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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.'"
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. =)
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,"
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.
So which is worse, playing the same game over and over for two months or staring at the same piece of crap ASP code and trying to figure out what the 30 developers in front of you were thinking (or not as the case may be) while your boss is screaming about deadlines, the financial people are screaming about budgets, and your co-workers are screaming about forming a union? Now ask yourself, which would you rather do: Test games, or be unemployed and "test games" without pay?
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.
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
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.
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