Slashdot Mirror
Working as a Game Tester
DaytonCIM writes "SFGate.com has a great story on the real life of game testers. 'Life is not all fun and games, though. It's all games -- with little time left for sleeping or eating, at least during the busy months before Christmas. The longest week he has logged was 106 hours, and 60-hour-plus weeks are typical in deadline crunches, he said.'"
I myself log about 10+ hours a week on games - no pay. My roommate logs about 40+ hours a week - no pay - this on top of a full time job. (I know, I know....) Why are these people complaining again??? The rest of the world has long hours and probably less job satisfaction than these "game testers".
Basically what is being said is it's a job. Just like any other long hour, deadline sensitive technology QA job. Besides...my college roomie could have done at least that many whilst smoking a bongload or six a day.
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
Lemme get this straight. You get PAID to spend the majority of your time playing videogames. OH WHAT A HELLISH NIGHTMARE EXISTANCE!! WO IS YOU!!
I just spent the afternoon degaussing 130 DLT tapes. You'll forgive me if I don't share in your plight of the hellishness that is Galaxies or Planetside. I'll pray for you tonight.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Sounds like with all that overtime they need to hire more people...
MMmmmm... game tester... *drools*
I would give anything to have that job. I am a total game whore.
back at my old job, the floor beneath ours was owned by EA's Tiburon division, and they hired gametesters seasonally to playtest whatever the next thing was. when i was working there, it was just before the PS2 launched in the US, and they were all playtesting Madden. It was funny, cuz when they first started the job we all envied the crap out of them. But after about 8 months of nothing but 50hr+ weeks of nothing but Madden, you'd talk to these guys and they'd sound like they'd never pick up a videogame again. =)
...for vivid games. I quit when my palms were so covered in blisters that it was painful to drive.
Just like anything else...
too much of a good thing is still bad.
Too much alcohol, the body revolts.
Too much work, you revolt.
Sent from your iPad.
Wow, poor guy sure has it tough. And to think I felt sorry for myself for working 50 hours a week at McDonald's while this guy's labouring in some sort of gaming slave pit - sheesh!
Do yourself a favor and test API's or server backends, its not glamorous but you won't go crazy.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
That guy must have been slacking off. I mean, with the 62 hours left during the 7 day week, he had about 62/7=8.8 hours left each day, which would be plenty of time to sleep. That slacker!
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Wahhh, I get paid to play games and I complain.
Yeah true, meetings suck too, but.... you do nothing in meetings!
Remember that The Far Side Cartoon? ;-)
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
What do they do as a hobby? Accounting, maybe?
The longest week he has logged was 106 hours, and 60-hour-plus weeks are typical in deadline crunches, he said.'"
At least he gets paid. Blizzard is beta-testing the Warcraft 3 expansion pack by sending it out to 10000 random testers, who are willing to find bugs for free. It's like a second, unpaid job.
Still, I wish I was selected. :P
A friend of mine was between quality assurance jobs - tried interviewing with a game company - walked through a wearhouse of 18-22 y.o. male game testers, being the only female in the building (to her knowledge). Did not enjoy the feeling of every head turning to watch her walk to the manager for her interview.
Quack!Quack!.....QUACK!!
...when you are assured lifetime employment as a Duke Nukem Forever tester?
You think you have it bad.
I'm the Chief Deneedler at a haystack company. You don't know what hell is until you spend 40 hours a week searching haystacks for needles.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Like bra-size taker, or beer taster, that _seems_ great, but actually isn't... yeah, right, eh? :)
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
they don't have enough to do anyway.
Medical interns hours may actually DROP to 100 hours per week. There are many people who work 70+ hours a week.
John Kerry is a Joke!
I'd rather review games than test them. I have a friend (she's 17) who reviews games for her local newspaper. She gets all of the games that she reviews for free and then gets paid for writing the review. Besides the obvious deadline, it would be a real nice side job to have (Free [commercially produced] games! (that aren't warez!))
Game testing is very mundane.. I'm near Lucasoft in the Bay Area, and I've heard from a few testers that:
1) You are hardly EVER hired on full time (always a temp, which means no benifits)
2) You're jobs are things like "Click every single one of these buttons in the menu and tell us if anything crashes"
3) You're usually laid off at the end of your temp position
4) Very long hours (especially considering the kind of work you're doing).
I'd rather work in an assembly line, myself...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
60 hours a week? psh, i play that much for fun :)
Imagine the incidence rate for eye and wrist related diseases. +60-hours a week in front of a television, wrestling with an uncomfortable controller, all the while squinting 'cause your vision is in a downward spiral.
For one, I'm sure most the time he isn't working on the finished product, meaning it's not really a whole lot like playing the finished game at all.
And by the time it is getting toward the finished game, I'm sure most the time isn't spent in general playtesting so much as trying to track down the conditions under which various bugs are encountered, meaning even if it's testing a game, it's still testing.
I think everyone in every industry feels like this, even when they love their job. In this case, the game tester has a pretty laid back job, where all he has to do is rigorously test games for many hours a week, and attend meetings. Yeah, that sounds like a job, but not a horrible one.
Similarly, a Political Science Professor who studies comparative politics gets to go off to conferences several times a year, write their own schedule for how to teach courses, see exotic places and do research on them. Sounds like a good deal doesn't it? You also have to deal with meetings, department politics, discipline politics, the competitiveness of publishing, the stress of trying to get tenure. Sure, its interesting, but its still a job.
I would imagine a US Senator has a similar problem. Sure, he gets a lot of power, and gets to make decisions at the national level that affect hundreds of millions of people (if not more), and gets to rub elbows with highly intelligent people wishing to influence his policies. Sounds great. He also has to deal with the people who don't like him, attend meetings, play politics, and run the risk of being voted out of office every 6 years. Its a job.
The point I'm trying to make is that even people who love there work (and there are many) will still occasionally bitch about how their work sucks. Back when I worked midnight shift at an ISP doing support calls, I spent most of my time playing games or watching movies and getting paid for it. There were also times when I had to deal with a huge volumn of irrate customers, because the office was understaffed in cases of a network outage at that hour. So, I'd bitch about my work when that happens, though I generally enjoyed my job.
Game testing is likely the same thing, just like every other fun job.
Hey, if you enjoy what you are doing... if your job is what you would be doing anyways even if you didn't need to work... then what more could you hope for? If that is your "thing", then go for it, with all your heart.
;)
Of course, all you need is a demanding boss breathing down your neck and putting pressure on you to take all the fun away. That's how bosses get self-actualized
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
If you were working under the threat of deportation you would't complain. Even for $6.23/hr.
1.Burn down the haystack.
2.Run around with metal detector.
3.Profit!!!
Where my fried chicken loving niggers at? biaaatch!
isn't the real question how much do they get paid?
.. is some slave labor I can get use to!
man I hope we keep those jobs in the US!
Once I used my clout as tech support rep, and software tester to test a game. I think it was called MAX something. it was a real time stratagy game. They required 4 hours game play every day, then you had to submit a journal daily. On top of that you had to log unto a chat room to share with the developers. I got cut after about the forth revision. There was so much compition to impress the developers with your input. It is actually much like slashdot and trying to earn karma.
