Slashdot Mirror
Is Bughunting Still A Way Into the Games Industry?
Edge Online is reprinting an article from last month's issue of the British gaming magazine. In the article, Bug Hunt, they look at the role of the modern QA tester. While once a good way to make yourself known to the company's HR staff, it's more and more simply a summer gig between classes for college students. They also discuss the hard working conditions, soul-crushing scheduling, and the public misconception that what a QA tester does involves the word 'play'. From the article: "Anyone with any experience of the QA process will deny the slightest resemblance between testing a game and playing one for pleasure: finding bugs is unmistakably work, and, by common consensus, very dull and repetitive work at that. On top of this, pay is often poor, job security frail, working conditions extreme and recognition hard to come by. So why do it?"
Its fledgling, but has promise in a few years. www.betaguild.com
God spoke to me.
I'd say that there's a better chance to get into the industry if you're a damn good modder, rather than a damn good bug finder.
Counterstrike(HL), Desert Combat(BF42), and Red Orchesta(UT2004) are all examples of this.
... so long as there are thousands and thousands of "kids" out there who dream of playing video games for a living. It doesn't matter that the reality is nothing like the fantasy. One kid gets burnt out and leaves, ten more beg to take his place.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
Hudson: "Is this going to be a standup open beta programme, or just another bug hunt?"
Gorman: "All we know is that there is still is no contract or schedule with the developer, and that SOE may be involved."
Frost: "Excuse me sir, SOE?"
Gorman: "Guys who made Star Wars Galaxies."
Hicks: "It's a bug hunt."
Only three?! Yeah! A good way to get in.
I'm currently a programmer in the industry (Activision studio). I spent nearly a year doing QA work, making sure to get the right connections by talking to the designers and programmers for the projects I was working on. I helped shape the game, gave constructive feedback, and hunted down bugs like no other. It got noticed, the development team passed my name along, and here I am, sitting in my dream job.
This was a timeframe of under two years... so at the very least, it can certainly still be done.
Just a few days ago Mythic announced a couple of job openings in customer support on the Dark Age of Camelot news site. They say the jobs are open now because they promoted two people in the CS department to development.
If people can go straight from customer support to development then I can't imagine they would have any qualms with moving QA people into development.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
QA will not be a path to anything but a series of contractor jobs in the majority of the game industry for a number of reasons.
First and foremost is the general value the software culture puts on QA to begin with. In any software environment, QA is frequently looked down upon, or at the very least not seen in the same light of respect and value that development is. This makes the QA position something that can be seen as nonessential to the primary function of the company: writing software.
Obviously, that's incorrect, and anyone who has actually worked with a good QA team will tell you so. Trouble is, there are plenty of bad QA teams, and badly managed projects where the value of QA is not clearly laid out.
In the game industry in general, you have the problems as already laid out: soul crushing work hours, ludicrous release schedules, and a sense that there is always someone waiting to do your job because it's a 'dream job' in the game industry. But that applies for every single game developer too. Or have people so quickly forgotten the EA scandal & lawsuit about the lives of their programmers?
Because most development houses are not their own publisher, they have external dependencies and requirements for quality that they must meet. Someone publishing a game thru Vivendi will hand it off to VU for an acceptance pass based on whatever criteria vivendi have in mind. Publisher's QA groups are probably the worst to work for and offer the least amount of actual outside visibility for the tester, but that's where the jobs are. The majority of QA jobs in studios are going to be reserved for people who have inside contacts or are lifetime career testers that are not trying to 'get into the game industry through qa'. They're in those positions because they're excellent testers who can help the company reach the publisher milestones. In some companies, there isn't even a QA team. The logic goes that the publisher will tell you when your game is good enough to release, and you can always bring in contractors on a temporary basis if you need to.
The real answer as to how to break into the game industry isn't a certificate from Game Design University Of DeVry Technical ITT College, and it isn't trying to get 'any job you can in the industry'. The real answer is to develop people skills. More than any industry I've worked in, the games industry runs on word of mouth and personal references. If someone knows you, you are vastly more likely to be hired than the person with superior skills on paper who doesn't have a personal recommendation.
"One kid gets burnt out and leaves, ten more beg to take his place."
The position of slashdot moderator apparently.
