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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.'"
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
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
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!))
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.
There is one downside that makes it less fun, more tedious, and more like a job then a vacation - you've got to play the SAME GAME over and over and over and over and over...
If it's a fun game, that's no problem, but how many games out there do you REALLY want to play for 80 hours a week for a month or two solid? I can't think of very many. You'd get sick of it in a real hurry.
Government IS the problem.
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
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Did you read the article? They mentioned times in meetings, and i'm sure that it isn't just "Go have fun". I'm sure each tester is given a set of things to test. Imagin the fun of testing out EVERYWALL on some level to make sure that you don't walk through it. Or testing out every possible path possible durring a conversation sequence of a game. It would be fun, but it could get just as boring as any other job out there. Remember that they don't just get paid to play video games, they get paid to FIND BUGS! Big difference. Trust me, i'm a computer engineer and work as a validation engineer.
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.
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.
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Yeah, I've come to that conclusion too. I doesn't matter what you do as a job, it's never going to be completely enjoyable. As soon as you no longer have the option to turn it off and walk away, it becomes much less enjoyable.
The best you can hope for is having a job where you have some control over the direction of your projects, or at least over the specific implementation of the project. It also helps to do something that gives you some fulfillment.
After playing a lot of computer games, especially the same one over and over, I feel silly. It's especially worse when you use cheat codes, even after you "beat" the game, if it is that kind of game. You realize just how worthless the accomplishments that were so important to you just hours before really were.
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'.
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!
Take you fvorite game of all time, not take your favorite piece of that game, not play it for 100 hours a week for a month.
Belive me, you are better off working 35 hours, and playing a finished game for 25 hours a week.
its not like Carmack walks in and says, here is a completely finished version of the game, play it at your leasure, get back to me in a month.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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--
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.
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.
The BLS puts the average US wage at $14.98 a year...which would is $30,000. We can't all be above average, now, can we?
Economy at a glance
QA Lead
'QA Lead' is an anagram for "Al Qaeda"
Terrorist!!!
As a company grows, the distance between the product and the money increases.
If they manage to sell the same number of copies, regardless of how solid or polished the game is, and if they don't feel any emotional connection to the game, why should they put time and money into testing and polishing it?
Of course, looking at certain cases (such as Rollercoaster Tycoon, Half-Life or Ultima VII) they would see that sometimes that investment does pay off. But the people making the decisions in large game companies usually prefer to spend that time and money on advertising (something they understand). It gets them the same net result (sales), it gets it in a shorter period, and it's not as risky (a game may turn out to be crap even after years in development, but with enough advertising you can sell anything).
So FIFA 2002 sucked? No problem. Next year there'll be FIFA 2003, and some people will buy it because they never played 2002 and some will buy it hoping it's better than 2002. It's not, of course. It's just more of the same - lots of polygons, zero gameplay, endless loading times, unusable menus. But as long as the dollars (or euros, or whatever) keep coming in, they'll keep doing it. And when people realise it's never going to improve, they've already given EA (or whoever) plenty of profit. And new sucke^H^H^H clients are born every year. And "editorial" advertising in the game industry is pretty cheap, especially with thousands of websites competing to be the first to review "XPTO 2003". You can be sure they won't say it's crap. At least not if they want a chance to review XPTO 2004 this time next year.
People in smaller companies want their game to turn out perfect. When they find a bug, they feel bad about it. But many of those smaller companies are now owned by large companies, and they have to obey the law of the sausage factory (keep crankin' them out). After all, that's how Big Bill got where he is today.
Above a certain size, all businesses are in the business of making money.
RMN
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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
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.
Yeah. Game testing is fun. But remember that you test the product that you're company is developing. Not only is it (probably) not the game of your choice, but there are usually problems in it that make it less fun or no fun. Even if the game is mostly functional, you can't just usually play it. You have to find where it's broken and do the same types thing over and over again. On rare occaison that you do get to play through the game normally, the game has already lost its appeal as entertainment to the tester so it's not even a reward so much as another task. The exceptions are, of course, multiplayer games (which I'm not currently testing). With all that said, I will admit it. I like my job. Although, I'd like even more to be able to play my favorite multiplayer game (Descent 3) 60 hours a week and get paid for it. But there's a fat chance that'll ever happen. As with any other job, you can't just do what you want to do. You have to work on what needs to be done.