss cannot tell NetHack apart from a network monitoring program. Someone in a coffee shop thought I was coding; it was Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup in a terminal. Still, it might be a good tradition to sometimes have a hidden boss key. So-called easter eggs can make software a little more fun?