Sega Settles Discrimination Suit With Filipino Game Testers

Thanks to GamePro for its story discussing the $600,000 settling of a discrimination suit brought by Sega game testers who charged that "Sega directed [employment agency] Spherion to terminate the employment of 13 Filipino game testers due to their national origin." Complicatedly, it appears: "The move to fire the Filipino employees stemmed from a complaint of a former employee, who alleged in his exit interview that Sega was giving preferential treatment to Filipinos." Interviews with the testers paint a downbeat perspective of the job, with one of the fired employees saying: "I look around and see some friends who are game testers, and I talk to a couple of people who are in the industry, and what I get from other people is that game testers... are almost disposable."

Comments

Say it ain't so

[b00m3rang]

"I look around and see some friends who are game testers, and I talk to a couple of people who are in the industry, and what I get from other people is that game testers... are almost disposable."

You mean, there's no shortage of people willing to play video games for a living? How could this be?

Re:Say it ain't so

[escher]

You mean, there's no shortage of people willing to play video games for a living?

But how many of them can really get into a game to fully critique it? (As opposed to, "Duuuhhh... gamez ar fun, doodz!")

Re:Say it ain't so

[lightspawn]

But how many of them can really get into a game to fully critique it? (As opposed to, "Duuuhhh... gamez ar fun, doodz!")

These people are testers. They can't really critique the games. Not that SEGA's got anybody else to do that...

Re:Say it ain't so

[Dixie_Flatline]

QA usually consists of tasks like, "Open and Close this dorr 1000 times, and see if anything breaks", or "Walk over this trigger 500 times and see if the server and client fall out of sync."

It's hard work, but it's not usually SKILLED work, in the sense that you don't need a lot of special training beforehand. I'm SUPER appreciative of our QA staff, but it's not something that you need a degree for. What you DO need is attention to detail, the ability to do monotonous tasks for hours on end, and a willingness to put up with annoying programmers like me that say that the bug can't be reproduced and that you're on crack for suggesting that it's still in the game. :)

I wouldn't say that QA is 'disposable'. It especially wouldn't be considered that if people knew what the job was like. It ruins a lot of people's ability to play and enjoy games. It really changes your outlook on life, from what I hear. You notice the flaws in everything, and see where OTHER QA departments have failed.

Re:Say it ain't so

[Scrameustache]

a willingness to put up with annoying programmers like me that say that the bug can't be reproduced and that you're on crack for suggesting that it's still in the game. :)

I always figured you never actually even try to reproduce 'em and just loaf around on slashdot all day...

Guess I was right ;-)

Re:Say it ain't so

[Xaymot]

Sure, but there is a huge difference between "being disposable" and being made to "feel disposable". Just because a job position is in high demand doesn't mean that a person deserves to be mistreated or have their rights brushed aside. In many professional relationships it is understood that some people serve a short term purpose but you should still be professional and not rub it in their face like an @$$ or worse, fire them because they're Fillipino.

Re:Say it ain't so

[Anonymous Coward]

Good one

Re:Say it ain't so

[Thing 1]

Better QA consists of finding the edge cases and automating tests to make sure that bugs that used to exist don't come back.

Of course, there's always a need for manual testing, but the better testers learn automation skills and move up in the organization.

Re:Say it ain't so

[TheLink]

Thile the monotonous stuff is needed, there are bits like the computer security line where you'd do much better if you understand how things could break. You'd then easily think of things (or a sequence of things) that normal players only might trigger 1 out of 200 times (and then complain).

BTW I got to the top of the lighthouse in GTA3 from a boat. Trick is to jump backwards all the way up. Not a bug but a feature :).

Re:Say it ain't so

[Dixie_Flatline]

In all honesty, I think it's hard to automate a considerable amount of testing in our newer games, especially the XBox games. Moreover, automation is just another variable that you don't want to have to deal with. If a bug pops up, you have to question whether it was the automation process or an actual bug. We don't trust our code to automatic generation, and we don't trust our testing to automated processes. I think we come out ahead both times.