QA never was the only way in, and it still isn't the only way in. In my experience, though, it helps a lot.
What you learn in technical school won't give you real experience with game development. There are a million things it won't teach you. They don't teach you when to leave something broken "for now." They don't teach you the utility of having everyone in your company observe focus tests. They don't teach you that sometimes the best design of one thing has to lose so that another feature which is important can survive. And, of course, a million other details about game development from when it is okay to telecommute an artist into a meeting to how
And, sadly, from what little I've seen they really don't let you get into the minutae of a game. Like when you push a button, does the button trigger on button down or button up? Does the animate-off occur after the button-down or during? Should the animate off take two seconds or one.
QA gets you exposure to all of that. You come out of a (in-house) QA gig basically knowing how to make a game. If you later come back as an artist, you're suddenly a more valuable candidate because you don't have to be told everything. You know the art resource is going to change a couple of times, so as not to polish too much for stand-in stuff. You know which parts of direction are essential to follow and which parts are suggestions. You know to keep an eye on milestones, and always buffer in an extra bug-fixing day or two before one.
Given the option between spending a year as QA and spending a year as a Programmer on a game, be a programmer. If you're going to be an artist, be an artist. But if you're still in college, or didn't graduate from MIT, get in through QA. It looks great on your resume to say that you spent a summer working along side a real team of developers, proving that you're not some random fuckup who is going to burn out in four weeks.
Of course, this is all QA for small companies that have their own QA staff. Don't work remotely at a publisher if you can avoid it. You won't learn much there.
The ______ Agenda
Well, crap, 17 years ago I was a QA tester during summers while in college. No, the market hasn't changed.
The "Entry Level" path is called "QA", not "QA testing". You know, the guy with access to the source code who can actually fix things.
It wasn't a bad job, but I didn't have any ambitions/illusions about the game industry.
Of course, 17 years later and I'm suddenly programming stuff, and trying to sell it.... It turns out, the mod team approach is the way in, particularly for those who want nothing to do with such a saturated and underpaid market.
Sigh...
I've been in the game industry as a Game Tester for nearly 4 years and I've seen a vast amount of people get into the industry without needing to go through Quality Assurance. Designers have been hired because they had good story writing and communication skills, level designers have come in because their own home made levels did well within the gaming community (Eg, Unreal Level editing). Artists and Programmers coming in because they make optimized and well thought out models.
If someone really wants to get into the game industry, all they need to do is be good at something, rather than being someone who is soso in all aspects of making a game. I'm not saying they need to be a prodigy, but simply having a basic know how on how to create what they are doing and understanding how it was done fully, instead of slapping it togther haphazardly and making it look pretty. Eg, there is a huge amount of people that make StarTrek 3D models out there. Most of which are quiet nice to look at, but when you look at it from a technical stand point, they over used polygons where it isn't needed, and/or they are unable to make the model again without a lot of trial and error. You need to be able to make a 3D model with the most amount of detail with the least amount of polygons. If you can do that, you've learnt a lot of useful tricks that most 3D "artists" will never learn.
The best advice I can give to anyone, is _JOIN_ a mod project as a programmer or artist or level editor, and get your fingers into as many pies within that project as possible. Communicate well with the rest of the team, and hopefully the project will get out the door and you can add it to your resume, which will look very good, much better that people coming out of these new game courses from University...
Also, join multiple mod projects, because not all of them will succeed, many will go down in flames due to the rest of the team not pulling their weight. But take note, _JOIN_ a mod project, don't try and start your own with no prior experience, it will be a waste of time, and really doesn't look that great on a resume.
Programmers, take a look at the "Demoscene". If you really want to make great games, then you need to know a lot of the little tricks for optimizing code, the demoscene will help you with that. www.scene.org is a good place to start, have a look at what other people have created. I know a lot of the veteran programmers respect people that come from the demoscene, more than codemonkeys coming from University. Demoscene programmers tend to be very adaptable, and will normally get to work on the more interesting stuff when on projects.
