Working as a Game Tester 363
DaytonCIM writes "SFGate.com has a great story on the real life of game testers. 'Life is not all fun and games, though. It's all games -- with little time left for sleeping or eating, at least during the busy months before Christmas. The longest week he has logged was 106 hours, and 60-hour-plus weeks are typical in deadline crunches, he said.'"
Poor babies... (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Poor babies... (Score:2, Funny)
If any of these game testers want to do a job swap, bring it on. I'll more than readily trade my 35 hour week office job for a 60+ hour week playing games and getting paid for it.
Re:Poor babies... (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's a fun game, that's no problem, but how many games out there do you REALLY want to play for 80 hours a week for a month or two solid? I can't think of very many. You'd get sick of it in a real hurry.
Re:Poor babies... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Poor babies... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Poor babies... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Poor babies... (Score:2, Insightful)
The best you can hope for is having a job where you have some control over the direction of your projects, or at least over the specific implementation of the project. It also helps to do something that gives you some fulfillment.
After playing a lot of computer games, especially the same one over and over, I feel silly. It's especially worse when you use cheat codes, even after you "beat" the game, if it is that kind of game. You realize just how worthless the accomplishments that were so important to you just hours before really were.
Got that right. (Score:2)
Net short story, after close to two years of getting paid to watch TV there is no way in hell I am going to watch TV for free. No way. Well maybe Discovery channel, or Science and Speed channels, and maybe some movies, but regular television? Not a chance.
Good thing they didn't pay me to play games and surf the web....
Re:Poor babies... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Poor babies... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, you get to play games... But it's very tedious, like as in, play the game, notice a fault. You have to be able to document EXACTLY what you did to cause the camera angle to go all funky, or cause that lockup, and be able to do it consistently.
I walked in on a testing session of a racing game. There was a team of five or six testers (can't remember how many) playing the game for 8-9 hours per day, on a five day (sometimes three day) testing cycle. One person was driving the entire track completely backwards. Another person was crashing into every object, mobile and immobile. Others were constantly ripping the controllers and memory cards out and putting them back in.
This isn't as fun as you think it is - it's real work.
And to top it off, that $40,000 that the game tester makes doesn't get you that far in San Francisco where Sega is.
-- Joe
$40,000?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:$40,000?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Economy at a glance [bls.gov]
Re:Poor babies... (Score:5, Informative)
It's also a way talented people without art or programming skills can get into games. The common path is tester -> test lead -> assistant producer -> associate producer -> producer -> executive producer -> game god. Of course, this takes years, and you need to sell your soul around AP to succeed...
Re:Poor babies... (Score:3, Informative)
Tester.
If you're at an average company for less than a year, you will never go past that. On top of that, I'm going to say about 1/2 the companies here don't develop in-house, so, the highest position you can get at those companies is Asst. Producer.
But guess what? That guy never leaves. So, if you're extremely lucky, you get a chance to bail on that path, and get to take a Marketing/Merchandising position. Otherwise, you have to hope you can ply your services to another company and jump to AP there. (There's a strange phenomena in business where they're much more likely to bring in some new guy to put over everyon else, then promote a guy within the ranks who has the same or better qualifications.)
And, also on the low end of the job totem pole: Tech Support.
Re:Poor babies... (Score:2, Funny)
Here's one: EverQuest. Whether or not you're sick of it, you're still playing!
Re:Poor babies... (Score:5, Insightful)
Belive me, you are better off working 35 hours, and playing a finished game for 25 hours a week.
its not like Carmack walks in and says, here is a completely finished version of the game, play it at your leasure, get back to me in a month.
Re:Poor babies... (Score:5, Informative)
Next, each tester is given some very specific areas to test. Say you do weapons. You'll have to test the functionality of each weapon: standard, skinned, when used in adrenaline mode, how fast the weapon switch happens, and a thousand other things in a thousand combinations. Did I mention that you have to test this for every single supported platform? Let's do the list: Windows 98, NT, 2000, ME, XP, X-box, Gamecube, Playstation, Mac, and Linux.
