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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.'"
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 didn't work as a game tester at Sega (I was in third-party developer support), but I knew a bunch of the game testers. Their job was anything but fun.
Yes, you get to play games... But it's very tedious, like as in, play the game, notice a fault. You have to be able to document EXACTLY what you did to cause the camera angle to go all funky, or cause that lockup, and be able to do it consistently.
I walked in on a testing session of a racing game. There was a team of five or six testers (can't remember how many) playing the game for 8-9 hours per day, on a five day (sometimes three day) testing cycle. One person was driving the entire track completely backwards. Another person was crashing into every object, mobile and immobile. Others were constantly ripping the controllers and memory cards out and putting them back in.
This isn't as fun as you think it is - it's real work.
And to top it off, that $40,000 that the game tester makes doesn't get you that far in San Francisco where Sega is.
-- Joe
Next, each tester is given some very specific areas to test. Say you do weapons. You'll have to test the functionality of each weapon: standard, skinned, when used in adrenaline mode, how fast the weapon switch happens, and a thousand other things in a thousand combinations. Did I mention that you have to test this for every single supported platform? Let's do the list: Windows 98, NT, 2000, ME, XP, X-box, Gamecube, Playstation, Mac, and Linux.
Testing each area isn't a once-through, either. Suppose something doesn't work right (and it won't). You get to note the specific system configuration (OS, build number, video config, controller, and all game options), then try to replicate the bug so you can give a list of specific steps to take that will make the bug occur every single time. A bug report that says "I can't pick up the rocket launcher sometimes" is useless unless you can show the developer how to make it happen every time. Translated: repeat the same exact motions with minor variations until you home in on exactly what's wrong.
Let's keep in mind that you don't just "play the game". You exercise your specific area of game play several hours a day for several months. By the time the game ships, you'll never want to play it again.
Now let's address the business side: you're working for a software company post-boom. You are understaffed, under-funded, and all devlopment times are reduced. If you don't get everything finished by Halloween, your game won't be in the stores for Christmas. Trust me: October is going to be hell. You like playing videogames? Now do it 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for a month.
By the way, $40,000 is peanuts in Silicon Valley. Get ready to drive an hour from Redwood City to Fremont because that's the closest apartment under $1000 a month. Yeah, I know the map says 28 minutes. They're lying.
Finally. You shipped. The code went gold, the cds all went to press, and the game is in the store. No Thanksgiving for you, though. Every kid in America bought a copy of your game and is trying it out on their uniquely configured system. You get to replicate the hundreds of bug reports filed by pissed-off 13-year-olds (and boy will they be polite and well-thought-out. Think "My game doesn't work! You fags suck dick!" and other bon mots) so a patch can be available on the web site for Christmas morning.
Game testing is difficult, time-consuming, highly-skilled work, and the testers are sorely underpaid and have zero job security. If you think it's easy, I encourage you to try to get a job as a game tester. Assuming you can even land a gig, you'll run away screaming in a month.
Interociter
-=What do I want? I'm an American. I want more.
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."
Look at adultstaffing.com. It's like monster.com for endowed people.
Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid. --John Wayne
"Why are these people complaining again??? The rest of the world has long hours and probably less job satisfaction than these "game testers"."
Pick up a football game, go through every single play (over a hundred) in the game, and make sure that what happens on the screen is exactly what's described in the manual. Tell me that wouldn't test your mental endurance.
I'm not a game tester, but I've done a great deal of testing for the software company I work for. It wouldn't matter if I was playing a game, it's still work. It'll always be work.
Besides, it's one thing to play the game and enjoy it, it's entirely another when your job is to test out every little thing and make sure it works as designed.
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
It's also a way talented people without art or programming skills can get into games. The common path is tester -> test lead -> assistant producer -> associate producer -> producer -> executive producer -> game god. Of course, this takes years, and you need to sell your soul around AP to succeed...
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
First off the path is more like:
Tester.
If you're at an average company for less than a year, you will never go past that. On top of that, I'm going to say about 1/2 the companies here don't develop in-house, so, the highest position you can get at those companies is Asst. Producer.
But guess what? That guy never leaves. So, if you're extremely lucky, you get a chance to bail on that path, and get to take a Marketing/Merchandising position. Otherwise, you have to hope you can ply your services to another company and jump to AP there. (There's a strange phenomena in business where they're much more likely to bring in some new guy to put over everyon else, then promote a guy within the ranks who has the same or better qualifications.)
And, also on the low end of the job totem pole: Tech Support.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
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
~~~
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........................
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.