Re:Say it ain't so

[Thing 1]

We don't trust our code to automatic generation, and we don't trust our testing to automated processes. I think we come out ahead both times.

This may be picking nits, but if you use anything other than assembly language then you are trusting your code to automatic generation.

Even assembly is interpreted; you'd have to write in machine language to have no generation involved.

I do understand what you were saying, which is why I mentioned the nits. And I don't work in the game industry, which I would imagine is a lot more difficult to automate than the general applications that I automate.

Especially the XBox, you'd need a super-fast cluster to process the images coming from the video splitter between the XBox and the TV; you'd need software that can take the 2-D representation on-screen and attempt to pull out 3-D info from it; you'd need to similarly split the controller's cable so the cluster could provide input; and you'd need to custom-write each test for each game.

This is me going overboard, but perhaps game testers of the world could unite and create an open-source framework for game testing which would take all of these variables into account. Sure, it would be a rather big effort to get the first game tested, but once the framework was there, the second, third and fourth games would take significantly less time.

But it may not be worth it to considering starting such a project, because human labor is cheap and getting cheaper as we globalize.

In a perfect world, the robots would do all the work. We'll get there, it's just a matter of time. So I suppose in a roundabout way I agree with you: you do come out ahead by making do with what you have, and not chasing pipe dreams which have a short-term money vacuum and only long-term benefits.

Disposable Employees

[Landaras]

[W]hat I get from other people is that game testers... are almost disposable

Hate to be the one to break this to you, but the general business concensus in almost any industry is that just about anyone is disposable.

Not that I agree with this, but that is the reality, esp. when an economy is not doing overly well.

- Neil Wehneman

As Someone who thinks he knows something..

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me tell you, Game testers have by no means the best job in the world. You are there to work. Even if you like the game you're playing (you are truly lucky then) you still have to test it. Test it so much that it no longer seems fun. You have to write a good deal, depending on your company (some companies have very nice methods, but good luck). And you still get treated like you're a janitor.

Re:As Someone who thinks he knows something..

[black mariah]

Am I supposed to cry or something? It's still playing games for a living. I did QC work for a large guitar manufacturer a couple of years ago. When someone asked what I did I told them "I sit around and play with guitars all day." I didn't bother mentioning that I rarely had a guitar in my hand for more than five minutes, that I had to do a good amount of warehouse work, that I had to handle incoming customer service calls, and that the company I was working for was on the brink of financial disaster and employed too many assholes and morons. My job was to play with guitars and get paid for it. I WISH I could say that all I did was play games all day and get paid for it. Tedious or not, it's still far better than working in a warehouse.

Game testing vs software testing.

[b0r0din]

I think part of the question is how game testing differs from software testing, by which software is stress tested and tested for flaws and problems.

Most software testers are not disposable (except maybe those being outsourced to India, but that's a whole different matter) but they are also active in the coding process to correct software glitches, perform specific tests. Are game testers held by the same criteria, ie. able to code and correct problems, or are they merely there to play the game?

I think the idea behind 'disposable testers' is that they are given the job of playing a game, so naturally the assumption is that it's a BS job or that it's a fun job. Having never been in a game environment, I can't say, but it could be that the job is something akin to a Production assistant working for a studio, where there is so much competition that the position is considered disposable and thus those being hired are treated like so much trash.

Re:Game testing vs software testing.

[Alkaiser]

Oh man...if I was allowed to code the game, you would have seen such better versions of a lot of games that you've all played.

They don't require a tester to know how to code. Nobody in our office had access to the code we were working with for the majority of the time. Everything was done outside, and then we got revs mailed back to us.

To an extent any gamer can be QA. But not every gamer can be GOOD QA. The problem with this lies in the fact that 1 good QA guy in a leadership position can cover up the flaws of several other testers. You get one guy who can work hard, has good writing skills and pride in his work, and he'll cover up the flaws of several people under him. In this manner, you can hire 3 good QA guys to oversee the work of 15 crappy ones, and get serviceable results.