Testing each area isn't a once-through, either. Suppose something doesn't work right (and it won't). You get to note the specific system configuration (OS, build number, video config, controller, and all game options), then try to replicate the bug so you can give a list of specific steps to take that will make the bug occur every single time. A bug report that says "I can't pick up the rocket launcher sometimes" is useless unless you can show the developer how to make it happen every time. Translated: repeat the same exact motions with minor variations until you home in on exactly what's wrong.
Let's keep in mind that you don't just "play the game". You exercise your specific area of game play several hours a day for several months. By the time the game ships, you'll never want to play it again.
Now let's address the business side: you're working for a software company post-boom. You are understaffed, under-funded, and all devlopment times are reduced. If you don't get everything finished by Halloween, your game won't be in the stores for Christmas. Trust me: October is going to be hell. You like playing videogames? Now do it 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for a month.
By the way, $40,000 is peanuts in Silicon Valley. Get ready to drive an hour from Redwood City to Fremont [yahoo.com] because that's the closest apartment under $1000 a month. Yeah, I know the map says 28 minutes. They're lying.
Finally. You shipped. The code went gold, the cds all went to press, and the game is in the store. No Thanksgiving for you, though. Every kid in America bought a copy of your game and is trying it out on their uniquely configured system. You get to replicate the hundreds of bug reports filed by pissed-off 13-year-olds (and boy will they be polite and well-thought-out. Think "My game doesn't work! You fags suck dick!" and other bon mots) so a patch can be available on the web site for Christmas morning.
Game testing is difficult, time-consuming, highly-skilled work, and the testers are sorely underpaid and have zero job security. If you think it's easy, I encourage you to try to get a job as a game tester. Assuming you can even land a gig, you'll run away screaming in a month.
Re:Poor babies... (Score:4, Informative)
Pick up a football game, go through every single play (over a hundred) in the game, and make sure that what happens on the screen is exactly what's described in the manual. Tell me that wouldn't test your mental endurance.
I'm not a game tester, but I've done a great deal of testing for the software company I work for. It wouldn't matter if I was playing a game, it's still work. It'll always be work.
Besides, it's one thing to play the game and enjoy it, it's entirely another when your job is to test out every little thing and make sure it works as designed.
You have NO clue. (Score:5, Informative)
You're in a section of the game where you can't save. And in the middle of this cutscene, where it has to load a connecting cutscene...say, every 3rd time it crashes. So, you've got to sit through 60 * 20 minutes. 20 hours of the aboslute worst part of the game.
Better yet, you get a version out of the in-house dev team every 3-4 days. Say you're putting in overtime and doing 10 hour days. If you're working every single minute possible, this takes up 2 full days of your time, and you have to re-do this process EVERY OTHER BLOCK of 2 days.
So, you suck it up, put in the overtime, make sure the game's clean. You've got a few bugs left that you really want to fix. But Marketing decides they're going to ship anyway, against you and the development team's protests.
3 days later, game ships, and your company's message board is flooded with people bitching about one of the bugs you wanted to get fixed. People start returning the software, and upper management comes over demanding to know why you didn't catch this bug that you have thoroughly documented.
People all over the net start complaining about how they have monkeys doing your job, and idiots like you are going on Slashdot and talking about how easy your job is to do.
And then, on top of that, you step outside of your section of the office space (usually sequestered from the rest of the employees, not containing the game rooms and ping-pong tables and couches that you're thinking about.) to find that the rest of the company, including the TEMP RECEPTIONIST are wearing these swell leather jackets for the product you just spent back-to-back 100 hour weeks on when they go 9 to 5, and make 3 times your salary.
"Where's my jacket?", you ask, only to find they "didn't have enough money to make jackets for the whole company", just to everyone who isn't in your department.
Then Christmas rolls around, and you're staring at your "sweet" $100 Christmas bonus...of which the US "gift tax" takes $41, so you end up seeing a $59 bonus. Meanwhile, people in other departments are moaning about how they got more than $300 taken our of their bonus in taxes...which is about 6 times what your take home is.
It's even more fun when you work for a company that has the dev office overseas, so you have to constantly wait for the time delay. So shit hits the fan while you're asleep and you leave working thinking everything's cool, only to get back to find out that your ass is now officially in a sling.
