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.'"

Comments

Re:Poor babies...

[interociter]

OK, Let me spell it out for you. As a tester, you are responsible for far more than just playing the game a lot. It starts with writing a test plan, a complex document detailing all the game features and exactly how they'll be tested. How much damage does a direct hit with a rocket do? How much damage do you suffer from a rocket jump? How will you determine that that is what happens? Repeat this for every element of the game from simple movement to pull-down menus to the API for creating levels.

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.

Testing is not the same as playing

[scaramush]

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.