Life as a Tester: Part 1
By:
Schuyler Lystad
|
March 10, 2010, 2:33 am

 

Knowing that I had to get a job some day, I held out hope that when that day came, I would do something that mattered, something I enjoyed, and something I got paid for, a trinity discovered by few. A golden possibility for that initial job is the same for everyone who has touched a controller: video game tester. Play video games for a living long before they come out. How can you lose?
She sure doesn't lose.
As all of the people on Sony's new show, The Tester, clearly are unaware of, there are serious pitfalls.
 
When I was fifteen years old, a site was started named GameBoyDojo. One of my friends got hired as one of the original staff. Some months later, the volunteer staff was to be expanded, and I was given the opportunity to join the team. Ater hearing him talk so long about working for a genuine fan site affiliated with a name as big (at the time) as NintenDojo, I jumped on the opportunity. So began my life on the periphery of the giant spinning wheel of the video game industry. I worked for GameBoyDojo, NintenDojo, Advancegb.com, and contributed articles for a few other sites, all on my free time. I attended E3 four times, from 2001-2004, holding interviews with companies; visited the Toy Test event at the Pacific Science Center, right underneath the Space Needle; tried to start an earlier version of this site with the same friend; and roadtripped to Portland just to lay hands on the new Zelda, which at the time, was Wind Waker. This was all out of my own pocket, and as of this article, I have yet to be paid for any writing done.
 
Technically, I've never worked for Microsoft, Nintendo, or ArenaNet. In their testing departments, all work is done through recruiters. They paid an intermediary company to handle everything including applications, interviews, management of staff, and pay. To my understanding, Microsoft does the same with many of their freelancers, but that's a different story. All of this work is done on-site. When I interviewed for the position at Nintendo, the interview was at NOA headquarters in Redmond, about an hour during rush hour and three freeways from my house. It was easy; there were no challenges or immunities, as this was purely an entry-level job. Literally one of the questions was, “What's your favorite game and why?” (I answered Ocarina Of Time and Perfect Dark) The most difficult part was convincing the interviewer that my amateur skills could be applied to professionally breaking video games and describing how good I was at clear communication, something I underestimated in importance. Knowing what would be required of me, I look back and am overwhelmed at how much I must have exceeded their expectations, but at the time I had all my fingers and toes crossed that I would get be (as several of my friends would later dub me) “that [choose your expletive] who plays video games for a living.”
 
(I might as well add that I also had to sign a non-disclosure agreement at all of these places, so pardon me for being a bit vague at parts).
 
For paid work, I maintain this was the absolute highlight of my professional career. The minimum wage in Washington State at the time had just risen past $7.00/hour, and the most I had made up until then was at Blockbuster pulling in $8.25/hour. At Nintendo, a tester was guaranteed forty hours a week, something I seemed to always struggle with, at $10.00/hour, which worked out to $320.00 a week even after taxes. At the time, I was flabbergasted that this happened every single week and remember thinking I didn't know what I would do with it all (granted, I was living at home at the time, and rent and most food was free). One thing I remember doing was buying my first iPod, for two reasons: 1) Half the day testers weren't required to wear headphones hooked to the game they were playing and 2) Certain rows of cubicles were feared. I'll get to that later.
Not Nintendo, but you get the idea.
The actual process was simple: record gameplay at all times, find boundaries, and attempt to surpass them. These could be literal, or they could be temporal. If you feel like you can create a logical loop in the game, attempt to do so. Don't let programmers get away with anything. Proofread text. Outrun ghosts. Switch between these two screens seven hundred times as fast as you can and see if the game fills up its memory and locks. During lunch, recalibrate your joystick (there's a button combo for this) and have your character walk towards a wall for an hour. Make sure you have enough tape to record the entire hour. Repeat in level two. Repeat in level nine. Make the programmers hate their job. 
 
These are the things you do when you're too bored with a game to continue along the story, but too lazy to turn the system off. Or maybe you've beaten it and love the game, and just enjoy time spent in the engine. You've done at least one of these acts before, I promise. “Don't worry about finding bugs,” they said in orientation. “They'll find you. Just be creative.” As far as I can tell, all companies are required to put X many man-hours into testing the final build before it goes out the door. If there are still big bugs, then this is not the final build. If the only bugs left are small ones, then maybe it is final anyway. The great running gag of video game testing is that programmers refer to bugs as “features” in order to get out of fixing them. I wrote up just about every grammatical error a character in a game for the DS committed, and always it came back, “He's foreign. This is by design.” Those that have beaten Donkey Kong 64 will realize sometimes that for a game to meet a deadline, even softlocks  (e.g., finding yourself in a room with no doors, or falling through a floor to a void) become small, permissible bugs if necessary.
 
Bugs are found and logged before a new build might come out. Testers then recheck these bugs on the new build, re-log them if they persist, and mark them as solved if they don't. Some bugs are corruptions of graphics or audio files, some delete your saved game, some cause an item to disappear, others might create loops of events where it's impossible to progress. I had a build of a game where the opening sequence of the third level would hardlock the game. “We know about it,” our lead said, “just play the first two levels for now.” We didn't get a new build for a week. Like they said, the bugs find you.
 