There are a handful of good companies, usually the small ones, that actually treat QA like human beings. The rest of them view you as easily replaceable doing a routine job that they could care less about. The cushy jobs that you are thinking about are in Marketing/Merchandising, where you get to play games all day if you want (they don't even havve to be from YOUR company, you can call it "Market Research"!) you spend your day talking on the phone to people who want to stock your product, and you go around having important business lunches/dinners/after-work events.
That 100+ hour "record" the guy talks about. Weak. A friend did some code work for one of our games to help out the dev team while we were in QA. 124 hours that week...at $10/hr. If you haven't put in a 100+ hour week and you are in QA, you haven't been there during a deadline.
Don't ever dog on a job you haven't done, unless they're making millions. If a guy's getting paid a crap wage, chances are you aren't going to know jack shit about what he's going through.
SO? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh please (Score:5, Funny)
I just spent the afternoon degaussing 130 DLT tapes. You'll forgive me if I don't share in your plight of the hellishness that is Galaxies or Planetside. I'll pray for you tonight.
Oh poor baby (Score:5, Funny)
I'm the Chief Deneedler at a haystack company. You don't know what hell is until you spend 40 hours a week searching haystacks for needles.
Easy solution... (Score:4, Funny)
2.Run around with metal detector.
3.Profit!!!
Re:Oh poor baby (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Oh poor baby (Score:2)
Re:I imagine it's different (Score:2)
And by the time it is getting toward the finished game, I'm sure most the time isn't spent in general playtesting so much as trying to track down the conditions under which various bugs are encountered, meaning even if it's testing a game, it's still testing.
Re:Oh please (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh please (Score:5, Funny)
> Remember that they don't just get paid to play video games, they get paid to FIND BUGS!
As opposed to customers, who pay to find bugs :)
Stop shooting me! I'm checking walls! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, and imagine that all your co-workers shooting you at the same time! "Boy, Jim is an easy target today. It's like he's always running into walls!"
(On the other hand, if you do find a buggy wall, it would be "Hey! Where did he go?")
Actually, not quite... (Score:4, Informative)
The Natural Order of Things in game development goes more or less like this:
It's not only not fun, it's also terribly frustrating to see that the "final" version of the game still has all the 357 bugs you found and warned the developers about. After the first couple of games, I refused to have my name listed in the "credits". After a few more, I stopped doing it altogether. I worked for two companies and both worked like this. Maybe some companies are different, but judging from the average quality of games (both in terms of stability and "playability"), I suspect this is the normal policy.
RMN
~~~
Re:Actually, not quite... (Score:3, Interesting)
Some companies are indeed different, and it seems to be that the smaller the game development company, the better the product.
Case in point: My wife is nuts for Spyro the Dragon (PS) and Ratchet and Clank (PS2), both from a little company called Insomniac Games [insomniacgames.com]. After watching her play these games, I tried them myself and got hooked. Man, these games are solid. After mastering them, I started playing games specifically to do the weirdest shit I can possibly think of on them. I found a few bugs to be sure, but very minor ones, the kind that simply make something odd-looking happen and let the game continue without crashing or making the game unsolvable. Also, the playability of these games is great.
Now compare this to my wife's experience with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for the PS2 from Electronic Arts, or as I like to call it, Harry Potter and the Endless "Loading" Messages. Not only did the constant loading from disk wreck some of the continunity, it locked up several times during disk loads. Electronic Arts is a much bigger company than Insomniac Games, you would think they would have more money for QA testing, but the smaller company beats them out on that score.
This is, of course, just one example, and YMMV. I remember Electronic Arts came out with some real kickass games for the C64 years ago (but they were a smaller company back then ... hmmm)
Now pardon me while I go back to Ratchet and Clank and try to do even weirder shit on it ...
Re:Actually, not quite... (Score:4, Insightful)
If they manage to sell the same number of copies, regardless of how solid or polished the game is, and if they don't feel any emotional connection to the game, why should they put time and money into testing and polishing it?
Of course, looking at certain cases (such as Rollercoaster Tycoon, Half-Life or Ultima VII) they would see that sometimes that investment does pay off. But the people making the decisions in large game companies usually prefer to spend that time and money on advertising (something they understand). It gets them the same net result (sales), it gets it in a shorter period, and it's not as risky (a game may turn out to be crap even after years in development, but with enough advertising you can sell anything).
