Game Tester: Dream Job or Occupation of the Damned?

[Ascending Wordsmith]

I read an interesting article on the birth of a video game. From brainstorming to store shelves, the creation of a video game usually puts a bunch of stress on the financiers, developers, and of course... the testers.

My question is about the testers. I'm sure there's tens of millions of people that wanted the honor of testing GTA: Vice City, but the article went on to say that testing is a very trying job. Most testers are expected to play a game in development all the way through, examining every movement, polygon, action, reaction, text, voice work, storyline... etc. The article also states that testers don't get paid that much, and live off a diet of pizza, burgers, fries, Chinese food, candy bars, chips, and soda (nothing wrong with mass quantities of junkfood IMO). Not to mention that they don't get too much sleep.

I'd like to think that testing isn't as strenuous as the article said, but I know no testers, and am not so familiar with the gaming industry's methods. Is game testing the dream it sounds like it is? Or is there a great deal of stress and urgency I don't yet know about?

Games and Junkfood: Bliss

Sleep Deprivation and Stress: Torment

What's the call?

http://www.chiroweb.com/find/images/junkfood.gif Mmm.... junkfood...

[Raedon]

If only I could work as a tester between the hours of 6-midnight.. then I could keep my day job..

only problem I could see with this is having to play really crappy games like Aqua Nox all the way threw..

[Nature Boy]

Well, you're not playing the games for fun, you're playing them to find out what's wrong with them.

So you have to keep track of what you did and how you did it in order to report the bug properly. And you have to redo things over and over and over again. And then again after they've fixed the bugs you found.

If you can handle the repetition. If you can be the bearer of bad news (programmers never take bugs well). If you can dissect every nuance of everything you see. I think you'd be okay with the job. I think I could do it except that I'd have to take a major pay cut and I just don't see that happening. :)

[Trixie]

Though it may sound heavenly if you get a good game, it'd be PURE HELL if they handed you Pacman or ET for the Atari and said, "Here. Play this exclusively for the next 4 months." :shock: :shock: :shock: :cry:

[Anonymous]

dunno about the smaller companies, but the larger companies have testers that never talk to the programmers. Often the data goes to japan, so you never see them. Also, game testers rarely if ever have any say on how a game should be, or if it's any fun. And during the second half of the cycle, you spend most of your time checking to make sure that bugs you submitted have been fixed. It can be tedious, and sometime the hardest thing about bug testing is staying awake. You get sick of the first few levels or beginning of a game, too, because each new revision means you have to start over from the beginning. However, when it's crunch time (like right now) you can make some insane money doing it. I have a friend who's testing a certain hotly anticipated title right now, and he's working from 8am to 11pm 7 days a week. if you add it up that's 77 hours a week (minus 2 lunch breaks each day), which is 74 hours overtime in a two week period. at 10 bucks an hour normal pay, the money is the main reason most game testers are game testers. The actual testing can burn people out on video games, or make you not enjoy them anymore.

[nesman85]

i would only want to be a game tester if it gave me the opportunity to advance in that company.

[NE146]

Yeah you got to realize your goal as a Game Tester is to BREAK the games. So you're not really "playing" them. You're sitting there in one specified area and doing all you can to make the game crash or malfunction in some way and documenting all of it one way. That's your entire purpose. If you don't find anything wrong on a relatively consistent basis, then you're not doing your job.

Dream job or hell? That really depends on your perspective I guess. But from what has been described to me, Imagine sitting from 8-5 for a whole week, running back and forth in level ONE of Ghouls and Ghosts. And not playing the game, but trying to do dumb things to see what happens. (jumping against a wall a hundred times). So yeah "Games and Junkfood" may be bliss. But believe you me, for the most part, you aint PLAYING the games buddy. :P

[kainemaxwell]

It has its good and bad points I would think.

[Ascending Wordsmith]

Yep, I kinda' figured that the testing phase of a game would be no picnic. It takes patience, an eye for detail, determination, and amphetamines. ;)

I almost feel like I owe those guys something. 9+ hours a day doing nothing but looking for glitches and other program flaws all for me, the consumer. I imagine some games are a lot more tedious for testers. The guys who tested Intelligent Qube may be a little more mentally stable than the guys who tested Super Mario Sunshine.

[Cheese]

I worked as a tester about 7 years ago for Time Warner Interactive. We tested some saturn games, early PS1, online (the palace), everything id put out that year (ultimate doom, Hexan, and Quake), and the Dark Eye and Bad Day on the Midway.

It was a give and take sorta thing. Yeah, I got paid to play video games. But not that much. I think the regular testers were making about 8 bucks an hour and the leads about 14.

And it was pretty tiring, sometimes you'd get these games that were complete pieces of shit. Totally and completely awful. There was one I still remember, it was a Speed Racer game that was based on one episode of the show where you had to hunt down and defeat this giant tank like thing. It had 3D driving levels and a 3D sorta side scroller. It was bad. Some of the characters looked like scans from kids tracing comics, only more pixilated. The control was abyssmal, the mach 5 it seems had the acceleration of a peterbilt and topped out at 55mph, not to mention the fact it took 9 cans of gas (which you picked up on the streets) to go 6 blocks. It was unbeatable too, there was no way past a certian level. So we played that game for weeks, everyday telling the leads to tell the producer that it was a POS. Eventually he did, and he was fired the next day. I think eventually it never came out. But the point is we played it, and played it and played it for I think 3 weeks. We all wanted to shoot the designers by the end of the first week, by the end, we would've killed their children as well.