Ultimately, near the end of a project, fewer bugs are found, although the man-hours still need to be fulfilled. Your actual job is to play the game, which after eight hours a day for six weeks, may be less than fun. Testers are organized in rows, and depending on your row, these periods are what defined the job for me. With testers organized in rows of half a dozen to a dozen, out of maybe a hundred possible heads, different projects have different feels due to differing coworkers. My first project was a demo disc with the first section of Resident Evil 4 on it, and the best way we could refer to the enemies and locations was by nicknames we gave them. As I play it now, I still think of Chainsaw Charlie, Hatchet Joe, Pitchfork Bob, and arbitrary lines in the game the enemies won't cross, even if you draw aggro. One of my co-workers beat the demo with just his knife, including the first Chainsaw Charlie. For a particular baseball game that was in the testing department longer than I was, some bugs got creative. One read (paraphrased of course), “In World Series Mode, it is possible to win with the Cardinals. This is a bug as the Cardinals are not capable of getting to the World Series.” Can you guess which team our project lead liked best?
 
In testing a handheld title that centered around mini-games, we created a shared excel file with all of our records. I remember fighting fiercely for a couple of records until I chose one 45 second mini-game that was based around time that could be extended, got to the point where I gained time faster than I was losing it, and played it for a stretch of two hours (the longest we were allowed to play in one go without taking a break). I don't remember hearing a lot about it after launch; for all I know, my record may even still stand, five years later. Inevitably, you have time to do these things, this is less a commentary on the game itself, and more the time you're required to spend with it.
 
Some games lend themselves less to discussion, and I had more than one in the six months I worked there. They say if you have a job you enjoy, you'll never work a day in your life. If you're the sort of person that likes discussing companies, engines, multiplayer games, control schemes, and I mean if the industry is your only avocation, then you will never work a day in that department.
 
There were also the sort of testers that floated from project to project with a benign affect, but with a stigma and malignancy drifting in their wake, like your average box jellyfish. It was for these people that I bought my iPod. These were the people that play World of Warcraft. They wake up, come to work, talk about WoW for all eight hours, spill food from their mouths talking about WoW at lunch, go home, play WoW for another eight hours, then sleep. I like to assume for simplicity, they divided their day into three equal parts: Work, sleep, and WoW. I also liked to assume that any time relegated to showering, eating, and transportation was taken out of the sleep section. If you had two in your row, they would react to each other like some forgotten machine from Tesla, spark to life, and perform a simple task in an inexplicable manner. If they sat on the periphery of the row, you may yet have a future. If they sat in the middle of the row, it was some impassable barrier, two goalies standing back to back, with great diligence slapping out of the air any other seedlings of conversational subjects that may sprout from the rest of us. Six weeks. Eight hours a day. WoW. I started bringing in CDs and ultimately my iPod. What would you do?
 
If you fit between these two extremes, there was a place for you too. One of my favorite games for moderates was something that's easier to play than explain. We'd wheel ourselves out from our desks and sit in a loose circle. It went like this: “Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Seven.” “Morgan Freeman, Jim Carrey, Bruce Almighty.” “Jim Carrey, Cameron Diaz, The Mask.” “Cameron Diaz, Jason Lee, Vanilla Sky.” “Jason Lee? Don't know him. Pass.” “Jason Lee, Ben Affleck, Dogma.” No repeats, and after stumping everyone in the circle, you have to provide the next link before you win. This literally went on for hours.
 
The biggest problem with this job was the downtime. When a project ended, a tester would only hear the day before if there was another project they were needed for. Sometimes this involved not working at all and just waiting for the call. There's never any telling when it will come. Keeping up on the industry and a lot of guesswork is all that would give someone a clue as to what was coming next, but there was no way to know how many people would be needed for a given project. I once waited five weeks before starting a new project, which meant no testing, no pay, and no other commitments.
 
During one of these droughts, my agency got me a gig working at ArenaNet for two weeks. When we came in, the project lead admitted he didn't really have much use for testers as the game was too huge for the dozen of us to make much of a difference and asked that we keep track of the weapons and items we got, how long we spent in each area, and how many experience points we got, for balancing purposes, and then asked us for suggestions of something else we might think was worth keeping track of. This wasn't rhetorical, he actually didn't know what to do with us. I worked studiously mining data that I knew wasn't going to be looked at, since the project was so close to completion. I wasn't interested in the genre anyway, and mainly gorged on the free food, which consisted of juice and snacks, and wrote another company onto my resume.
 
For most, this is one reason not to get the job, or to take it while looking for something else. Hours are hard to get, and in some cases you're lucky if you get a call back. Not too shabby if you need a little extra pocket money and are living at home, but this is essentially impossible to support yourself on. In the Seattle area, Redmond is not particularly expensive, and yet while some testers had moved into some apartments literally less than two blocks from the headquarters, none had cars, all had at least two roommates, none were going to school (or had finished DigiPen, a block away from NOA headquarters), they still had trouble making rent. The other problem is that not a whole lot is added onto your resume from this job. You can cite communication skills, proofreading, working in teams and as an individual, and that's about it.
 
Stay tuned for Part 2: Testing at Microsoft.
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