So FIFA 2002 sucked? No problem. Next year there'll be FIFA 2003, and some people will buy it because they never played 2002 and some will buy it hoping it's better than 2002. It's not, of course. It's just more of the same - lots of polygons, zero gameplay, endless loading times, unusable menus. But as long as the dollars (or euros, or whatever) keep coming in, they'll keep doing it. And when people realise it's never going to improve, they've already given EA (or whoever) plenty of profit. And new sucke^H^H^H clients are born every year. And "editorial" advertising in the game industry is pretty cheap, especially with thousands of websites competing to be the first to review "XPTO 2003". You can be sure they won't say it's crap. At least not if they want a chance to review XPTO 2004 this time next year.
People in smaller companies want their game to turn out perfect. When they find a bug, they feel bad about it. But many of those smaller companies are now owned by large companies, and they have to obey the law of the sausage factory (keep crankin' them out). After all, that's how Big Bill got where he is today.
Above a certain size, all businesses are in the business of making money.
RMN
~~~
Damn PC games developers (Score:3, Funny)
busted games == no fun (Score:5, Insightful)
I work as a game developer, and testers come and go pretty quick. The good ones mostly get promoted to be level designers, or they go work at a higher paying regular QA gig. The rest tend to go away once they realize what a pain in the ass the job really is.
-
Re:Oh please (Score:2)
However, imagine being a playtester for The Sims for 24/7. Or worse, the latest Windows version. What, Windows isn't a game? DAMN! I always thought these "Service Packs" were levelups... Crikey!
Re:Oh please (Score:2)
I had a friend that did computer game phone support, part of doing support was playing the games that the support person actually knew what the customer was calling about.
One day, his manager came up to him and said, "Jay, I don't think that you are spending enough time playing 'Need for Speed'."
Re:Oh please (Score:3)
Aye. I'm the chief of engineering on a starship you've probably heard of. I thouht it'd be all fun and games and tinkering with toys that emit all kinds of pretty particles. But is that what my job is like? Ach, no matey. That beastie of a cap'n we have makes my job a living hell. We can't even stay in our own bloody time-line! Do you know how many clocks on this ship has? Of course NOBODY but me knows how to set the damn things.
Re:Oh please (Score:2)
funny story (Score:5, Interesting)
Its true (Score:5, Funny)
Re:funny story (Score:2, Interesting)
THE_OTHER_WHITE_BOY speaks the truth!!
For those of you who think video game develoment is a "dream job," you're fooling yourself. Video game development is as much fun for the programming/testing team as sewing soccer balls is for an 8-year kid in a Pacific island sweat shop.
My experience as a video game developer absolutely ruined videogames for me, and nearly ruined my health and marriage, too. How could it be otherwise? After months of 100+ hour work weeks life is not good! To put it into perspective, I was sleeping at my desk three or four nights a week and I recall visually hallucinating from the fatigue. I'd awaken from a "fog" to find hundreds of lines of code written with no recollection whatsoever of writing it. I always felt vaguely ill, and looked like hell; pale, gaunt, lots of new grey hair, etc. (The "new recruits" we hired who were only 20 years old looked thirty just a year later, so I wasn't the only one. In fact there was a sort of "macho" nature to sleep deprivation -- it was a point of pride to see just who could push themselves the farthest. Search the web for 'sleepless in seattle' for another account of this phenomenom.) Oh, and speaking of age, I was one of the "old guys" -- i was in my mid-twenties! Nearly everyone (engineers and testers) was just out of college, and the office had a "frat house" feel to it.
Other than the kids I worked with, I had zero social life. There was never time for "vacations" -- there was always some looming deadline or crisis which required extra effort. Family life practically didn't exist (other than returning home for a shower and sleep, only to drag myself back to work the next morning) but somehow it was all strangely addictive. After all, I was working on what was to become a PC Gamer "Game Of The Year" and was having my ego fed by being told that I was at the top of my game, part of an "elite" class of programmers. Besides the obvious physical costs, I had taken a 45% pay cut to work there.
The final straw was the afternoon I received a Valentine's day card in the mail at the office. It was from my ten-year-old daughter, who had gotten the address from the telephone directly. Her letter read "Daddy, I love you. Hope you can come home to have dinner with us someday."