I know I certainly would not like testing games, I rarely play them as it is, usually when im with other people cos its more fun that way. Playin games all the time would drive me .... nuts. you can get too much of a good thing.
Seriously, though, at least couch potato is a profession that is as exciting and glamorous as it sounds. And I can do it at home, in my spare time, with no additional training. I might even be eligible for government grants.
Let's run the numbers. $10/hr * 100hr week = $50k/year.
Pardon me if I don't shed a tear.
Yes, it's hard work. No, it's not as fun as it sounds.
If you want to quit, I know a half dozen folks off the top of my head who'd be happy get a $50k job these days.
I wonder what George Alcantara's longest record of days working without a day off.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I went from being a mail boy at a very well known, smallish publisher to the QA lead at another publisher.
It WAS hellish. It was so corporate, I had to be at work by 9am, and they expected me to work until 8-10pm. Sometimes later, they ordered pizza around 5pm for the whole company. And everyone was salaried so they were expected to stick around. I had 9 fucking games on my plate.
Sure, you may think 9! great! but some of the games were HUGE and in bad shape. You may think the job is "playing games all day" But I actually playing games took about none of my time. About 90% of it was getting new builds from the development guys, making installation CDs, and then installing them and finally getting the game up and running to find that:
The menu bug is still there, needs to be fixed, the characters lip synching is still off, the game still crashes if you pick Paladin as your main character, etc etc etc. This isn't "playing games." It's going through a checklist of known bugs and making sure they're fixed/not fixed.
It sucks, it totally burns you out on games. I'd come home, and stare at my monitor, not wanting to play any games since I just spent 12 hours at work messing with them. I got burnt out in about a year and quit right before our game was about to go Gold. Then they threatened to sue me. I hope the company goes under, if it already hasn't.
Anonymous cuz I don't want to get more lawsuit threats.
I just tried to search for "porn star" on dice.com, and I didn't get any results.
Damn. I was hoping porno was hiring.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
The little kiddies with mod points can't handel the truth.
Shares the same tedium.
/. and making runs to the coffee counter.
Even if it started as labor-of-love coding project. By the time your doing mutil-version support, regression testing, dealing with inaccurate bug reports, "must have" feature implementation you being to wonder why you ever wanted to create a solution in the first place.
OTTH, I've seen plenty of QA people working 60+ hour weeks. Too bad more than half that time was spent checking email, reading
signal, noise, to me it's all the same.
I've never been interested in testing games for a living. I think the dream job for me when I was younger was reviewing & rating games. Their's a big difference. I can't imagine how boring testing games is.
This article explored the most tedious uninteresting aspect of the gaming industry. While reading I was far more interested in the job of those theatre graduates that they mentioned. That sounds cool. Being the director behind games like Resident Evil, Legend of Zelda, etc. It would have been interesting to see how knowledge of creating the illusion of drama and theatrics combined with knowledge of the form itself.
Hell I think even managing the marketing for games is alot more interesting then listening to stories about game testers.
QA/Game Testing must be the worst job... any game can be ruined for you by having to playtest it. Sure it's fun the first couple times through, but how fun is it on your 43rd?
I mean, there's so much stupid things to do. You have to test and see if you can play through the game using a knife while running backwards and jumping nonstop because SOME nut out there will try it. And you never know, that nut might work for a review website/magazine.
I am a filthy pirate.
or maybe it's just the company, I did QA for br0derbund back in the late 80's early 90's, and while it wasn't as bad as the article, it wasn't a cakewalk by a long means. Since then I've done QA for Autodesk, telecommunications equipment, healthcare software and now I'm testing web apps for an insurance company. Of all those the healthcare company was the most laid back and easy. (and yes we had quake deathmatch tournaments after hours on the comany net). At br0derbund, I had no intention on playing any more games after work...
Remember how annoyed you were the last time you played a buggy game. Now imagine how annoyed you would be if you had to play MUCH more buggy games all the damn time? And you had to play the same broken level over and over and over...
I work as a game developer, and testers come and go pretty quick. The good ones mostly get promoted to be level designers, or they go work at a higher paying regular QA gig. The rest tend to go away once they realize what a pain in the ass the job really is.
-
SFGate.com has a great story on the real life of game testers.
Uh, what was so great about it? I didn't learn shit, nor was I entertained. This seemed like a pretty average, boring story to me. What was supposed to be so fucking fascinating about this article?
Welcome to Equilibrium, the Game of Life (c).
You are at the north end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: S
>read plaque
The plaque reads "Know thyself".
>S
You are at the south end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: N
>read plaque
The plaque reads "Nothing in excess".
>N
You are at the north end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: S
(...)
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
No, this isn't a comic strip but it is the Penny-arcade 'guy' explaining his life as a video game developer. It's basically a rant, but it's a first hand experience from the tester himself. I now have respect for people who play video games all day and it's written very well.
Here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/porktester.php3
me again
Some more information:
I was salaried at $21,000 a year + health insurance. I had 1.5 days of time off per month. I was expected to come in on weekends during crunch time (which lasted 6 weeks), so I ended up working 80-90 hour weeks for no additional pay.
Yeah ok, I got free soda and pizza. Big whoop. It still sucked. I did get to go to E3 for free though, which was cool.
I worked for eight months as a QC in spector for a guitar company. Much like them, I thought my job was going to be to sit around and play all day. Of course, it wasn't. Guitars don't QC themselves and when you're staring at a stack of 100 that have to be out today and it's already noon, you start to realise that no matter what you're working on, you're still WORKING. It's still a job. Let's put it this way. How many of you here love working on computers? Now, how many of you like your job? Now how many would want to spend 100 hours at your job in a single week? Yeah, I thought not. Work is work, no matter how glamorous it sounds.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
that it's not as good as it sounds. Having to pop on demand is pretty tough work. My point is this - leave game testing to the pros, er.. or jerk off, or something.
you ever work 100 hour weeks regualarly? I have, and they take a huge toll on your health. Snce it is likley they don't have insurance, that means more days off, and higher cost.
I wouldn't do it for 50K.
it really makes no sense. it is an hourly position, thet means overtime.
The hours are long, that means more mistakes, and less quality.
Why not hire 2 people and work them 40 hours?
Based on me experience, you would get the same amount of work done.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, why not actually be a tester for some small business firm or bank, and make 50k/year and have it not be legal for you to do overtime?
I learned after quite a few years of being naive, that $10/hr is $10/hr... It doesn't matter if you make work 168 hours a week, it's still ten bucks an hour.
10 buck an hour jobs are all over the place. I'd rather be a surface technician (janitor) at that price. At least I'll keep my mental sanity.
The illusion these days is that there aren't any jobs out there. It's rahter that there aren't any good jobs. A game tester in my books isn't a good job.
I am a tester at a major games company (we have had two products in the top ten at times in the past month) and I can attest to the fact that testing can in fact be a tedious, horrible, and even evil job at times. The hours can be extremely long, as well. examples of jobs most people do not associate with a games tester that are primary functions:
-going through the User Interface with a checklist and checking off boxes for each item as it functions, pass or fail.
