Fun is a corporate bylaw in Silicon Valley. Four square is the official sport at instant messaging service Meebo. Conference rooms are named after board games and video games at professional networking site LinkedIn. Guitar Hero rules at start-ups from San Francisco to San Jose. And parties at TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington's house go on until all hours (when he's in town).

Boring may suit corporate America, but it's practically a prosecutable offense here. After all, this is the place that gave you the real Steve Jobs and the fake one.

A popular pastime to show off the collective creativity: naming conference rooms. In Google's new San Francisco office, they pay homage to television shows and movies set in San Francisco, including "Charmed," "Suddenly Susan" and "X-Men." In Washington, D.C., the Internet giant has "The Secret, Undisclosed Location" room.

In Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, you can go from Addis Ababa to Valencia without leaving the building. That was the brainstorm of co-founder Sergey Brin, who wanted Googlers to know exactly where in a building a room is -- based on its name. Each building covers a different region of the world. Cities beginning with the letters A through L are on the first floor, and the M through Z cities are on the second floor.

At the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, conference room names follow the Google tradition. Founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen chose video games. "When a videoconference screen shows that 'Resident Evil' has just joined the meeting, you can bet that a YouTuber is on the other side," YouTube spokeswoman Elizabeth Linder said.

Apparently no pursuit is too trivial when it comes to witty riffs on the status quo. In Google's Santa Monica offices, printers and bathrooms are named after characters on the old sitcom "Three's Company."

In December, YouTube field technician Joe Shockman, who is responsible for desktop support (he's also a former Googler who moved over to YouTube after Google bought it), suggested that the video-sharing site retire its old practice of naming its office printers after video formats such as QuickTime. He asked for nominations and was so quickly overloaded (95 in one day) that he had to enlist a friend at the Googleplex to set up a special "name the printer" page that would allow YouTubers to vote for their favorite. In 15 minutes the page was up and YouTubers could either submit a new idea or vote for one already submitted.

Front-runners in the early voting: San Francisco music venues and Transformers (the latter was scrapped because Google already had claimed the animated robot franchise for printers).

But an underground campaign soon emerged for Wu-Tang Clan, the hard-core hip-hop group whose popularity has spanned decades thanks to ...