I quit that afternoon, without notice. I just walked out and didn't come back and I don't regret it for one second. My health is back to normal, I'm working normal hours (in a different field), I have time for my family and my marriage is strong. My hair's still quite grey, however it's not getting any worse. It was several years before I even considered playing ANY video games (and I was an avid gamer beforehand). Even now, I can't look at a game box without thinking of the poor slobs who have (literally) spent their lives for the benefit of a stranger's amusement.
[posted anonymously, for obvious reasons.]
Re:funny story (Score:5, Funny)
I was a game tester... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I was a game tester... (Score:2, Funny)
moderation baby (Score:2, Funny)
too much of a good thing is still bad.
Too much alcohol, the body revolts.
Too much work, you revolt.
moderation? (Score:2)
I worked with an ex Game Tester... (Score:5, Interesting)
Do yourself a favor and test API's or server backends, its not glamorous but you won't go crazy.
106 hours? (Score:3, Funny)
The Far Side (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Far Side (Score:2)
My dad always had a sad look in his eyes when he saw that cartoon.
I wonder... (Score:5, Funny)
As a tester... (Score:2)
I was such a tester (Score:4, Informative)
much of what testers examine is not top-rated games. for example, i tested a large number of kids' games (far more than the other, more fun/challenging and graphic ones). i may not be typical among testers, though; my company repackaged and distributed games over the internet, so i tested everything from unreal tournament, theif 3, and civilization II to tonka's garage and learn windows 98. most of testing is non-sequential; when i tested evercrack (err, i mean everquest), i didn't keep the same character for too long. essentially a tester's job is to break a program.
What do they do as a hobby? Accounting, maybe?
i was kind of known for "testing" ebay while at work, as it was my only internet connection and i was growing/selling my magic [magicthegathering.com] collection.
As to a real hobby, we would play speed bughouse [tripod.com] (team chess) during lunch and Dungeons and Dragons [wizards.com] after work on days we didn't hit the bar down the street (on the company of course)
Re:I wonder... (Score:2, Funny)
Beta testers (Score:4, Insightful)
The longest week he has logged was 106 hours, and 60-hour-plus weeks are typical in deadline crunches, he said.'"
At least he gets paid. Blizzard is beta-testing the Warcraft 3 expansion pack by sending it out to 10000 random testers, who are willing to find bugs for free. It's like a second, unpaid job.
Still, I wish I was selected. :P
Re:Beta testers (Score:2)
But the real trick is to get these testers to not only submit bug reports, but to be intelligent enough to describe the steps taken to recreate the bug in detail. They probably use 10000 testers because they know that about 99% of them will be useless for finding bugs. Thats quite a bit of effort to wade through the influx of information to sort the good reports from the bad reports. Of course, the aspect of the randomness obtained by so many people messing with the product is appealing too.
Re:Beta testers (Score:2)
Who needs a pension... (Score:5, Funny)
This is one of those 'misunderstood' professions (Score:2)
I'd rather... (Score:2, Insightful)
Definately not what you think it is (Score:5, Interesting)
1) You are hardly EVER hired on full time (always a temp, which means no benifits)
2) You're jobs are things like "Click every single one of these buttons in the menu and tell us if anything crashes"
3) You're usually laid off at the end of your temp position
4) Very long hours (especially considering the kind of work you're doing).
I'd rather work in an assembly line, myself...
Re:Definately not what you think it is (Score:2)
Re:Definately not what you think it is (Score:2)
Re:Definately not what you think it is (Score:3, Interesting)
+1 Funny!
The only security these days is money in the bank. Anything else and you're just kidding yourself.
Re:Definately not what you think it is (Score:2)
1. You're hired full-time, but you're not on salary, you're hourly (I didn't work as a tester, but I believe that was the case).
2. Yep, it's pretty much like that.
3. Not necessarily so. It's in the company's best interest to keep the good testers on-board, since they don't have to retrain new people to watch for the little things. On the other hand, people tend to leave due to burn-out, and possible career advancement.
4. Not really, I usually worked longer hours than the game testers, and I was supporting game developers. Unless it's a rush deadline, you're usually in at 9, out at 6. Heck, they locked the doors on the testing room at 6PM on normal nights. Of course, this varies from company to company.