-going through strings tables to find spelling errors and grammatical issues, as well as text that does not fit its area.
-polygon counting.
-recording frames per second as an automated test runs the same combat over and over again
-installing the game to each drive letter possible (D: through Z:) to make sure it functions properly, to quell a VP's fears.
-Installing and uninstalling. repeatedly.
-testing against the Windows Logo Checklist. Trust me...don't if you can help it.
And thats just a start. I could go on for hours.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
And working for 100 hours every week? That's a lot.
Imagine the fun of testing out EVERYWALL on some level to make sure that you don't walk through it.
Yeah, and imagine that all your co-workers shooting you at the same time! "Boy, Jim is an easy target today. It's like he's always running into walls!"
(On the other hand, if you do find a buggy wall, it would be "Hey! Where did he go?")
Actually, my last job was as a Sr QA Engineer at a company that made games for kids. I tested games for a living.
It gets old. Fast.
"Oh, what a hard job, playing games all day." was the typical comment I heard from everyone. Well, guess what, it's not hard job. It's a job that requires a large amount of manual testing. Playing the same sections, over and over and over for 70 hours a week. It's not that it's hard, or rather, its not harder than any other QA job, and it's technically easier than other QA jobs I've had that were more automation focused.
Manual software testing sucks, whether its playing games, testing enterprise applications, or any other task repeated over and over, week after week.
Then, when you find abnormal behavior, you have to 1. create a reproducible test case for the developer, and 2. build that test case into whatever automation (if any) tool you have, for when the scripts run.
After a while, it's just a job, and it isn't really that different than sorting mail at the post office.
After a few years of it, I decided it would more fun as a consultant, working on enterprise web software.
And guess, what?
I was right. Analyzing business logic is more fun than playing the same game over and over for months.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I worked for an employer that found that a lot of us had worked overtime and now needed to be paid. Rather than pay straight time-and-a-half, they empolyer offered a complicated formula that offered less and less money for each hour worked after 40 per week. They were thinking that we were less productive after 40 hours, and thus were worth more (personally, after 40 hours, my time becomes more valuable, regardless of my productivity). Anyway, we reduced their math to a simple parabolic equation and found that the peak was at 80 hours/week. If you worked 81 hours, you'd get paid less than if you worked 80. We had had a crunch time (in satellites, it's called "space chicken" where the rocket people and the payload people both bluff saying that they'll meet the deadline, hoping to put blame on the other), and, sure enough, we had people sleeping over and working > 100 hours/week. The company never though anyone would ever do that!
Unfortuantly, it seems that the laws of supply & demand don't help here and depresses game testers' salaries. I wonder what their overtime-pay situation is; it doesn't look too good.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I am a games tester. When I finish a project, usually the first thing i do with my free cop(y/ies) is send them to friends who live far away.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
10 Tesla Magnet.
cunt
For a brief time a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to be a tester on a game that I absolutely adored (it was, for lack of a better description, a space racing game). At the time I was testing the new version, I had been playing it for 2 years, and I knew the whole game like the back of my hand.
;)
Or so I thought.
We spent *days* doing things like "bounce your ship into the channel walls repeatedly until you find a hole". Or, "Have all four of you boost off the starting line, and we'll take network load readings, and stop the game. Do it again. And again. And again. And again". We spent ~8 hours one day looking for an obscure bug by having us move each ship a tiny bit at a time, while the other 7 of us watched. 8 hours of sitting there for 20 mins, motionless (silent), and then moving a quarter inch. Goddamn, that was boring. I'm bored now just remembering it
The point is, for an experienced player, it was nothing like playing the game, because we weren't playing (IE, trying to achieve the goals of the game), we were testing (IE trying to achieve the goals of the QA Lead, which was test functionality). The entire time I was there, I think we ran one real race per day, and that was just to keep us from going batshit at the end of the day.
Certainly, for a short term it beat the hell out of working (I took a week off to go do it), but I could see how it would quickly become tedious and boring. You don't (or at least I didn't) get the thrill of nailing down bugs, or even finding them in open play. It was just tedious, tedious, tedious work recreating other people's problems.
"...you can steal my woman, but you ain't done nuthin' smart."
Actually, as a hobby, I garden and I play with computer hardware. And I play console RPGs. But I have never worked on an RPG title...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Are you a total moron?
It didn't say 100 hours every week. Therefore it is nowhere near $50k/yr. as you say. Even if it was 100 hours per week, that leaves only 68 hours each week you aren't working. Assuming that the work would be spread out evenly every day (and it isn't) and assuming you need 8 hours of sleep, that would give you less than 2 hours per day to do anything else besides work. Maybe you can keep that up for a couple weeks, but nobody would keep that schedule for a year or more in this day and age.
Don't forget anything over 40 hours is usually considered overtime.
$50k a year? You'd think this would be the sort of job you could have done in India/Eastern Europe really cheap.
Look at adultstaffing.com. It's like monster.com for endowed people.
Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid. --John Wayne
Like he's gonna work 100hr weeks for a full year! Yeah, great analogy. Go back to flipping your burgers.
Well, if you want to be a porn star, you might try something more appropriate than dice.com. It took me about 10 seconds to google this site which seems to be a more appropriate job search board for your desired occupation. Glad to be of service.
Having worked as a game tester for Crystal Dynamics, I can tell you that I would NEVER work as a game tester again. This isn't because the company I worked for sucked. Crystal was a great company to work for (Free lunch, casual work atmosphere, cool co-workers, LAN parties after work). It was because testing bugs over and over and over and over and over again is the most mind numbing work I have ever done in my life. I suppose if you worked on an assembly line it might be worse, but the work is very similar. Repetition is the name of the game in Game Testing. I'm very happy to be a Systems Administrator now. I have no problems listening to users whine about their computers not working. At least the problems vary from day to day. I remember having to test the same bug 10 times each before writing it up (this sometimes took up to an hour to get through the game to the point where the bug occurs), then getting a new burn of the game only to have to do it again. See how long you can take that. Oh, and many game testers work under contract for one project rather than full time, so that 40K a year salary is NOT something you can always depend on.
"You know Myra, some people might think you're cute. But me, I think you're one very large baked potato."
QA Engineers (or their management) have to fight. Bottom line. QA is a battle against bad program schedules, crappy design and poor unit testing.
QA can be a hoot. Contracting for QA *can* suck (as I've noticed lately). But good SQA is an excellent job, and something people that don't/can't code should aspire to. It's a pretty noble profession in the software world.
Unfortunately, most companies these days don't want really good SQA Engineers. They'd rather pay minimum wage for drones. In the end, they will indeed pay. During a recession (as we have here in the States) I think software quality degrades at the same rate unemployment goes up.
Hell, I remember being a beta tester for a game (Total Distortion), because my friend's cousin's husband was one of the lead designers. It was cool for a little while, but I was under no pressure to keep playing. If I'd had to put in 8 hours a day for a month trying to find bugs and the like, I'm sure I would have gone insane. The cute things like the "you are dead" song when you died would have gone from funny to annoying, and it ran pretty slowly on the machine I had back then. It really wasn't that great of a game (which is too bad, because his earlier game, Spaceship Warlock, ROCKED when it first came out).