You'd be shocked at how little of a hiring process there is during crunch time. A lot of temp testing hires are given jobs solely based off of the available hours they have. Since the GOOD guys cover up for the crap guys, outsiders assume the department is OK and don't do anything about they way they've hired people.

Nobody can accurately describe QA without having done it for a year or so. "Merely playing the game" is a lot less trivial than you'd make it appear.

How many times do you play a game for fun, load up 35 different save points, and check that you can buy, sell, and cancel out of transactions at a store. Then go and sell every single item you have in stock, and make sure it gives you the proper amount of money back. After that, buy every single item you sold, and then make sure it deducts the proper amount of money, and that it won't sell it to you if you don't have enough cash.

At the end of all this 30-45 hours of mundane work, the pointlessness of it all is underscored by the Lead taking a look at your results and chucking them in the waste bin. All for $8/hr.

You feel your life ticking away at a QA job. The only reasons compelling enough to tough out that job are that you take pride in knowing there's one less text error gamers will laugh about. You know that you've got a damn good group of guys with you, you're just biding your time to get a job at a better QA or game gig, or there's room to advance to somewhere else in the company.

as an American white male who worked for Spherion

[Anonymous Coward]

I gotta say I have no idea what they're talking about. I certainly never experienced that sort of thing!

What a shocker!

[Anonymous Coward]

No really! Game testers are disposable?! Who would have thought?

Now seriously, the only requirement needed to perform the job when getting hired is a love of games and a decent understanding of computers. You pretty much get taught everything you need to know first day. Basically all that entails is how to write up bug reports.

There were two methos we used. Play game til it crashes. Record what caused the crash, and what error appeared if any. Describe if it was a crash to desktop, a hard lock, a system reset. Then try and recreate that same crash to prove it was repeatable.

Method two involved an actual test plan. This was usually in the later stages of development as the game became stable and playable. Then we'd test all the nit-picky items. Check dialogues for spelling/grammar errors, walk over every pixel, make sure you don't walk through trees and the like, then record all those little things.

Any high school kid with a moderate interest in computers can do this job, and it's a fun job for a little while. It can be real tedious at times as you've worked on trying to recreate one crash for 8+ hours.

Disposable Folks

[_RiZ_]

Anyone who works for 10 bucks an hour is disposable... and you are probably getting less than 10 so change the word "disposable" to "slave-labor" and it more defines the role. Having to work 100 hours a week must suck. And for the testers I know, they complain... yet they never seem to want another job?

Re:Disposable Folks

[Anonymous Coward]

"Anyone who works for 10 bucks an hour is disposable... and you are probably getting less than 10 so change the word "disposable" to "slave-labor" and it more defines the role. Having to work 100 hours a week must suck. And for the testers I know, they complain... yet they never seem to want another job?"

Bullshit.

Bullshit.

Bullshit.

I make $10 an hour; henceforth I am disposable? What a horrid leap of assumption, let alone worth a mod up to 2.

Not being in a large city, but the largest one in this state (Maine), $10/hr is a reasonable/liveable amount. Am I worth more? You bet your arse I am, and I know my boss knows it. We get paid various bonuses from time to time during the year due to that knowledge. However, the company can't always pull in enough money to make us all rich.

Using a basis of $10/hour as disposable, means you need to get your righteous attitude out of your arse, recognize that the market in area one is different that area two or three, and not everyone can afford to "want another job" because they'll miss a single rent period, and can't just move back into Mom & Dad's.

However, being part of the slave-labor pool, I can recognize the class warfare going on, and can only hope that attitudes like yours don't continue long before irrepairable harm comes to this country.

Re:Disposable Folks

[Lucius Septimius Sev]

Compaired to most jobs that are 10 bucks an hour its pretty dam good work. Most ten dollar an hour jobs around here in NYC are working for HomeDepot or another large company.

Those jobs come with two problems.

