Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Lemme get this straight. You get PAID to spend the majority of your time playing videogames. OH WHAT A HELLISH NIGHTMARE EXISTANCE!! WO IS YOU!!
I just spent the afternoon degaussing 130 DLT tapes. You'll forgive me if I don't share in your plight of the hellishness that is Galaxies or Planetside. I'll pray for you tonight.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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. =)
...for vivid games. I quit when my palms were so covered in blisters that it was painful to drive.
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,"
That guy must have been slacking off. I mean, with the 62 hours left during the 7 day week, he had about 62/7=8.8 hours left each day, which would be plenty of time to sleep. That slacker!
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
What do they do as a hobby? Accounting, maybe?
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
...when you are assured lifetime employment as a Duke Nukem Forever tester?
You think you have it bad.
I'm the Chief Deneedler at a haystack company. You don't know what hell is until you spend 40 hours a week searching haystacks for needles.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
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.
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
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
1.Burn down the haystack.
2.Run around with metal detector.
3.Profit!!!
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.
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.
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.
-
Welcome to Equilibrium, the Game of Life (c).
You are at the north end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: S
>read plaque
The plaque reads "Know thyself".
>S
You are at the south end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: N
>read plaque
The plaque reads "Nothing in excess".
>N
You are at the north end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: S
(...)
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
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 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!
Imagine the fun of testing out EVERYWALL on some level to make sure that you don't walk through it.
Yeah, and imagine that all your co-workers shooting you at the same time! "Boy, Jim is an easy target today. It's like he's always running into walls!"
(On the other hand, if you do find a buggy wall, it would be "Hey! Where did he go?")
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
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
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.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I am a games tester. When I finish a project, usually the first thing i do with my free cop(y/ies) is send them to friends who live far away.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
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."
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.
"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
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--
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.
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.
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 dunno. I think Mary-Kate and Ashley might give that a run for its money.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
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.
The longest week he has logged was 106 hours, and 60-hour-plus weeks are typical in deadline crunches, he said.
After a 106 hour marathon game testing session, he went home to unwind by going over budget figures in Microsoft Excel.
Does this
Playing games that are 95% done is like drinking water that is 95% not urine. Sure, its mostly good, but that other %5 ruins the entire experience.
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.