Definitely not fun work, but not that bad. Salary is your only problem if you live in a high-cost area (i.e. the Bay Area).
-- Joe
Game Testing is a job... (Score:5, Insightful)
Similarly, a Political Science Professor who studies comparative politics gets to go off to conferences several times a year, write their own schedule for how to teach courses, see exotic places and do research on them. Sounds like a good deal doesn't it? You also have to deal with meetings, department politics, discipline politics, the competitiveness of publishing, the stress of trying to get tenure. Sure, its interesting, but its still a job.
I would imagine a US Senator has a similar problem. Sure, he gets a lot of power, and gets to make decisions at the national level that affect hundreds of millions of people (if not more), and gets to rub elbows with highly intelligent people wishing to influence his policies. Sounds great. He also has to deal with the people who don't like him, attend meetings, play politics, and run the risk of being voted out of office every 6 years. Its a job.
The point I'm trying to make is that even people who love there work (and there are many) will still occasionally bitch about how their work sucks. Back when I worked midnight shift at an ISP doing support calls, I spent most of my time playing games or watching movies and getting paid for it. There were also times when I had to deal with a huge volumn of irrate customers, because the office was understaffed in cases of a network outage at that hour. So, I'd bitch about my work when that happens, though I generally enjoyed my job.
Game testing is likely the same thing, just like every other fun job.
Testing is not playing (Score:5, Insightful)
-going through the User Interface with a checklist and checking off boxes for each item as it functions, pass or fail.
-going through strings tables to find spelling errors and grammatical issues, as well as text that does not fit its area.
-polygon counting.
-recording frames per second as an automated test runs the same combat over and over again
-installing the game to each drive letter possible (D: through Z:) to make sure it functions properly, to quell a VP's fears.
-Installing and uninstalling. repeatedly.
-testing against the Windows Logo Checklist. Trust me...don't if you can help it.
And thats just a start. I could go on for hours.
Self Actualized? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, all you need is a demanding boss breathing down your neck and putting pressure on you to take all the fun away. That's how bosses get self-actualized
Now there... (Score:2)
man I hope we keep those jobs in the US!
never beta (Score:4, Informative)
Once I used my clout as tech support rep, and software tester to test a game. I think it was called MAX something. it was a real time stratagy game. They required 4 hours game play every day, then you had to submit a journal daily. On top of that you had to log unto a chat room to share with the developers. I got cut after about the forth revision. There was so much compition to impress the developers with your input. It is actually much like slashdot and trying to earn karma.
You get to put "Video Game Tester" on your cards (Score:2, Flamebait)
Pardon me if I don't shed a tear.
Yes, it's hard work. No, it's not as fun as it sounds.
If you want to quit, I know a half dozen folks off the top of my head who'd be happy get a $50k job these days.
Re:You get to put "Video Game Tester" on your card (Score:2)
I wouldn't do it for 50K.
it really makes no sense. it is an hourly position, thet means overtime.
The hours are long, that means more mistakes, and less quality.
Why not hire 2 people and work them 40 hours?
Based on me experience, you would get the same amount of work done.
Re:You get to put "Video Game Tester" on your card (Score:2)
Well, why not actually be a tester for some small business firm or bank, and make 50k/year and have it not be legal for you to do overtime?
I learned after quite a few years of being naive, that $10/hr is $10/hr... It doesn't matter if you make work 168 hours a week, it's still ten bucks an hour.
10 buck an hour jobs are all over the place. I'd rather be a surface technician (janitor) at that price. At least I'll keep my mental sanity.
The illusion these days is that there aren't any jobs out there. It's rahter that there aren't any good jobs. A game tester in my books isn't a good job.
Cheaper in India (Score:2)
Re:You get to put "Video Game Tester" on your card (Score:2)
There's only 168 hours in a week. Take out 100 hours of work, 6 hours of sleep a night, plus time for showering, getting dressed, and eating meals, and that's your entire life. Where's the fun?
A lot of people here probably earn about $50K/yr for 40-50 hour-a-week jobs. Would you be willing to work twice the hours for the same amount of pay?
Re:You get to put "Video Game Tester" on your card (Score:2, Redundant)
I think you're missing a very large point here.