First you only get around 20-30 hours of work per week and for a college student taking a year off to make some scratch thats a raw deal. You have to get a second job or maybe a third. Second those jobs when working for only a year give you the usual register, stock or maybe a greeter if its a very large store. Testing games might be boring but not as boring as those tasks.

Calling 6 dollar an hour jobs slave laber is alright but ten dollars is pretty good for a newbie with nothing to offer his employer other then basic writing skills and an abilty to sit for long hours.

IAALT (I Am A Lead Tester)

[Scrameustache]

Are game testers held by the same criteria, ie. able to code and correct problems, or are they merely there to play the game?

Testers test.
They don't code, they don't "play", they test, that's their job.

And yes, they are treated as disposable people, its a cool job, it beats washing toilets or flipping burgers, but testers are to the gaming industry what goblins are to fantasy settings or infantry to the military. Call it disposable, expendable, whatever. I call it the bottom of the ladder, and when shit happens, it flows down.
Also, its a contract job. There's work mostly in the summer/fall and not much in the winter/spring (the summer rush ends in october for console games and november for PC games, who don't have to awnser to Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft and who can always get a patch later on).

What I've seen is that they hire testers when a project needs testing, and when its done most of 'em get the axe and the good ones are kept or told they'll be called back when there's a new project.

I might be a tad bitter...

Having never been in a game environment

It shows...

I think the idea behind 'disposable testers' is that they are given the job of playing a game, so naturally the assumption is that it's a BS job or that it's a fun job.

Yeah, because doing 40 to 70 hours a week in the same damn levels over and over again, documenting every little problem...that's fun...

Sheesh.

almost?

[AIX-Hood]

"I get from other people is that game testers... are almost disposable." They're not almost, they fully disposable. As one game magazine mentioned, the next career step after game tester is janitor. Unless you're taking game creation classes on the side while working as a game tester during the day, there's really no career path in game testing other than staying where you are.

Not a career, dumbass

[Smidge204]

Working as a game tester is not something you should plan a friggin' career on. Of course you're going to be disposable - the job takes virtually nothing to qualify for and there's plenty of people willing to do it. If you're *really* lucky, you might get a few contacts in the company you can use if you want to get into game development, but I'm thinking that's pretty damn rare.

Working as a game tester is just like mopping floors at McDonalds. No brains, very tedious, and you're not exactly contibuting anything unique to the company.
=Smidge=

Re:Not a career, dumbass

[Scrameustache]

Working as a game tester is just like mopping floors at McDonalds. No brains, very tedious

It is very tedious, but the guys with no brains are laid off pretty damn fast.

There is a big intelectual step from noticing a flaw to describing the exact reproduction process of that flaw.

disposable

[qlippoth]

is that game testers... are almost disposable.

Might have something to do with the fact that everybody in the history of the world would take a job where they get paid to play video games? Seriously though, I know the pay isn't all that great, but game tester would probably make a great job to work through college.

Re:disposable

[Anonymous Coward]

It would if it weren't for the fact you're working 13 hours a day 6 days a week. Makes it rather hard to fit in the going to classes part.

And having been a tester there's a big difference between playing a game and testing a game.

Re:disposable

[Scrameustache]

everybody in the history of the world would take a job where they get paid to play video games

Those Amish testers are the worst! Its allways carriages this, barn raising that...
;-)

Re:disposable

[Alkaiser]

Yeah, and their:

"Graphical Error: Woman's ankles exposed."

I mean, if they even get THAT in. Most of the time they're just going on and on about the evils of electricity.

Former Sega Employee

[Propeller Arena]

This is my second post ever to /. As you can tell by my nickname, the last post I submitted was about "Propeller Arena," a cancelled Sega game.

In any case, I'd like to toss in my two cents about this whole deal. First of all, the fired employee who threatened a lawsuit in the first place is Steve Peck. I'll say it again, just so everyone knows. Steve Peck. That's the correct spelling.

Steve Peck is well known throughout the industry for his fanatic love of all things Sega. No kidding. He has a Sonic the Hedgehog tattoo. It's on his leg, if I remember right.