Level designers, pick a game and make levels for it. Eg, Unreal, FarCry, Quake, etc. But make levels and get them out to the community. Its fun to waste 4 months making sure every tree in your level is in exactly the right place but it doesn't serve any use in the game industry, that's what artists will be asked to do. Your job as level designer is to make fun, functional levels that work well within an engine. What you should teach yourself how to optimize your level, such as object culling, VIS, PVS, level layout etc. Also study what makes other game levels fun. You need to know exactly what makes a level good, you should be able to answer this question when asked. Your opinion is not a valid answer, you need evidence to back it up. Once you have mastered one level editing tool, start dabbling in others. You may not like it at first, but it will come in handy down the line should you ever get hired and you have to work on in-house tools to make levels.
Artists, try all sorts of different styles of modeling, don't just make spaceships or manga characters. Show that you are versatile. Show that you can make 3D models with few polygons as possible and they look awesome. Make a few character models and import them into a game, such as a Quake3 character, or a monster for a mod project. It may be even a better idea to find someone who has drawn a charac
I worked for QA at a major US developer for 3 years (2 of which in a Sr. position) and I have to say that this article does not exaggerate, If anything it was being nice.
The hours are just as terrible as they say in the article, but unlike in the article after the seven months of non stop crunch hours there was no month off, maybe a few days to a week, then you either got fired or moved to another project to start it all over. The equipment is always substandard and often broken. The working situations are always way too cramped. We went even given cubicles; we worked in long rows of tables pressed up against each other so close that 2 people could back up their chairs at the same time.
Using QA as a stepping stone or entry point is no longer an option at all, from what I have seen. Many developers have a very negative image of the people in QA. Out of the 100 people they hired to test probably about 20-40 are actually talented testers, and less then half of that have development skills. Because of this there has been a growing thought that if you work in QA you don't have the talent needed for development work. I have seen people get turned down from a development jobs purely because they currently worked in QA. If you want to make games, you're better off working any normal full time job and making demos/designs docs in your spare time.
Now that I am no longer working for that developer I have much more family/free time, am able to work on my own projects again, and make nearly twice as much as I did while I was in QA (I'm now working in education)
My suggestion for everyone who ever thought about moving into QA, Don't.
A relative of mine started game testing for a EA in California as a summer job. He became known to the company, and is now
;)
doing a masters of game design (or something like that) and has already sold one of his team's games to a large company. I'm pretty sure his team also
won a game-design contest for MTV.
So, as an observer, it seems to me that the answer is yes.
QA certainly IS a track into the games industry, but depending on where you go it may not get you a development position. QA falls into two categories: publisher QA and developer QA. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Publisher QA tends to track into Production. This is like Hollywood production in that you are a facilitator between the publisher and the developer. You may or may not be an asshole, either seems to work (just so that I make my bias clear from the start). A good producer is invaluable and does have some power in tipping the balance between a game that is decent and one that is exceptional. A bad one can make a dev team's life a living hell. But it is a profession all on its own. Producers must be excellent communicators, have management skills, be diplomatic, understand scheduling, have enough of a grasp of the technical demands to know what to ask of their assigned team, and be able to navigate labyrinthine publisher politics. The turnover rate is high. It is very much a "people" position and its closest analog on the dev side is mangagerial. Getting back to the article, QA definitely is a path toward a production job. But most people applying to QA hoping to get into the industry aren't looking to be producers, and probably haven't even thought about it. The track goes something like Temp Tester -> FT Tester -> Lead Tester -> Assistant Producer -> Producer, with each tier culling out increasing numbers of candidates. The other thing about publisher QA is that publishers will tend to just grab anyone off the street and throw them into a QA position. You get high school dropouts and PhDs alike working QA. Moving up to a full time position (QA almost invariably starts temp) is like making it through a firing squad; rough numbers from people I've talked to seem to show that about one in twenty will move up. But because so many people enter QA just as a side job -- with no intention of continuing in the games industry and often very little technical ability whatsoever -- those odds aren't that bad. It should be noted, too, that occasionally publishers will loan out people with technical ability from the QA ranks to fill in scripting help and the like with their developer studios. This is a good opportunity for advancement but generally is a resume padder and not much else; the dev house ultimately will be doing its own recruiting and not necessarily pull from the publisher's QA (they may not even be able to, depending). Development QA, for one thing, is much more difficult to find. Increasingly QA is done by the publisher and the publisher alone, because it's more efficient (economically). The publisher is also the one that ultimately is giving the approval on the milestone and final product, so they want to have their own in-house resources doing quality testing so that they can monitor them and ensure quality of the testing itself. A dev house with its own QA department, meaning people that ONLY do QA, is either very big or very unusual. A big developer will run a QA department very similar to the publisher's, and sometimes worse; QA at Electronic Arts are literally fenced off from the rest of the developers and are treated with zero trust, herded in and out and highly restricted on what they can bring into the building. This is because they are temps, and when you have to cycle so many people through, you quickly tap regional talent resources and have to start hiring people off the street, which many companies don't seem to mind because their QA practices mostly involve having people play the game over and over again and report where it breaks, a very primitive form of QA that still persists in the industry but is slowly being augmented by automation, and, in some rare and ahead-of-the-curve places, better actual production practices in managing QA testing teams. These usually involve keeping testers on full time, though, which companies do not like to do because they perceive the job to be 'unskilled' and therefore don't want to pay for things like health insurance and other ful
...You mean game testing involves more than just tightening the graphics?
