Strangely enough, I have carved a small place into video game history for myself as a tester. I'm even credited.
Yes, I worked QA (Quality Assurance) for a bit in my past (and maybe my future). Just not presently. And yet I always find myself reluctant to tell anyone that I was a game tester not because of the stigma attached to it but because people who do not work in software development are 100% clueless about what QA is or does.
I recently discovered a webcomic/blog that culls reader anecdotes about QA.
I don't really care for the serialized comic but the anecdotes are spot on. I'm fairly certain I know some of the contributors.
Software companies look for very few qualities in testers. They want someone who has a general familiarity with video games and the current tech. What this broadly means is that they want gamers. They want individuals (mostly guys) that have no problem spending an entire day staring at a monitor and "playing" a video game. They need guys like this because anyone else would go batshit insane after two weeks. They also look (more discreetly) at another quality. Are you insane? They really don't want the insane creepy guy with the thousand-yard stare and has a fascination with military and weapons paraphernalia. That would end up only in litigation...only in litigation if they're lucky. They also don't want pedophiles or guys who masturbate uncontrollably. I spell these things out because sometimes the filtering doesn't work and you end up hiring these people.
When you work at a larger company, the details tend to get overlooked.
At a smaller studio, everybody knows everybody so it's harder to get lost in the crowd/overlooked/unnoticed. Not only can they more easily recognize your talents they can also more easily recognize your flaws.
But at a large studio they simply rely on the other testers getting so fed up with one of their own that they cast him out.
The testing environment resembles the male caste system of high school and that may be because so many of these young adults are in a state of arrested development/denial about the real world. Many of them are still basking in the glory of their high school days when they were the baseball champion or the honor student or just getting by without a care in the world and a joint in their hand. And you will know way too much about each of your co-workers. In spaces that were once designed to be glorious sprawling cubicle farms they distribute and pack testers in drab spaces with permanently closed blinds. Sometimes they're in rows. Sometimes in blocks. Sometimes in configurations that just don't make sense. It's a little like space madness. You spend 8, 10, 12, 18 hours cooped up in a small space with people you either barely know or know too much about and they will be your friends and your enemies all at the same time. You'll eat lunch with them and you'll laugh at the same Monty Python jokes with them and you'll IM each other links to various websites or videos. But you also don't trust them farther than you can throw them. You realize that at some point this person may stab you in the back or maybe you'll stab them in the back. You realize that if you want to keep your job you have to be slightly better than everyone else. You realize that your relationship with this person is completely circumstantial. Unlike the TV show, "Lost," not everyone is connected. In the reality of a situation where people are just thrown together, afterwards, it just ends and you don't think about those people. In QA you are losing people at a higher rate than you are acquiring people. The person you spent your lunch hour playing Magic: The Gathering with is gone. The person you played Smash Bros. or NBA JAM or Street Fighter with is gone. And you just move on until someone takes their place. Actually, as soon as they're gone you cannibalize their stuff. Did they have a bigger monitor? Mine now. Did they have speakers? Mine now. Did they have a chair that could recline or didn't squeak as much? Mine now? Did they have a better graphics card? Mine now. And that's just the work-related things that the company owns. There's also Nerf guns, action figures, posters, unopened sugary snacks, company trinkets. All up for grabs. Their entire identity is distributed and consumed like the Highlander. And when you are done the same will be done to your things that you leave behind.
If you're fortunate enough to work with people you get along with, QA may not be all that bad. If you work with people you can't stand, it will become an all-consuming obsession that blocks out all other thought.
Did that guy just take two donuts? Enemy.
Did that guy just take a two hour lunch? Enemy.
Did that guy just spend the last two hours playing MvC3? Enemy.
Though let's be in denial about the fact that sooner or later you have done all of those things yourself but it was completely justified.
Testers tend to be fairly narrow-minded.
The job itself is monotonous and boring for the most part.
Think of your favorite game?
Now think about testing it? What does that entail?
To the QA team that worked on it it meant developing a complete testing cycle to parallel the dev cycle. See, QA actually has a lot of sway during software development. It's not just a means of rooting out bugs. If a game does not pass certain milestones, QA holds it back.
For example, to enter Beta, a game has to be completely playable/beatable and all features have to be implemented. So the only issues that can arise are cosmetic. Art, text, graphics. No "this object that you need to pass this level doesn't work." No, "the game crashes if you do x."
And until the developers fix it, we all sit on our hands. Not really. We actually just keep looking for more bugs. It's easier to continue your sweep while it's still in progress than wait for a fix and start all over again only to find a bug that existed in the last build.
Testing a game means examing EVERY aspect of the game. Testing every button configuration, every compatible hardware configuration, every option (audio, video), testing through every compartmental chunk of the game. For every type of game that means something else.
For a linear game like Super Mario Bros. it would mean assigning a specific level to every tester. If you were assigned level 1-1, you own level 1-1 and know it backwards and forwards. You are responsible for finding holes in the geo. For ensuring that the enemies spawn consistently. That Mario can't backtrack or otherwise cheat.
For an open world game a lot of this can mean trying to do things out of order. If the only way to get across the bridge is to get permission from a gangster, is there any other way I can get across the bridge? Bug.