Now, I'm not trying to bash the guy, but he's quite an ass to work with. First off, he's by far the loudest mouth in any office I've worked in in the last 10 years. When he wanted someone's attention, he'd scream at the top of his lungs. He'd frequently do things like pass gas in other employees' cubes. While this may be amusing, the putrid ensuing stink wasn't. He'd also do this in front of new employees, thus showing them that it's okay to be a complete ass at work. He'd also incite pointless Mac vs PC arguments when he should have been working. What do you think your employer would do if they knew you were debating as opposed to working?

The main reason he was fired, and John Amirkhan told me this at the time of his firing, was because Peck decided he wasn't rich enough. Peck was falsifying his hours on his time sheets. Naturally, he was caught and fired. Steve, being the jerk he is, decided he couldn't let Sega management seperate him from his precious position as a game tester, so he threatened the lawsuit. In a blatantly knee-jerk reaction, Sega management proceeded to:

- Fire the test department management
- Fire all of Steve's acquaintances
- Fire pretty much everyone who was Fillippino

That was Sega's mistake. But this pretty much all stemmed from some total ass who couldn't tolerate the fact that the company he so adored wasn't going to pay him to sit around the office (or as the case may be, NOT sit around the office.)

Re:Former Sega Employee

[Anonymous Coward]

Some games on which Mr. Peck has worked

Re:Former Sega Employee

[Anonymous Coward]

Let us all take a moment to thank Daniel Chang, lead tester of the cancelled Propeller Arena, for such witty and wonderful prose.

Do be sure and thank him for the game once its all over the 'net.

How do you become a official game tester?

[Quadfreak0]

I've always wanted to give it a try, I've done limited betas before(Planet-Side, WC3) so I know I'll be working with incomplete work etc. Anyone know who I should contact about having plenty of spare time to test games? Living in the Miami,FL Area I know of any game studios here..

Re:How do you become a official game tester?

[Mike Hawk]

Not many of opportunites to be both "official" and stay at home. Step one is move to LA. Step two is check the publisher's websites. Good luck!

Re:How do you become a official game tester?

[Quadfreak0]

correction: Living in the Miami,FL Area I DONT know of any game studios here..

Re:How do you become a official game tester?

[Alkaiser]

You move to where the companies are. LA. Nobody has you as a full time tester from a different time zone, especially with everyone having source code leaks. If you can't move, it's a pipe dream until you can.

Re:How do you become a official game tester?

[Scrameustache]

Anyone know who I should contact about having plenty of spare time to test games?

Its not a spare time thing, its a full time job.
You find a game company within commute distance of where you live and you apply for the position.

The best place to apply to would be a game publisher, since they usually are the ones in charge of testing (as opposed to the developpers, who are in charge of making buggy games and then refusing to admit that its full of bugs). You need to know how to work in an office (meaning you need to know how to use Word and Excel or their open office equivalent, to show up on time, do what your superviser tells you, etc).
There are also a handfull of testing subcontractors, don't know if there are any in florida though.
Basically, being smart, professional, patient and passionate about games will qualify you.

The pay sucks, the hours are horrible, the stress is intense, but you get to impress any 10 year old you meet : )

Re:IAASPL (I Am A Senior Project Lead)

[Mike Hawk]

Been doing the QA thing for quite some time. Much longer than I intended actually, but they pay me too much to up and leave now.

Spot on. Though you paint a bit of a bleak picture and I want to polish it off a bit. Yes there is a high turnover rate for testers. Testers are hired generally on a temp basis, and they know full well what they are getting into when they apply. Being the one in a million long-shot cliche here guy to "make it" is rare. This is typical, though we are hiring a little more than we had been lately. Business is good. =)

Who comes in? Kids right out of high school or college looking for a fun gig before starting college or a career. Some guys make the rounds and seem to bounce from publisher to publisher. Then there is always just the random avid gamer who really really really wants to make games but doesn't have any qualifications other than they are good that them. I personally got hooked in out of school. Just applyed on a laugh. Got it, turns out Im good at it, and Im still here 4 years later. Though the whole bust and everything. HA!