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Sucks too. In college I worked for the local NBC affiliate (KZTV-10 for those that care) for roughly minimum wage at the transmitter, about half hour drive from home. In one sense it was the perfect job as the transmitter tech's job was to be in the building waiting for the signal to throw the switch on the Emergency Broadcast Signal box and reset any breakers that pop during the day. Take power readings once every three hours and monitor the broadcast levels... But really it involved about 1 minute of work per hour and 59 minutes of watching TV on about 5 different monitors (spectral graph, B&W, hi-def B&W, color, hi-def color) watching for problems.
Net short story, after close to two years of getting paid to watch TV there is no way in hell I am going to watch TV for free. No way. Well maybe Discovery channel, or Science and Speed channels, and maybe some movies, but regular television? Not a chance.
Good thing they didn't pay me to play games and surf the web....
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Let's run these numbers: (all US Dollars)
This is what I'm getting as an INTERN with a Fortune 100 company. I do Computer & Electrical Engineering, (I'm 3/4 of the way to my B.S. Degree in Computer Engineering).
$22.13 / hour
x 40 hours / week
x 50 weeks / year
==
44260 before taxes
And that's just ON MY WAY to an engineering degree, and only 40 hours per week. Oh, and I get time-and-a-half overtime after 40, so, in the hypothetical case that I work to 100 hours, that's over US$177,000. Of course, no one in their right mind would work 100 hours per week regularly, so the 177k number and the 50k number we've both quoted are crap.
Blah.
What good is a $50K/year job if you don't get any free time to enjoy the money?
There's only 168 hours in a week. Take out 100 hours of work, 6 hours of sleep a night, plus time for showering, getting dressed, and eating meals, and that's your entire life. Where's the fun?
A lot of people here probably earn about $50K/yr for 40-50 hour-a-week jobs. Would you be willing to work twice the hours for the same amount of pay?
You ever try playing through your least favorite section of game 20 times in a row? Just for simplicity's sake imagine you're responsible for testing on 2 different machines different with 10 different video cards.
You're in a section of the game where you can't save. And in the middle of this cutscene, where it has to load a connecting cutscene...say, every 3rd time it crashes. So, you've got to sit through 60 * 20 minutes. 20 hours of the aboslute worst part of the game.
Better yet, you get a version out of the in-house dev team every 3-4 days. Say you're putting in overtime and doing 10 hour days. If you're working every single minute possible, this takes up 2 full days of your time, and you have to re-do this process EVERY OTHER BLOCK of 2 days.
So, you suck it up, put in the overtime, make sure the game's clean. You've got a few bugs left that you really want to fix. But Marketing decides they're going to ship anyway, against you and the development team's protests.
3 days later, game ships, and your company's message board is flooded with people bitching about one of the bugs you wanted to get fixed. People start returning the software, and upper management comes over demanding to know why you didn't catch this bug that you have thoroughly documented.
People all over the net start complaining about how they have monkeys doing your job, and idiots like you are going on Slashdot and talking about how easy your job is to do.
And then, on top of that, you step outside of your section of the office space (usually sequestered from the rest of the employees, not containing the game rooms and ping-pong tables and couches that you're thinking about.) to find that the rest of the company, including the TEMP RECEPTIONIST are wearing these swell leather jackets for the product you just spent back-to-back 100 hour weeks on when they go 9 to 5, and make 3 times your salary.
"Where's my jacket?", you ask, only to find they "didn't have enough money to make jackets for the whole company", just to everyone who isn't in your department.
Then Christmas rolls around, and you're staring at your "sweet" $100 Christmas bonus...of which the US "gift tax" takes $41, so you end up seeing a $59 bonus. Meanwhile, people in other departments are moaning about how they got more than $300 taken our of their bonus in taxes...which is about 6 times what your take home is.
It's even more fun when you work for a company that has the dev office overseas, so you have to constantly wait for the time delay. So shit hits the fan while you're asleep and you leave working thinking everything's cool, only to get back to find out that your ass is now officially in a sling.
There are a handful of good companies, usually the small ones, that actually treat QA like human beings. The rest of them view you as easily replaceable doing a routine job that they could care less about. The cushy jobs that you are thinking about are in Marketing/Merchandising, where you get to play games all day if you want (they don't even havve to be from YOUR company, you can call it "Market Research"!) you spend your day talking on the phone to people who want to stock your product, and you go around having important business lunches/dinners/after-work events.
That 100+ hour "record" the guy talks about. Weak. A friend did some code work for one of our games to help out the dev team while we were in QA. 124 hours that week...at $10/hr. If you haven't put in a 100+ hour week and you are in QA, you haven't been there during a deadline.
Don't ever dog on a job you haven't done, unless they're making millions. If a guy's getting paid a crap wage, chances are you aren't going to know jack shit about what he's going through.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
I was disappointed with this story - not too much detail or enlightening information about game testers, as the headline would have you believe. At least the /. posts were a good read.
I think you're missing a very large point here.
There are 168 hours in a week. Take away 100, and you're left with 68. Now assume you want to sleep 8 hours a night, each night. That takes a 56hr bite out of your week, leaving you with a grand total of 12.
That's 90 minutes to yourself each day, for as long as you work there. I'd bet most of us could do it for a week, but how about a year? Not likely.
And of course as a temp, your sick days are limited...and vacation? Forget about it. Going out with friends? watching tv, reading slashdot, talking on the phone, dates....You've got 90 minutes each day. 35 minute commute? Too bad.
You've fallen into the common belief that money brings happiness. The question however is this: What good is money if you have to sacrifice your mental well being to get it?
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
I know a half dozen folks off the top of my head who'd be happy get a $50k job these days.
I think you're missing a very large point here.
There are 168 hours in a week. Take away 100, and you're left with 68. Now assume you want to sleep 8 hours a night, each night. That takes a 56hr bite out of your week, leaving you with a grand total of 12.
That's 90 minutes to yourself each day, for as long as you work there. I'd bet most of us could do it for a week, but how about a year? Not likely.
And of course as a temp, your sick days are limited...and vacation? Forget about it. Going out with friends? watching tv, reading slashdot, talking on the phone, dates....You've got 90 minutes each day. 35 minute commute? Too bad.
You've fallen into the common belief that money brings happiness. The question however is this: What good is money if you have to sacrifice your mental well being to get it?
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
$$$$$exyGal's obsession with fans (scroll down to the end of the porn links):
http://slashdot.org/~$$$$$exyGal/journal
Ekrout's obsession with fans:
http://slashdot.org/~ekrout/journal
Notice that Eric Krout compares his # of fans to the same type of people in both cases!
I wouldn't even look at porn for 14hrs a day 7 days a week for only 50k a year. I'm not joking either, 14 hours is a LONG time to dedicate to something like that. You'd be lucky to get a good night's sleep, never mind you never have a day to yourself.
I have to look for hay in stacks of needles. And we don't even get to wear gloves. I also have to pay to work and... did I mention I live in a frozen lake...?
I was salaried at $21,000 a year + health insurance. I had 1.5 days of time off per month. I was expected to come in on weekends during crunch time (which lasted 6 weeks), so I ended up working 80-90 hour weeks for no additional pay.