The job described in that article sounds damn near perfect, to me...especially the anecdote that was supposed to 'chill my bones'. A repetitive job, requiring some thing but hardly any physical labour; huge hours at an hourly wage; being able to sleep at work to get more of those paid hours in; job perks like a new wardrobe, or cocaine...where do I sign? Games aren't really any fun for me, as it is, but I'd love a job I could lose myself in.
One of the best jobs I had in my life, I was working 80 hour weeks, often sleeping at the office, doing the same sinple things to the same seven computers every day...only downside was the $400/month salary. If I'd been making even the minimum hourly wage (and if personality conflicts hadn't arisen...which is unrelated), I'd still there, doing the same things.
Sure, it's not for everyone, but some of us really thrive on that kind of environment.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
but my understanding that QA people are in strong demand. In my experience QA people are paid at least as well as developers at most big companies.
I can't imagine a development shop doing all of their QA through kids on summer break like the article suggests. High quality QA is essential and without it large development projects will implode.
That said, I don't particularly want to work QA, it seems mindbendingly boring to me. Development may also be hard work, but there's more room for creativity at least to keep it from being boring. Still, I have respect for people who can do the work. Nothing can get done without the people in QA who are willing to tough out the excruciating hours of bughunting.
Yes if you can find a good smaller company, no if you want to go through someone like, say, Microsoft.
Microsoft actually does their XBox QA through a seperate company created solely for the purposes of avoiding temp working lawsuits. I don't think I need to explain then how they treat their contractor QA staff. Of which I have been one in the past.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
I'm not going to deny that QA is difficult. I started at Access Software and stuck with QA through almost five years at Microsoft Game Studios before saying "fsck it" because of the stress and leaving games for a bit to try my hand at coding.
During my time as a programmer, I learned two things. First, even just spending time testing games helped me learn enough about coding in a performance-critical environment that I was able to carry many of those lessons over into "the real world;" and second, as much as I enjoyed making things, I enjoyed breaking them even more.
So I've returned to QA. Sure, QA is often the scapegoat in case anything goes wrong; QA often has to work shifts that would make sweatshop workers quit; QA rarely receives the recognition due or the compensation necessary...but QA is also one of the most rewarding careers in terms of variety and challenge. Every day, I receive a build and wonder what's wrong with it this time and how can I break it.
When I report something to a developer and see them seethe for an hour on end trying to figure out how they're going to fix it...it makes my heart smile. Those are the moments I live for.
That's why I test.
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
First of all, I have worked in QA for a summer, and I'm going back to Activision in about a week for this whole summer. It's an erxcellent job! And no, not just because I'm "playing" computer games; 9$ an hour is good pay for something that requires no experience and no education and can be done over a summer; in short an excellent college job. Perhaps Activision is better than the rest, but working conditions were not that bad. The worst I had to deal with was being stuck with the "Duke" X-box controller or being moved to the n00bcube. Our bosses were just testers themeselves, certainly not oppresive. As for it being a path into the industry, it's better than nothing! If nothing else, you're working side-to-side with people who do have thier foot in the door; know them, make a few friends, and your job app will be looked much more favorably.