Mostly though turnover is high. Some leave because that thing they were waiting for comes through. Others don't work out. And sometimes there is just no work. The best stay, the rest go, sometimes the medium guys get asked back next year.

Good QA is hard. Its not a BS job nor is it a fun job, but its fun-ish. Its fun for me because I actually enjoy the process more than the gaming. In fact I've pretty much been promoted out of actually playing them!

Are you going to come into a publisher, design a sweet game on their time, sell it back to him and become the next Will Wright? Hell no. Be realistic. Enjoy the job, take it serious, try hard, learn the many levels of the job and yes there are opportunities. Many of my good friends are now designers at various developers all over the US. I look at my AIM list and I can contact devs from coast to coast just to bullcrap. Some others are in production here. They all got hired based on their work right here in QA. Others went on to higher positions in other QA departments.

What's this all about? I don't know anymore. Just that yes, turnover is high in QA, but its because so many people want to do it. Not because it sucks or its not worth it. And some of that turnover is to fill a seat of someone who just got their dream job.

You forgot a very important thing.

[cgenman]

Creativity. Your best testers are the ones that can still come up with ludicrous, ridiculous things to try after doing ludicrous, ridiculous things to this piece of software for 10 hours a day the past 8 months. You know, the ones that decide to feed the big monster the meat of undying gratitude and attack them with the pokey fork of infuriating blindness while pausing and saving during the same frame, only to load the game and, without unpausing, cast the instaneous spell of random teleportation on the poor beast.

From an engineering standpoint it doesn't require a lot of "special training," but the same thing could be said about the marketing department. You need a very broad experience base touching on 3d drawing, programming, design, and gameplay. You do have to deduce all of the interrelating systems in a game and how they may misinteract with eachother. The programmer probably thought to put in a special case clause for doing direct damage to a unit in the same tick that they transfer ownership to the damaging player, but did they remember about area damage? They must have implemented pathfinding around obstacles, and regions of potential interacction around obstacles, but did they remember to update completely surrounded regions of potential interaction when obstacles are removed? I had to create a demo level for the programmers for that last one, so that they would understand what was going wrong.

Testers should not be disposable (until the end of the project *sigh*), because good testers will save a lot of valuable programmer and artist time. Now, most publisher's testing departments I have worked with (and in) have been disposable, simply because their job was not to create the best game possible, but to put in the number of hours as stipulated in the contract. But the in-house teams I have worked in (and with) have all been excellent, focused, and above all, valuable. A programmer could say he saw something weird at a particular location, and go do something more important. When he came back, there would be a %100 repro and parameterization that gave them insight into the problem. With a good QA team, bugs can take minutes to fix. With a bad QA team, that same fix might take hours to figure out.

To misquote Tom Lehrer, a testing department is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends upon what you put into it. The attitude that a testing department is not a skilled position will be reflected in the kinds of testers that you hire and ultimately, the kind of work that they perform.

In other words, demand better. Game development teams are in a position to select great QA people because there's just so bloody many of us. Take advantage of that. Put out your feelers long before the position becomes necessary, and select the best of the best. Pay a livable wage, integrate QA into the process, give them direct access to your programmers, and you will have a truly valuable asset in development.

The alternative is to have a QA department with a high churn and a low useful output. Prophesies tend to self-fulfill.

- Chris Canfield

Re:You forgot a very important thing.

[Scrameustache]

Creativity. Your best testers are the ones that can still come up with ludicrous, ridiculous things to try after doing ludicrous, ridiculous things to this piece of software for 10 hours a day the past 8 months.

Hehehe, reminds me of my first project. The lead tester wanted to kill me the night before the final deadline (deadlines come and go, but there's a point where its either done or the suits pull the plug).
It was about 2:30 am and I declared "I've become invincible and I don't know how I did it". Turned out it was the result of another bug I'd found an hour earlier, so they only had to fix the first one to get rid of the 2.
That was an 18 hour day, btw, and we still had to come in the next morning (though I did manage to convince them to let us come in only at around 10...woophee).
And the bug wasn't there the day before. They went ahead and added something the day before the deadlines, the fools.