You could have done better at McDonald's. Why did you stick around for an entire year?
I wouldn't be terribly averse to being a game tester, but not at those prices.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Moderation in moderation. The path of excess leads to the palace of CowboyNeal.
That said I love my job and feel like I'm one of the lucky few that actually can say that.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Dude...I was the highest paid for a while at my company...I topped out at $26,800 for the year...this is in Orange County.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
Like reading slashdot? What if you had to click on every link you ever saw posted to make sure it didn't go to goatse.cx? Day after day after day, for years on end.
Okay, maybe it's not that cruel, but you get the idea... :)
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
... but they are the most important people on the game team. When I was a developer at a game company that will remain anonymous, we tried a new team arrangement of having the key people from other departments in the same room. I was from tools & sound and worked a lot with our game's lead tester.
They work very hard. Harder than you imagine a game tester would. They would stay they until the early hours of the morning to help a programmer find that one bug that would prevent your game from shipping. Sony et al have a policy that if they encounter one, just ONE, crash bug in your game, it won't ship. And Sony tests the hell out of the games for their console. (that's why major crashes are extremely rare in games published for a Sony platform).
I was having a sound bug that would happen once in maybe 8 hours that would garble the sound sample. The game testers spent hours upon hours helping me isolate and verify if it finally went away or not. They spent very alte hours playing a not-very-fun game over and over again to help me find it.
They also come up with tests a programmer would never think of. I remember one tester testing the LAN play of our game. He then, on a whim, just typed a bunch of garbage on the keyboard. Game crashed hard. Buffer overflow. It had not occured to any of us programmers to check for buffer overflow in the multi-player chat code. That probably saved us getting the game to our publisher because that is one of the things they tested for: buffer overflows.
So please stow your bitching that "Game testers have a job that's so easy..." I'd rather flip burgers at McDonald's than be a game tester. The pay's better, you get more free time and you get more respect from your co-workers and other people.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
A hundred and six hours? 75 year old Supreme Court justices work 120 hours.
I once worked 145 hours in a week in crunch time for a telematics show in Europe, and 450 hours over a 5 week period that same time. Longest work day? 33 hours.
106 hours, I could do that with a malfunctioning pacemaker, a headache, and a snack machine out of everything but dry, oversalted pretzels and black licorice Good-n-Plenty.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
The Natural Order of Things in game development goes more or less like this:
It's not only not fun, it's also terribly frustrating to see that the "final" version of the game still has all the 357 bugs you found and warned the developers about. After the first couple of games, I refused to have my name listed in the "credits". After a few more, I stopped doing it altogether. I worked for two companies and both worked like this. Maybe some companies are different, but judging from the average quality of games (both in terms of stability and "playability"), I suspect this is the normal policy.
RMN
~~~
if 7 hours a week has done this to me, then what would i be like if i spent 60 hours a week playing games? talk about no social life, you have daydreams of shooting your boss in the head with a freakishly large, hideously overpowered gun.
That probably sounds a lot funnier if you're high, or plastered.
- You could be hunched over testing a moronic GBA or cel phone game 8+ hours a day.
- You could be putting in massive overtime on the next Daikatana.
- You could be looking for text/voiceover discrepancies in the next Barbie or Olsen Twins game.
- You could be tasked with making every single unit type attack every other single unit type in the next Medieval: Total War.
Also remember that a crappy boss or management will ruin any job, no matter how good it seems on paper. And just like with technology in general, there are plenty of clueless executives in the game industry...
I think that happiness at a job has more to do with how rewarded you feel for your work. Testing is fun, but it ultimately isn't as satisfying as actually having created something. Even if you write an unglamorous bond-trading program, at least you can say it's *yours*. To me, that is an actual accomplishment. Sitting around on your ass playing someone else's game is fun in the short term, but the only way testers can really feel rewarded is if (notice I say "if") the bugs they find get fixed.
It is also for any softwares, hardwares, etc. It is a tedious process as a QA tester. I tested Web applications and security programs. All this involved tedious stuff like: planning, documentation, testing, technical support in trying to reproduce issues, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
i was 18...?
when you're 18 and right out of HS and suddenly have about $700 of completely disposable income a month, it gets to be pretty cool pretty quickly, then it starts to suck and it's not worth it.
Apparently the "Sims Online" game still has serious issues. For example, I believe the object limit (104) and property limit (850 ??) were susposed to be removed by now. Apparently there were lots of other "promises" made to beta testers which have not been kept. Cities are crashing several times a night (at least last night). This game apparently needed a lot more work before it was released. (Game testers apparently did a poor job on this one.)
(I do not play the game, so this information is "second hand". If your experience is different, then perhaps my "facts" are wrong.)
All of the comments on here seem to be mostly regarding PC Games/"Computer Games". What about consoles? (Gamecube, Playstation etc.). Is it different? Which is easier? I would think console would be easier, since you don't have to test install anything or test on multiple platforms etc.
I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that the game testers working on Duke Nukem Forever will have jobs for years to come.
jbm
One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is that game programmers work the same ( if not more ) hours than the testers and their job is even more demanding than "push all these buttons and see if it crashes"...they actually have to remain sharp-witted and able to debug with next to no sleep.
And comparing game testing to playing for 60 hours a week is "apples and oranges". I don't think you'd play a game with rampant bugs for 60 hours period...much less in a week.
-installing the game to each drive letter possible (D: through Z:) to make sure it functions properly, to quell a VP's fears.
Skip that one, and check that you can install to a custom directory *including spaces*. Like "C:\DefaultInstall" and "D:\Windows Games\Role Playing\Yourgamehere". It's a small thing but it still annoys me that I'm sometimes stuck with DOS limitations (no spaces) in 2003.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Slashdot needs an edit function. I proofread it before submitting, but obviously not well enough.
I worked for an employer that a lot of people who had worked overtime, found out that they were wrongly classified as salaried, and now needed to be paid extra to make things legal. Rather than pay straight time-and-a-half, they offered a complicated formula that offered less and less money for each hour beyond 40 worked per week. They were thinking that we were less productive after 40 hours, and thus were worth less (personally, after 40 hours, my time becomes more valuable, regardless of my productivity). Anyway, we reduced their obfuscated formula to a simple parabolic equation and found that the peak was at 80 hours/week. If you worked 81 hours, you'd get paid less than if you worked 80. We had had a crunch time (in satellites, it's called "space chicken" where the rocket people and the payload people both bluff saying that they'll meet the deadline, hoping to put the costly blame on the other), and, sure enough, people were sleeping over and working > 100 hours/week. The company never thought anyone would ever do that!
Unfortuantly, it seems that the laws of supply & demand don't help here and depresses game testers' salaries. I wonder what their overtime-pay situation is; it doesn't look too good.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
God, a pinpoint of brilliant CLUE in a sea of terminal dumb-ass -- thank you. In the last ten minutes I've seen game testing compared to being a medical intern, being U.S. Senator (!) and being a rock star on tour(!!).
I think I just lost about ten points on my Slashdot Purity Test score. Nothing I read here will ever seem quite as well-informed or realistic, ever again. This is worse than when I walked in on my parents fucking. This is an end and a beginning.
