Video Game Testers

What's it like to play videogames all day? That's the life of a tester.

Disagree? It really depends on your patience. A tester has to have the patience of Job, willing to spend hours picking at a game environment, or days checking every level and every space of a game for the same tedious graphical flaw. That's what testers do.

If you think you're a patient person, let's try a real-world test.

You're stuck on a one-lane road behind an elderly driver. He's going 25 in a 35 zone. Five minutes go by and you're forty miles from your destination.

Your friends are the judge in this test. They're in the car and they look at you. Are they calm? Or are they afraid you're about to melt down?

A lot of gamers lack the patience to be testers. It's a job, and jobs involve this four-letter word known as "work." Be kind to your neighborhood tester. He or she doesn't get to experience video game play like you do.

A lot of people assume you simply plug in, play a great game, and write down any flaws you see. They find a single bug and think they have the chops to test. Unfortunately, it's not that easy.

The role of a tester is essentially to find bugs and report them. It's a rigorous, structured, high-pressure role that requires good writing skills, an essential understanding of where the problems are coming from, and diplomacy in reporting problems to the development staff - people who are under a similarly Sisyphean load of work and are understandably reluctant to hear about bugs and additional work that must be performed.

Testers adhere to a plan developed by the test lead - the general on the battlefield of killing bugs. The plan illustrates how the team will tackle the game's flaws, dividing the tasks and sending the most eyes to the worst areas. Some testers will play the game like a consumer. Some will play the game using knowledge and software that only the development team has access to. Some will spend weeks only testing the UI - the menus, game save, and game load functions. (Sound like fun?) Some will spend weeks checking the game on different combinations of video cards, processors, and memory (if it's a PC game).

And don't forget - the game is buggy, ugly, half-finished. The testers sometimes have to bend over backwards just to get it to run. And there's no guarantee a tester will get to test a game that will EVER be fun... there are a lot of bad games out there. It's tough to test a game for a year knowing it will never be enjoyable.

Testers spend half their time punching data into a bug database that tracks all the bugs as they go through phases - initial discovery, discussion, initial fix, testing, and if necessary, re-fixing and retesting. Tough bugs may be reopened dozens of times - not necessarily because they weren't fixed right, but often because other work in other parts of the game keep breaking another sensitive part of the game.

Writing skills and an incisive analytical sense are required to write a good bug report. No one likes a tester who writes ambiguous, unrepeatable, or hard-to-locate bugs.

Testers are also under enormous time pressure at the end of the game's development. It's critical that the game be finished on time - stores only hold space for a game on the shelves so long, and then they give up hope and start betting on the next hot game.

Testers are the last obstacle before a game gets approved to go to market. As a result, they're at work all hours - ALL hours - all the time as the game gets close to finishing. They're expected to lay down their lives for the game, figuratively - everything goes on hold as they slave away at finding bugs. As the entire team works harder to close out the project, more bugs are created, and the test team's tasks multiply. Testers are asked to play the entire game through, over and over, every time there's a new revision of the game. Often, testers will resort to sleeping at the office so they can get their work done.

Sound like fun?

So the next time you meet a tester, or talk about testers with your gaming buddies, give them a little respect. It's not a monkey's job, and it requires tremendous dedication and heart. It's often underpaid and unrewarded, and even the best testers sometimes never make it through to join the ranks of the game development team - never getting to be able to create the bugs instead of finding them.

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