You do have to deduce all of the interrelating systems in a game and how they may misinteract with eachother.

There's also intuition. I was just discussing that at work earlier this week. One of my testers was doing some collision checks and I saw him go around a room and then out, I told him to go back in and try one wall some more. Turns out there was a way to get stuck there. I knew it just looking at him walk in it, and I'm not sure how I did.
Its something in the way the character moved when he was pushing against the wall, I could tell something wasn't right.

There's another guy in the team who gets that collision intuition too. We had a chat about it as they were doing some more of that tedious collision testing. Our conclusion was that it comes from years of playing. You get a subconsious understanding of the conditions of a bug-free region and a bugged region.

Testing is part science, part artform.
Unfortunatly the biggest part is buisness.

And then, there's the mantra of the programmers: Will Not Fix/Not A Defect

Re:You forgot a very important thing.

[cgenman]

There's another guy in the team who gets that collision intuition too. We had a chat about it as they were doing some more of that tedious collision testing. Our conclusion was that it comes from years of playing. You get a subconsious understanding of the conditions of a bug-free region and a bugged region.

Usually twitching is the dead giveaway. Even the slightest bit indicates that physics broke down. One of the favorite tricks in the first game I worked on (a basketball game) was to wedge a player firmly between two other players, causing him to vibrate slightly, then pass the ball. It would cannon up into the sky, and wouldn't come down for a dozen seconds or more. Nothing in a modern, well designed engine will cause twitches except problems or problem areas.

Slight hitches are also a sign of trouble. If you slide along a wall, and there is the slightest pause, that usually indicates that something isn't quite aligned, and there is a space that you could theoretically squeeze yourself into.

Remember Designers: The clip plane is your friend!

There is also the small space effect... Any time a player's space transitions from enough to not enough along a sloped line instead of a sharp point, problems will occur. You may have to try and wedge a shoulder in there, or filp forward and backwards rapidly, but be it a lower-than-90 degree corner or a small pipe that creeps too low lengthwise, it will cause problems to somebody.

Then there is the bowl effect, where you have a condition that the player should slide down but only encounters another place where they should slide down in the opposite direction. No designer worth his salt would do this normally, but on 80 hour weeks where the only thing to break up the death march is beer...

The pothole effect is about the same, where you have a hole near to the width of the character's collision box, that theoretically they should fall into but the engine can't quite make up it's mind.

There's the penetration ploy... Where you find something pokey and sharp, try to overlap that slightly in a way while walking away from the wall. Many engines will push you back through (or into) the wall. This was most famously demonstrated by The Secret of Mana, where you could traverse characters (including one blocking your return to your home village) by walking up to them and flipping back and forth. 3D engine examples exist too, though none come to mind immediately.

There are others, but those are just what come to mind right now.

And the bug wasn't there the day before. They went ahead and added something the day before the deadlines, the fools.

Don't you just love it when the Lead Programmer starts a conversation by saying "This shouldn't break anything, but we..."

Propeller Arena

[Stormwatch]

Straying a bit off the topic... and straying a bit into illegality... but this is really interesting: it seems Propeller Arena is really going to be ripped and leaked at last! Check dreamcasthistory.com's message boards... ~_^

Re:HRIASPL (He Really Is A Senior Project Lead)

[Anonymous Coward]

He really is a senior project lead.

His last journal entry starts with "Dear Fucktard Little Children..."

So then, McDick:

[Anonymous Coward]

Which of your bullcrappy dev friends was involved in the production of Tony Hawk Pro Skater for the Nokia N-Gage?

Re:as an American white male who worked for Spheri

[Anonymous Coward]

I happen work for Spherion in the Corp HQ. Didn't here anything about this but I'm gonna go ask a couple people in the legal dept about this on Monday.