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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."
[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
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
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.
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!")
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.
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.
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
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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.
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.
Mmmm, -funroll-loops
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.
You can't take the sky from me...
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
You can't take the sky from me...
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
The ______ Agenda