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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.'"
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 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.
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.
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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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--