There are 168 hours in a week. Take away 100, and you're left with 68. Now assume you want to sleep 8 hours a night, each night. That takes a 56hr bite out of your week, leaving you with a grand total of 12.
That's 90 minutes to yourself each day, for as long as you work there. I'd bet most of us could do it for a week, but how about a year? Not likely.
And of course as a temp, your sick days are limited...and vacation? Forget about it. Going out with friends? watching tv, reading slashdot, talking on the phone, dates....You've got 90 minutes each day. 35 minute commute? Too bad.
You've fallen into the common belief that money brings happiness. The question however is this: What good is money if you have to sacrifice your mental well being to get it?
-Chris
Re:You get to put "Video Game Tester" on your card (Score:2)
I wouldn't even look at porn for 14hrs a day 7 days a week for only 50k a year. I'm not joking either, 14 hours is a LONG time to dedicate to something like that. You'd be lucky to get a good night's sleep, never mind you never have a day to yourself.
Longest days of work nonstop without a day off... (Score:2)
I used to be a game tester too, QA Lead actually (Score:5, Interesting)
It WAS hellish. It was so corporate, I had to be at work by 9am, and they expected me to work until 8-10pm. Sometimes later, they ordered pizza around 5pm for the whole company. And everyone was salaried so they were expected to stick around. I had 9 fucking games on my plate.
Sure, you may think 9! great! but some of the games were HUGE and in bad shape. You may think the job is "playing games all day" But I actually playing games took about none of my time. About 90% of it was getting new builds from the development guys, making installation CDs, and then installing them and finally getting the game up and running to find that:
The menu bug is still there, needs to be fixed, the characters lip synching is still off, the game still crashes if you pick Paladin as your main character, etc etc etc. This isn't "playing games." It's going through a checklist of known bugs and making sure they're fixed/not fixed.
It sucks, it totally burns you out on games. I'd come home, and stare at my monitor, not wanting to play any games since I just spent 12 hours at work messing with them. I got burnt out in about a year and quit right before our game was about to go Gold. Then they threatened to sue me. I hope the company goes under, if it already hasn't.
Anonymous cuz I don't want to get more lawsuit threats.
Re:I used to be a game tester too, QA Lead actuall (Score:2)
You could have done better at McDonald's. Why did you stick around for an entire year?
I wouldn't be terribly averse to being a game tester, but not at those prices.
*Any* QA dept. (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if it started as labor-of-love coding project. By the time your doing mutil-version support, regression testing, dealing with inaccurate bug reports, "must have" feature implementation you being to wonder why you ever wanted to create a solution in the first place.
OTTH, I've seen plenty of QA people working 60+ hour weeks. Too bad more than half that time was spent checking email, reading
SQA *doesn't* suck. Bad development does. (Score:5, Insightful)
QA Engineers (or their management) have to fight. Bottom line. QA is a battle against bad program schedules, crappy design and poor unit testing.
QA can be a hoot. Contracting for QA *can* suck (as I've noticed lately). But good SQA is an excellent job, and something people that don't/can't code should aspire to. It's a pretty noble profession in the software world.
Unfortunately, most companies these days don't want really good SQA Engineers. They'd rather pay minimum wage for drones. In the end, they will indeed pay. During a recession (as we have here in the States) I think software quality degrades at the same rate unemployment goes up.
Test this! (Score:3, Funny)
You are at the north end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: S
>read plaque
The plaque reads "Know thyself".
>S
You are at the south end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: N
>read plaque
The plaque reads "Nothing in excess".
>N
You are at the north end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: S
(...)
Obligatory Penny-Arcade Link (Score:4, Interesting)
Here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/porktester.php3 [penny-arcade.com]
I can see their point... (Score:2, Insightful)
80 per week overtime pay story (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortuantly, it seems that the laws of supply & demand don't help here and depresses game testers' salaries. I wonder what their overtime-pay situation is; it doesn't look too good.
Boredom? (Score:2)
After twenty years, I imagine these guys come out of the job shell-shocked and blind as a bat, with no earned skills besides tendonitis and CTS.
Testing is not the same as playing (Score:5, Informative)
Or so I thought.