But then, I as one of the first people to play Quake. We did the network compatability tests for the original 3 level demo. So this was a maybe a month before it hit the net. So that was great, we'd play all day, then stay late and have LAN parties.

The hardest part about it, which might not seem it, was writing the reports. Often the developers were in other states or across oceans and what not, and you'd have to tell them every little detail of what you'd done to cause the bug, then repeat it. That may have been everything from repeating the same move 99 times, or landing on a particular board game square with a score of 502, anything. You'd be surprised at what would fuck up a game.

There was some room for advancement there too, for our inhouse games. One could go from tester, to lead tester, to jr. programmer, to programmer. Sadly the company went under before i got anywhere. Too bad, it was a pretty good gig in the end, I think if I were a lead tester, I might've kept going in that industry, that 14 or 15 bucks an hour would've been pretty good at 23.

[theaveng]

Imagine sitting from 8-5 for a whole week, running back and forth in level ONE of Ghouls and Ghosts. And not playing the game, but trying to do dumb things to see what happens. (jumping against a wall a hundred times).


I could handle that IF I could do something else at the same time (like listen to TV or radio). That way my hands can do the boring task of running into walls while my brain is occupied with the TV. Otherwise, there are better ways to make $10 an hour. Like going to Vo-Tech and becoming an Electrical or Computer Technician.

[Nintendork]

The article also states that testers don't get paid that much, and live off a diet of pizza, burgers, fries, Chinese food, candy bars, chips, and soda (nothing wrong with mass quantities of junkfood IMO). Not to mention that they don't get too much sleep.


Man, I do this now for free! anyway I've read articles on game testing and they really do have a harder job than one would fantasize. It's already been mentioned but just imagine playing a crappy game for months. Even if one had a good game to test they wouldn't have the time to enjoy it or anything because they would be looking for the smallest glitches.

[IGotTheDot]

Good testers are invaluable. I have worked with great testers and poor testers and they realy make the difference when it comes to getting a game approved on a particular platform.

It's a foot in the door for some people, but very few testers move up in the industry. There are so many testers and so few producer/manager positions. Imagine testing a great game like GTA VC, and being sick of it before it's actually a fun game. Testers are put on games very early in the development cycle some times and you can realy get sick of a game fast if all of the "fun" elements are not in the game yet.

Also when you are a tester you are at the bottom of the totem pole and any job at the bottom can suck. The shit only runs down hill.

MY2CENTS

[hades]

It's a foot in the door for some people, but very few testers move up in the industry. There are so many testers and so few producer/manager positions. Imagine testing a great game like GTA VC, and being sick of it before it's actually a fun game. Testers are put on games very early in the development cycle some times and you can realy get sick of a game fast if all of the "fun" elements are not in the game yet.

Well -- for some people I'd say it would still be a great job. I have no programming talent. I've tried and tried. I've programming in C, C++, JAVA and a few other various languages and haven't gotten past the point of just using arrays and doing sorts. Also -- when it comes to graphical elements, I'm horrible. I couldn't draw a stragith line if I tried!

So where does that leave me in th gaming industry besides being a tester? I guess I could work out game scripts and the such, but there aren't many other positions I could think of off the top of my head that I would be able to do. Well -- besides a network administrator or IT tech work for a company, but that I can do for any company.

So in other words, what other jobs are out there in the gaming industry besides artists, programmers and scripting work?

[CPUWIZ]

I dunno about some of the guys comments but personally I have QA staff in my office at the end of every project, they are invaluable because they can repeat bugs by endless repetition of a certain combination of movements, etc. !

While they do that, I can sit and look at the code that is relevant to that peticular situation and see if I can spot the bug(s).

Yes it sometimes is mindless but those guys feel greatly rewarded when they repeat a bug that only happens 1 out of 1000 times.

Joe, I don't agree with your comment, most programmers that work for me or I work with like it when a QA guy repeats a bug and reports it because they don't have to do it themselfs.

As to the last question, the answer would be level-designer with scripting abilities and a creative thought process.

[theaveng]

What qualifications are required to land the job as a Tester?

[slapdash]

Good testers are invaluable.

This is true even outside of the games industry, believe me.


Also when you are a tester you are at the bottom of the totem pole and any job at the bottom can suck. The shit only runs down hill.

I knew a guy who worked at Acclaim in NY as a tester... Apparently, the upper heads on the totem just didn't give a shit. He told me about one game that had a showstopper (that's a bug that causes a program to not be continuable -- i.e. it crashs, hangs, or locks the user out of something vital) that was reported by mutliple testers and multiple times, but the next version still had the bug, and the next, but there were pretty new graphical features. Another time they added a new menuing system at the beginning of the game, but the controls in-game were shot to hell. They dumped half of the testers, including him, before that got fixed.


Joe, I don't agree with your comment, most programmers that work for me or I work with like it when a QA guy repeats a bug and reports it because they don't have to do it themselfs.

That's the thing -- I'm paid to program. Sure, there are many other things I need to do in a day, but that's the gist of my position. So, why should I be testing? Mind you, I believe a programmer who doesn't test his stuff is a bad programmer, no matter how big the QA department behind him, but... The more testing I have to do, the less programming I do, and therefore I'm not really doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

A good programmer backed with good QA is an unbeatable combination...