I worked QA at Atari in Beverly, MA from September to Christmas, 2003.
As a recent high school graduate with no college experience (in college now, though), it paid $10 an hour. On top of that, it was 60 hours a week mininum. Time and a half for over time, so I was making $700 a week, $550 after taxes. Damn good money for a high school student with no job experience whatsoever.
And yeah, it was work. But you know what? It was good work. I enjoyed what I did, even when it was mindless and repetitive. It beat the hell out of flipping burgers or what not. Even on the bad days it was good.
The lack of job security, though, is a definite problem of the gig. The QA department was about 40 "temps" and 20 full timers. When we were hired as temps, it was with the tacit implication that we were temps only for insurance/benefits purposes and would be kept on more or less indefinitely, with the slim possibility of graduating to full time if such positions opened up. Then 6 days before Christmas, they called all the temps into a meeting room and said "We don't need you any more." and that was that. No warning, although it wasn't that much of a surprise, given how slow work had gotten recently. A few weeks later they layed off all the full timers and shortly thereafter shut down the Beverly studio.
So, uh, yeah. QA is a damn good job, and 60 hours a week is nothing if you've got no life. Just meant 8 hours a day, every day, and staying late one weekday.
It's a fledgling alright...
Several years ago, just before I left my 'proper job' to work in the games industry I was involved in a pretty disastrous software project. The project and companies involved shall remain nameless, but basics of the story will be familiar to alot of people.
We had a small in-house team (9-10 coders) and the business decided to embark on a project which was way outside of the teams' capacity. After several weeks of protesting that the project was too big for us to deliver in anywhere near the drop dead dates we were given management finally relented and brought in a development consultancy to supplement our small internal team. This consultancy (who will also remain nameless) brought with them a small army of mostly incompetent coders and a giant army of business analysts, architects, project managers and other varieties of monkey trained in various levels of sales and management speak. Needless to say the consultancy left the internal team todo most of the coding work and spent alot of time making presentations, sending long e-mails, creating complex charts of various kinds and then left the delayed, feature barren, burning carcass of of the project behind and pocketed alot of cash.
The one thing that the consultancy brought with them that actually helped was a team of sub-contracted QA staff who were located off-site at the consultancy's office, some miles away. I was even younger and stupider then than I am now and at first I complained bitterly about the 2 page bug reports that I began to receive from them on a regular basis. These reports would contain a massive amount of detail for even the most trivial bug, complete (often 100%) repro cases for bugs which were incredibly complex and (IMO at the time) were never going to be found by normal users. The reports often also contained references to specific areas of the functional specs that we had written at the start of each project which our implementation was not entirely adhering to.
Now that I am less young, less stupid and work in the game industry I pine regularly (as my colleagues will no doubt confirm) for those QA people whose bug reports were so clear, complete, accurate and detailed. The bug reports I receive now from game team testers are like drawings on the wall of a cave when compared to the reports described above. They are short, unclear, often completely inaccurate and sometimes the text is not even recognizable as English.
The reason for this massive discrepancy in report quality is glaringly obvious. When I worked at the consultants office for a little while (just prior to leaving that job) I actually sat next to the QA team. The difference between that QA team and all the QA teams I've worked with in games was like night and day. In a word, they were professionals. Most of them were graduates with 5-10 years of work experience, they were obviously well paid (some of them better paid than me I think) and their personal appearance and hygiene put most of the coders to shame. They had analyzed our entire functional spec, without any interaction with the development team and created a complete test plan which they synced up to our development schedule. They had identified a number of complex testing tools which were appropriate for our product, acquired them and were actively using them to find bugs the we could hardly even imagine. They were often able to isolate the causes of problem, when the cause and effect were in totally unrelated parts of the product (functionally speaking).
That's not to say that the game QA teams I've worked with have been all bad, but they're a totally different class of tester than the guys at the consultancy. I suppose that the title of this post is alittle misleading, as I have also worked with the class of tester found in the games industry in other industries, but they are less common and generally in smaller numbers.