Testers not only make sure the game works as designed, they also spend a lot of time trying to break the game. Overload the house with assets and see if the game crashes. Spam the attack button and see if the game crashes. Making the framerate drop low enough is a bug. Breaking through the world geo is a bug.
And you do this everyday. 5 days a week if you're lucky. 6 days a week if you like OT. 7 days a week if you're unlucky and probably hate OT now.
Oh and that game that you were so excited to test because you love shooters/platformers/scifi/action/puzzle/sims? Now you hate it. Now you close your eyes and you still see it. You go to sleep and you dream it. You wake up in the middle of the night thinking you missed a bug. When the game is released and you get your free copy you feel like it's a sick joke that someone thinks that you would ever want to play this game again in your life. And then there's the fear of the dupe.
See, writing bugs is also an under-appreciated skill.
Software development teams use databases. The database tracks the game's progress as well as the bugs. Testers must use the db to write up every bug that they find. Once it's entered the developers can track the bug's progress until it's fixed and you, in what's called "regression" confirm that the bug no longer exists. With the db you can also search to see if the bug has already been written. Often the bug has been written up already and may or may not have been fixed. If you write a NEW issue that has already been entered you have wasted your time as well as a developers time. You duped.
Testers with a history of duping tend to disappear.
Writing bugs requires laying out step by step how to reproduce the bug. Repro steps.
And they're meant to be written so that ANYONE can understand.
You don't write:
Go to that building near the middle of the street and keep jumping you fall into a hole forever.
You write:
1. Load game
2. Start a new game
(Editorial: I've had developers give me shit for not including the first two steps and this was WAY late in the dev cycle "You didn't say start a new game. How do I know that?")
3. Progress until level x
4. Progress until player can access the building on "x" street
5. Stand as close to the 3rd window as possible
6. Jump continuously
7. View results
Results: Player falls out of geo
Expected: Player does not fall out of geo
Notes: See attached screenshot for details
Sure it sounds redundant but if you've ever tested and had to regress a bug that wasn't written by you and had very poor repro steps, you appreciate the format.
So in between testing the game for MOST of your waking life for 9-15-36 months you are also trolling the database, monitoring new bugs, talking about new bugs, talking about old bugs, comparing bug counts, and finding as many ways to pass the time as possible. In many cases this means finding the laziest way to do your job. Everyone does it differently. Some just wander away from their desk at regular intervals and claim they were in the bathroom or getting a soda. Some have the game open but are just trolling the internet all day. Some find useless ways to test the game such as spending obsessive amounts of time re-creating things in the game or making their characters look like the characters from Futurama or making the building look like a giant obscenity.
But QA is, unfortunately, seen and treated as the bottom of the barrel. Many of the people who work QA are extremely talented and have the skills to move up out of QA and onto development or production. Still others clearly don't belong in software development at all and should be pursuing their actual passions/dreams. For many QA is the new McJob. It's a low level job that pays. They don't take it home so it's not stressful. They like working with their team and they make it fun. In their off hours they still have lives.
To make QA worse the larger companies have begun reducing their on-site QA teams and rely more on outsourced QA teams. In many foreign countries, companies have found it much cheaper to train and hire large teams to do the bulk of the QA work. This means sending QA managers abroad for months at a time so that they can train and manage new teams until they can work on their own. This means weekly conference calls with people with very basic English skills. This means more and more of your friends disappear. But why not. Apparently it's cheaper which means bigger profits for the company and the top producers/developers. For you it just means it is harder to get a job because now the only on-site QA is a handful of testers who are not even sure why they're there. The occupancy level has been reduced by 90%.
In a final note, I want to mention that even though developers typically bear the burden if a game sucks, there are always a few morons out there who try and blame QA. You'll see comments like, "why didn't they test this game before they released it?" or "somebody in QA didn't do their job."
And they're not talking about some small indie game that was made by one person. They're talking about triple AAA platinum titles that everybody plays. Believe me...that game was tested and QA most likely DID do their job. The reality is that developers will often call the shots with regards to what will be fixed. When it comes down to crunch time they will 86 low level bugs (art, text, graphics). 86 enough of those bugs and the game's overall quality definitely diminishes. Or if it's one of those rare, hard to repro bugs they may have determined that they were willing to risk leaving it in the game. Software development is still a business and subject to business practices. How many products in the world are "perfect?" There's always someone in the room raising their hand to ask why something can't be better. It's just business.
If gamers were really all that concerned with quality we wouldn't have the onslaught of poorly produced games that exist now. But games are still a realm where the purchases has no definitive way of testing the product before they purchase and games have to deliver on so many fronts. It's not like buying soap. Soap has to clean and smell they way you want it to smell. That's it. Games not only have to deliver on the back of the box promises ("An exciting new adventure" "Play as 10 different characters") but also have to deliver on a quality standard on par with what a consumer expects. When the graphics suck and you can't use your top spell because it slows the framerate too much and when you paint the car this color and tone it looks like mud and there's an exploit with buying and selling cotton...the game diminishes in quality.
But you can't return the game because no retailer accepts refunds or returns on software.
You can complain to the company and maybe they'll fix it in a patch if enough people complain and it's serious enough to devote another $100,000 of dev budget to even patch.
But really, there's nothing you can do.
Quality not assured.