We spent *days* doing things like "bounce your ship into the channel walls repeatedly until you find a hole". Or, "Have all four of you boost off the starting line, and we'll take network load readings, and stop the game. Do it again. And again. And again. And again". We spent ~8 hours one day looking for an obscure bug by having us move each ship a tiny bit at a time, while the other 7 of us watched. 8 hours of sitting there for 20 mins, motionless (silent), and then moving a quarter inch. Goddamn, that was boring. I'm bored now just remembering it
The point is, for an experienced player, it was nothing like playing the game, because we weren't playing (IE, trying to achieve the goals of the game), we were testing (IE trying to achieve the goals of the QA Lead, which was test functionality). The entire time I was there, I think we ran one real race per day, and that was just to keep us from going batshit at the end of the day.
Certainly, for a short term it beat the hell out of working (I took a week off to go do it), but I could see how it would quickly become tedious and boring. You don't (or at least I didn't) get the thrill of nailing down bugs, or even finding them in open play. It was just tedious, tedious, tedious work recreating other people's problems.
Another good article (Score:3, Interesting)
Hell, I remember being a beta tester for a game (Total Distortion), because my friend's cousin's husband was one of the lead designers. It was cool for a little while, but I was under no pressure to keep playing. If I'd had to put in 8 hours a day for a month trying to find bugs and the like, I'm sure I would have gone insane. The cute things like the "you are dead" song when you died would have gone from funny to annoying, and it ran pretty slowly on the machine I had back then. It really wasn't that great of a game (which is too bad, because his earlier game, Spaceship Warlock, ROCKED when it first came out).
Missing a Major Point (Score:5, Insightful)
I know a half dozen folks off the top of my head who'd be happy get a $50k job these days.
I think you're missing a very large point here.
There are 168 hours in a week. Take away 100, and you're left with 68. Now assume you want to sleep 8 hours a night, each night. That takes a 56hr bite out of your week, leaving you with a grand total of 12.
That's 90 minutes to yourself each day, for as long as you work there. I'd bet most of us could do it for a week, but how about a year? Not likely.
And of course as a temp, your sick days are limited...and vacation? Forget about it. Going out with friends? watching tv, reading slashdot, talking on the phone, dates....You've got 90 minutes each day. 35 minute commute? Too bad.
You've fallen into the common belief that money brings happiness. The question however is this: What good is money if you have to sacrifice your mental well being to get it?
-Chris
Let me draw an analogy here... (Score:4, Insightful)
Like reading slashdot? What if you had to click on every link you ever saw posted to make sure it didn't go to goatse.cx? Day after day after day, for years on end.
Okay, maybe it's not that cruel, but you get the idea... :)
Console or PC? (Score:3, Insightful)
How Do Game Testers Relax? (Score:4, Funny)
The longest week he has logged was 106 hours, and 60-hour-plus weeks are typical in deadline crunches, he said.
After a 106 hour marathon game testing session, he went home to unwind by going over budget figures in Microsoft Excel.
Playing games that are 95% done.... (Score:4, Funny)
Game Tester Says Job Is Fucking Rad (Score:3, Insightful)
Thought I'd pipe up for the game-testers-actually-like-their-jobs camp (which seems a little short on support). Dude, most of the people I work with actually *love* the gig. Yeah yeah, long hours and super redundant UI BS. Yeah, carpal tunnel and the Prostitute Caveat (do it for pay, you'll never want to do it for free again...)
However, personally I think we have it pretty goddamn good: we spend *our* 12 hour days working on our passion; we know the game from the trenches and are often considered qualified design sources; we are usually respected for our talents and knowlege.
Those that say game testing is a cush job: well, wrong. It is actually fucking hard and stressful and you watch your age increment every morning in the mirror.
Those who say testing is crushing, brutal work-- come on, you know they can't really pay us any less, quit trying to scare off the new hires
The most amazing thing? Waking up every morning *looking forward* to going to work.
In that case ... (Score:2)
Seriously, though, at least couch potato is a profession that is as exciting and glamorous as it sounds. And I can do it at home, in my spare time, with no additional training. I might even be eligible for government grants.
Re:And in other news (Score:2)
Damn. I was hoping porno was hiring.
Adult film companies ARE hiring... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And in other news (Score:2)
Re:game test (Score:2)