Thanks again for the CLUE-fulness.
I realise that games testing is not what we all envisioned when we were young, but 60+ hours a week is typical when working to deadlines in nearly all software engineering fields.
I work as a test lead for a small group (5-15 depending on the time of year) working on a hardware simulator (thats as much as I can say) and I find that 60+ hours when in a formal test phase would be nice sometimes. Testers in general (especially leads) are known to work very long hours - the same goes for designers, and coders, and product architects. I think it just goes with the territory. Whether this is a good thing or not I leave that up to the reader to decide but in todays job climate I'd prefer to be working these hours than to have no job at all...
Mind you I'd prefer to be testing games than comparing wave forms outputted from a simulator :)
If you ever start to feel like your job really sucks, then reflect on this. Some people wank pigs for 8 hours a day to make minimum wage. I saw a documentary on it once. I was channel surfing (honest) and stumbled on this documentary, it was most disturbing. You didn't see the wanking action (thank god) but you saw the pigs face as it was being jerked off, with its tongue lolling out and drooling, thrusting it's hindquarters in motion as the guy did his thing. It's an image I unfortunately will never forget. How people can do that for 8 hours a day and then look at themselves in the mirror when they get home is beyond me. So if you think testing games is a shitty job, perhaps this will make you feel a bit better :-)
If anyone is hiring for such a position (game tester), then I would be interested. I am a senior computer science major, set to graduate in May 2003. I am looking for a full time position. I am an avid gamer and would enjoy such a position.
Please email me at herbiekornfield@yahoo.com
Thanks.
I worked in the QA dept of Interplay for about a year and a half and it is not all fun and games. It seems like tons of fun until you are 'playing' the same terrible game over and over aging for weeks on end. Often times you are only playing the same portion of the game becuase it crashes before the next level. I dont care how fun a game is the first time you go through it, it aint fun the 1000th time. Keep in mind also that even unfun, uninteresting games have to be tested by someone. Take a quick look at all the crap on shelves and make a quick calculation of your odds. If i hadnt got out when i did and into IT i prob would have set my desk on fire and run screaming from the state.
-- Hail Eris
I have been on both sides of this fence. My days as a professional tester were extremely tedious at times. Playing games I just couldn't find interesting at all was horrible. The only thing I can think of being worse is answering technical queries all day from complete morons...that's what I do now. The grass was indeed greener in my testing days. While testing a game generally ruined it for me to the point of never wanting to see it again, the job was indeed way more fulfilling. Sure, I made quite a bit less than I do now, but I was happy. That 20K less a year was meaningless in retrospect. What good is that money to me when I haven't the energy, both physically and mentally, to spend it? For any tester out there making money doing it, just remember you have it much better than you might think. You may not make enough to drive the cars the developers are driving. You may not make enough to buy the houses the accountants are living in. But you ARE living a great life doing what the rest of us only dream of while we sit in our cubicle and remind a secretary how soaking a mouse in a bucket of disinfectant can be bad (true story). I would give up every penny I have made to be back at the bet job I ever had. Time to crack open an old game manual and see what my name was worth before I sold it to the highest bidder.
I worked at a well known Vid game publisher in San Fran (think Tomb Raider) I can tell you first-hand what the biggest problem is with being a game tester. It's not the long hours. (they are long, but you know that going into it) Its not the small pay (it's small, but you'll manage. It's the total lack of respect you get from anyone else in the company. Even others in the industry. And it turns out to be cutthroat inside QA as everyone is bucking for the carrot promotion management dangles in their faces.
QA Lead
'QA Lead' is an anagram for "Al Qaeda"
Terrorist!!!
Uh... 100hrs a week is not one job, its two and a half jobs ( 40hr + 40hr + 20hr).. are you saying you couldn't find work making a total of 50k / year working two full time jobs and one half time job?
I do agree with you on one point though: if you really hate it quit. If you are not being compensated properly, quit. Try to set your monthly expenses at a level where you retain the economic power to be able to say "I quit".. Its not really that complicated.
Yeah. This is what's wrong with the computer industry.
Hate to break it to you hosers who are just in it for the ph4t s4l4ryz!!!, but if you don't enjoy your job, you shouldn't be there.
my first job was during the xmas season donkey kong country for snes came out. i worked for nintento as a demonstrator inside a toysRus. i beat the game the first day, and had 45 more on my feet to go. got to wear a fun vest and hat.
*I used to be quite irreverent and ignorant. I am probably much smarter now. I seem to realize this every 45 days or so.
Settings some facts straight
-Hours are long, you work as much as needed (if you value your free time, this is not for you)
-Pay depends on the company you work for, some pay OT, others don't (mine does, and it is double-time after 48 hours, which makes up for the long work weeks)
-I click through menus and try different options together and hardly "play" any games, except when I'm trying to create specific instances
-When there is down-time, your time is free and you can play/do whatever you want
-Fun depends on the people you work with, just like real life; I could play Barbie with Howard Stern and have a blast, so...
-Game testers are usually assigned one area of the game to look at (this could be Front End, Franchise Mode, Animation/Rendering, Online, etc)
-Alot of it is tracking bugs, entering fixes or not fixes into a database
-You get to help out with other games when needed (depending on how big your company is)
-Credits, baby... you get your name in the game
-There is just as much bureaucracy here as there is in _any other_ corporation/company or even the world
-It's pretty easy to get laid off, really is.
-There is competition between you and co-workers
-Soft skills are, perhaps, more important than Technical or Gameplaying skills
-Cafeteria food sucks
-Draw your own conclusions
Hey, great to meet you buddy. I live far away.
What a coincidence, the game I'm working on (MotoGP2, Xbox) is days away from completion, so the subject of testers is one that's very close to my heart at the moment.
Most games testers are idiots.
There's a strange idea in the industry that you go from testing to design to producing. This is a very unhealthy thing to happen. It means that testers that are any good get snapped up as designers real quick. This is bad for two reasons. The first reason is that good testers often don't make good designers. The second is that taking away the good testers leaves you just with bad testers.
It's not uncommon to get bug reports as precise as "I was playing, and it crashed" back from testers. If you ask them what level/track the crash happened on, it takes them another two days to remember.
I would list some more, but I'm tired; it's 1:45am and I'm just about done working for today :)
You big baby! What, do you think that your job is any more difficult than other peoples? Do you have any clue how much work the Programmers have to do, or the media artists? And what about jobs that don't have a damn thing to do with gamez? Do you honestly think that playing a game ad nausem is a difficult job? Ever try construction work, or how bout something that requires a great deal of mental work, not just, "Hey, I bet game tester would be sooo cool... WAIT A SEC, this bites!" What's that,you haven't held a real job with real stresses? Didnt think so, but hey, that's okay, you can bitch about how horrible an experience it was to test games, and how you realized *horror of all horrors* a game isnt fun when played 100+ hours a week (I am in utter shock [sarcasm for those that missed it]). But that's okay! The modders are in utter amazement of your sad,sad tale (I hear the violins going off in the distance)and wish only to give you wonderful points for all your trouble....
As you can tell, I am not so impressed by your horror story. If you hate it so much, then get a real job, you said it yourself that the job has no job security and totally suxorz, so stop your bitchin and leave.