Anyway, before I get modded off topic the real point of this post is that I would like to see the kind of testing described above happen more in the industry
With all of the talk about the deplorable working conditions in game development companies, I'm surprised anyone wants to work in that segment of the industry.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
Here's my take on why most QA teams suck:
The reason is related to the reason why in some countries crunch time happens so often and lasts so long that in the end, whatever extra work was done by having people working extra hours has been, due to the extra bugs introduced by stressed-up/tired designers and coders, totally wipped out and the delievery took even more time than it would without crunch time:
- Inexperienced and/or incompetent managers always concentrate on immediate and visible positive effects and ignore delayed, hard-to-measure negative effects.
Thus people working many hours NOW is immediate and easy to check - people spending, later, a much bigger percentage of their time than it would be needed otherwise debugging and re-writting code is delayed and harder to know for sure (how can you know it's a "lot more time than otherwise needed" if you can't compare it with the "no-crunch" situation)
The same effect applies to QA - saving money NOW by not having good requirements upfront (needed for proper regression testing) and by hiring some guys of the street to do QA is immediate and visible by comparisson with sub-contracting-to/maintaining a well paid, professional QA team which will save a LOT of time (and money) by shortening debugging time and getting those developers doing productive stuff instead of trying to reproduce badly reported bugs.
FYI - I'm a (very senior) software designer and developer, i've done some tester work on occasion and i've worked with both very good testers and very bad ones.
Bughunting was definitely the way into the game industry for Satoshi Tajiri . After spending his childhood hunting insects, he later came up with the idea that became Pokemon.
That article is pretty spot-on. I recently got a 'real job' after spending about a year, on and off, working as a temp game tester for US$10 an hour, 8 hours (if not more) a day. I was lucky enough to work in a place with no daily or weekly bug quotas, thankfully. I definitely don't regret the experience - it was an eye-opener into the inside world of games, and I actually did enjoy the work (despite my occasional complaining). While I was working, I quit playing almost everything, though, and I still sometimes get annoyed when I find bugs or typos in games I'm playing at home and feel the urge to write them up.
As a tester, you will be doing the same things over and over again, day in and day out. Yes, you'll be 'playing a game' for 8 hours a day. You will probably beat whatever game you're testing within the first few days, assuming it's a game with an end, of course. And then you will beat it every day (if not more often) for the next month. You'll do speed runs to see what the bare minimums for beating the game are. You'll do 100% runs where you have to find every single little item in the game. You will get so sick of that game that you and the rest of your team will become very close friends in your shared misery. You will be concentrating on small sections of the game, trying to break little things like walls and environment objects. And then when you do break something, you need to repeat it until you're sure it's not a fluke. And half the time, you will get a response of 'no bug' or (even more annoyingly) 'it's a feature'.
It gets worse during overtime, when everyone is sleepy and tired and sick of still having a controller in their hands. You'll hear the game music in your head and occasionally dream about the game when you go home to sleep.
Depending on who you work for, you probably won't even get into the game's credits, or if you do, it'll be as a part of "_________ QA team".
They really mean it when you sign those non-disclosure agreements, by the way. You'll note I'm not saying a word about what I tested. You talk about the games you test or specific bugs you found in those games... bam, you're gone and you're probably going to find a cadre of lawyers on your doorstep in a few days. (I think we can say we tested it about 6 months after it comes out, but that's all we can say.)
It may be a way into the industry, but it's a slow, thankless way. While I was working, a total of two permanent testers were hired, and one of them had been a temp for years. Some of the other people I met there had been temping there for years too. If you're a good tester, you can make enough money to live comfortably, especially with overtime, and you will be asked back again and again. (I was actually asked back not long after I started my new job and had to say no.)
I've had experience of QA coming back with a load of bugs like
* Username is mis-spelled "Usrname" on the account creation page
* Username is mis-spelled "Usrname" on the account edit page
* Username is mis-spelled "Usrname" on the administrator pages
Oddly enough, it comes from a propery file... go figure.
Some QA testers can end up in a situation where they can't see the forest for the trees. Enabling them to file lots of minor bugs, but miss much larger flaws.
On the other hand, when you find an excellent QA person it makes everything so much easier.
.. even if it doesn't lead to a FT job, could you squeeze a few days in on the Rogue class?
Strong, Light, Cheap - pick two.
And I'm a Nigerian Prince. Wanna send me some fucking money and I'll send you 10x as much back up to 500,000?