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

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.

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: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..."