If you have gotten this far, then you are probabley dying to slap on a troll mod, but realize this, I am right and you know it. That's what makes you mad. So stop your bitching, develop some skills, and get a better job. Bitchin' sure as hell isn't gonna make it better.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
...and probably ever WILL have! I worked for Dynamix, which was a total blast. Sure, we had to test some pretty surly games, and it could be seriously tedious at times, but then we got to test fun games! I still enjoy Tribes 2, even after months of endless testing! Now I work for an education software company doing QA testing. It's so incredibly boring that I often think about quitting, but then notice the job market and see how much I'm making and I decide to stick it out. QA testing for a game company ruined my life! Not because it was a horrible experience, but because it was a GREAT experience, and every job I get from here on out will be compared to it.
Well that's ANY testing. I was a software engineer that had to do unit testing and also help out QA a few times. I programmed Healthcare software, it's mundane. Check the spelling, check the font, is it the same as the fonts on the other 15 tabs you just clicked. Testing is testing, no matter what you are testing.
The University of Southern California is starting a new video game design minor program. An article in the Daily Trojan (USC Student Newspaper) tells about one class. A syllabus can be found here.
~apok
It's not a bug, it's a feature
i was a game tester back before the dot.bomb
much of what testers examine is not top-rated games. for example, i tested a large number of kids' games (far more than the other, more fun/challenging and graphic ones). i may not be typical among testers, though; my company repackaged and distributed games over the internet, so i tested everything from unreal tournament, theif 3, and civilization II to tonka's garage and learn windows 98. most of testing is non-sequential; when i tested evercrack (err, i mean everquest), i didn't keep the same character for too long. essentially a tester's job is to break a program.
What do they do as a hobby? Accounting, maybe?
i was kind of known for "testing" ebay while at work, as it was my only internet connection and i was growing/selling my magic collection.
As to a real hobby, we would play speed bughouse (team chess) during lunch and Dungeons and Dragons after work on days we didn't hit the bar down the street (on the company of course)
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I used to program for a big console company and used to go downstairs to see the testers every so often. Although they had a fun little office (lots of porn and toys), it stunk of sweat because they kept having to do all-nighters.
The work is extremely tedious and requires concentration, since once you find a bug you have to recreate it and write it up. Plus, once the bug is "fixed", it needs to be tested a fair few times (depending on the bug type).
I remember this other guy found a bug that only came up one in ten times (each try takes about 3 mins). So, when we think we fixed it, we had to make him try it about 100 times to make sure. I went down to see him and he was slumped to one side in his chair, looking ready to kill someone, just hammering his joypad to repeat this bug. Made him stop in the end before he went on th rampage..
but there were some people who loved it and were like columbo in noticing little details and making the thing break. you'd get bugs like "i was walking around on level 4 with this cheat enabled and shooting at this particular wall with this timing and then i paused the game and turned off the music and unpaused then walked through the door then the game locked up".
we had thousands of bugs and were drowning in them, but the programmers had a secret weapon - NBF - which was NOT BEING FIXED, the all powerful veto for tedious bugs, provided of course it wasn't countered by those above you...
memories........................
There is so much competition on LA right now...I am a programmer, I have a BS, I work my ass off and I am good at what I do (better than most at my level), yet because I have less that 3 years experience, my market value in LA is less than 35k a year. WTF!!?
testing days over @ Nintendo rocked.
-----------
Starwars Galaxies - free webmail, boards, dbases
I play 100+ hours a week, I hardly ever sleep and eat, and the having no time to yourself thing is not an issue as I have no life outside of games. I have participated in several open betas, and I spend alot of time trying to find bugs in already released games for the hell of it ...
I'm reading these comments from people who've done this sort of testing and others who know people who've done this stuff. They all pretty much say the same thing: It sucks.
So, if there's this sucky job requiring lots of repetition, and precision, and exact recording of what's going on, why are people doing this? Can't the game coders make bots that can run through the game and do this-or-that repeatedly? Can't they test these things as they go?
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Did anyone ever tell you that if you think something sucks soooo bad, you don't have to do it?
Bloody hell. That bitching and moaning on the previous page proves you didn't like, so fucking don't do it. Next problem?
This is a contractual agreement between [Your name here], hereinafter Developer, and rice_burners_suck, hereinafter the Beneficiary, with regards to software developed by Developer, hereinafter Software. Developer hereby signs over all rights with regards to Software to Beneficiary. Developer gives all copyrights, including but not limited to all rights that have anything to do, no matter how remotely, with said Software, to Beneficiary, free of charge with no ifs, ands or buts, no questions asked, and no other problems or whatever. Developer agrees that no matter what, Beneficiary now owns said Software. Furthermore, developer agrees to pay rice_burners_suck $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 for its service of taking said Software from Developer.
____________
Developer's Signature
__________
Date
___________i ary's Signature
Benefic
_______
Date
Almost, perhaps "A QA Lead", but "QA Lead" is short one A.
What?
Try being the man who's ideas rock so corporations steal em.
x 2. html
Try coding a good MMOG by hand, on top of testing it.
Try having big game corporations fuck you over directly, ruining your credit, cancelling your wedding, and evicting you.
Try being me for a while. When I finish this MMOG though, everyone's gonna want to be me.
http://delvedesigns.com/websites/clancrazy/inde
God spoke to me
The longest week he has logged was 106 hours, and 60-hour-plus weeks are typical in deadline crunches, he said.
After a 106 hour marathon game testing session, he went home to unwind by going over budget figures in Microsoft Excel.
Does this
my gf was a bra fitter for olga/warnerco&&cK she wasnt too in to it. she says a lot of ladies were more than willing to walk about barechested, even if they needn't ever wear less than 3 parkas. - p3
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OK, So I'm not deneying for a second that game testing is tedious or not fun, but there are lots worse jobs that have equally long hours and pay less. You think that middle aged woman who is at McDonalds at midnight on Friday night is having fun? You think the people who work 3rd shift at non-union factories standing in fromt of an assembly line are having fun? You think the farmer who is trying to get his crops planeted before it rains again making his fields a muddy mess is having fun? You think the people who work at the meat processing plant are having fun?
Sure game testing is not a great job. It's probably pretty crappy. but there are a lot of other crappy jobs as well.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
plastered? is that a wall joke?
Not a complete list:
1) Hot Fudge Sundae Tastemaster
2) Rock Star
3) Condom Tester
4) Photographer for major pornography studio
5) QA for Demolition Supplies
6) "Joe Millionaire"
7) Security Guard behind one-way mirror in Victoria's Secret, Beverly Hills store
8) Industrial Spy, Exotic Sports Car Market
I guess anything's crappy when someone else is making you do it.
Sleep is for the Weak
Gee, I see some people are scared of 60 hours per week. Don't go to Japan, as 100 hours per week is pretty frequent.
Come on, 106 hours gets news on slashdot. Jeez, if I posted to slashdot every time I worked that many hours, I'd be able to...., well, I guess I'd be able to say I posted to slashdot more hours than I can remember.
Such is the life of a sysadmin.
