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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.'"
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. =)
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,"
What do they do as a hobby? Accounting, maybe?
...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.
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.
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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."
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--