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
As a former contract xbox tester I can state with certainty that being a games tester is probably one of the MOST overrated jobs in the "tech sector".
The facts of games testing:
1) You will get bored. Think about it logically. Even with the games with high replay value you get bored of them. If I *EVER* had to play NFL Fever again I think I will get physically SICK.
2) You will almost never get to play a game through in it's entirety. You will play bits and pieces over and over and over. I have played the Assault the Control Room level(s) in Halo several HUNDRED times forward and back, some parts over and over and over and over...
3) You will be paid LESS than other people working in Quality Assurance for non games firms.
4) You will not learn useful skills for career advancement outside the games industry. If you work for a long time in Games QA be prepared to remain there. It is unlikely you will learn skills useful in the rest of the world, or even in games development. (perhaps design but thats it). Not much point in knowing SQL if you are going to play DOA all day.
Conclusion: Little room for advancement. Less money and sadly you aren't even sacraficing it for some altruistic cause such as fighting world hunger. You had better LIVE for games.
Playing games that are 95% done is like drinking water that is 95% not urine. Sure, its mostly good, but that other %5 ruins the entire experience.
QA can be really difficult
aww.. whatever. you get the point.
> Life is not all fun and games for Alamano, though. It's all games -- with little time left for sleeping or eating
So? I do that (even more!) and i do not get $40000 ayear. And your little 60 hour week - that's nothing in comparison to a fanatical games players and even other people who also work hard because of their bosses beeing idiots by refusing to hire more staff to take the pressure of the employees.
Come back when you have REAL problems.
Thought I'd pipe up for the game-testers-actually-like-their-jobs camp (which seems a little short on support). Dude, most of the people I work with actually *love* the gig. Yeah yeah, long hours and super redundant UI BS. Yeah, carpal tunnel and the Prostitute Caveat (do it for pay, you'll never want to do it for free again...)
However, personally I think we have it pretty goddamn good: we spend *our* 12 hour days working on our passion; we know the game from the trenches and are often considered qualified design sources; we are usually respected for our talents and knowlege.
Those that say game testing is a cush job: well, wrong. It is actually fucking hard and stressful and you watch your age increment every morning in the mirror.
Those who say testing is crushing, brutal work-- come on, you know they can't really pay us any less, quit trying to scare off the new hires
The most amazing thing? Waking up every morning *looking forward* to going to work.
You wouldn't get away with that on a console. Well maybe CD-I.
Don't you mean all -game- seeing as most QA jobs involve working on one game from start to finish? That means playing the same game every day all day. Sure it's fun for about two days, then it becomes mindbogglingly dull for the most part. And that goes double if the game is single player or just plain crap.
Your only respite is if the QA department is reasonably casual and contains a few comedians, which (fortunately for me) is the case.
I'm not unwilling to do overhours when they are really needed, but if they reoccur constantly for the same reason, the management has failed big time!
It's well known that after 8 to 9 hours you become much less concentrated, the quality of your work decreases and accidents are more likely. So it's not good for both, employer and employee, to do so much overhours.
Kosi
WALKING?
YOu don't enjoy your job so much? SO LEAVE!
Shit you americans work way too many hours than is good for you anyway. Anyone would thing that you were all lawyers, investment bankers or surgeons.
I've got a nice little number as a sub-editor on a newspaper at the moment; mortgage gets paid, bills get paid, savings get made, holidays get gone on and shit gets bought, generally speaking.
But I've had poorly paid, monotonous jobs with bosses spawned from satan's very own cock, and you know what you do? YoU FUCKING WALK and go get something cushier.
You sure as hell sound like you hate your job man. Follow your instincts, get the fuck out and good luck.
Is it me, or are these numbers just not that big of a deal?
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
How often have you sat down and played a game for a while and thought to yourself "wouldn't it be cool if it could work this way?
I play some computer games, role-playing games, and miniature games. To be able to have some impact on the content and playability would be fantastic, especially if you got paid for it.
This is of course assuming that the company in question wanted your opinion and not for you to be a lemming.
I have done some beta testing for some undergound adventure games, not because I get paid, (which I don't), but because I like adventure games and wanted to understand to delevopment process better. It sucks. The game was fun, but after trying to break it every way possible, the fun goes away quick. I can't think about doing this for a living...this was just a little 8 hours a week sort of thing for my name in the credits.
Ok........ why would you wank pigs?
I hadn't heard of it being done with pigs, but it's a common practice with turkeys. Because the breastmeat is the most important part of a turkey, they have been selectively bred over and over and over again until the turkeys that are on turkey farms these days are so physically enlarged that it's impossible have sex. It's up to the farmer to collect the semen and then manually inseminate the hens.
I will admit, I derived GREAT satisfaction when people asked me what I did for a living..."I play games for a living, what do YOU do?"
After a while, the novelty wears off.
I beta tested the MMOG Tanarus for Sony Interactive Studios of America (aka SISA, aka Verant, aka 989 Studios). I got paid $1.00 over min wage as I was a temp. I could go on and on about the 'perks' Sony provides the perms and not temps (Pizza during crunch time, free PS dev units, etc.) but I'd rather leave the ranting at home today.
Bottom line: You cannot make a living from doing this work. If you like playing games for a living, code them for somebody!
- OrbNobz
Are we fashionably late?
Did it say anywhere in that rant that I was still holding this job? I am out! The job isn't ALL bad though. I was just trying to emphasize that's playing games for a living is not all fun and games, because some of the Slashdot pole smokers had decided that they knew everything there was to know about being a tester witout being anywhere near the job.
When you DO manage to ship a game mainly bug free, it feels pretty good. But, it just drains you...too repetitive...no real thinking invovled. I needed to get out, needed to do something where I'd use my brain for something other than proofreading screen by screen.
But you are right about one thing. People here in America work far too many hours! More vacation!
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
I am sure there are a few of us who would like to let you let you know in a not-so-nice way exactly what we think of your poor beta testing skills.
Wow -- a bunch of replies, and I get modded as flamebait.
I'm not trying to say it's a good job, nor would I be interested in taking the job. Thankfully, I'm employed in a MUCH happier situation, and I have choices for fall-back if this gig folds tomorrow.
My point is simply this: Video game testing is a job. If you don't like your job, then change your situation. We aren't talking about extortion, indentured servitude, white (or any color) slavery or any other explotative situation. It's a job.
If you choose to sit in a horrific situation, but do nothing but complain about how bad off you have it, then I'm not going to shed a tear for you.
You're free to go. If you're not free to go, then that's a different story.
Funny, that's our Windows XP deployment strategy...
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Developers should note that the PS2 has a seek time similar to that of a reel to reel tape deck, so they should not be reading lots of tiny little files. It's not a PC hard disk. Join them all up into one big one for each load.
These gaming companies should establish in costa rica. We have gamers up to the roof, with university degrees, they don't smoke pot all day like gringos do and would love to work for $20000 a year. contact me I'll set up everything up for ya here, phones , computers, ISP's, servers all to a 1/3 of the cost. Damn it if Intel does it why don't you do ???
old CIO article, it includes a computer gaming firm, EA Tiburon of Orlando Florida
http://www.cio.com/archive/030100/intern_conten