-
Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!
So I got a job as a game tester
- Thread starter Oblivion
- Start date
Well I wouldn't lie about finding less bugs and I can show you the emails asking me if I'm available if you'd like? The job was extremely lax.surume said:
Availability status with Nelson onsite at Sony Playstation
From: ******@playstation.sony.com
Add contact Add contact
Sent:
Fri 3/23/07 2:52 PM
To:
Hello,
I am writing you this email to find out your current availability status. We have you listed in our system as being 'available but on break'. There are many reasons available candidates can be set to the 'on break' status (ie. back to school, found another job, on 3 month mandatory break, out of town etc.).
I am trying to put in an accurate status for each of our employees. Can you please let me know what yours is?
Also if you are available and looking for work, we are going to be getting lots of new and exciting titles this summer so there will be work in a couple weeks. Please indicate if you would be eligible to go back on assignment.
Thanks
RE: Availability status with Nelson onsite at Sony Playstation
From: *******@playstation.sony.com
Sent:
Mon 3/26/07 10:41 AM
To:
Great, We should be getting titles in next week. I will give you a call
**********
Staffing Coordinator
Nelson Staffing, San Diego
On-Site at Sony Computer Entertainment America
From: ******@playstation.sony.com
Add contact Add contact
Sent:
Fri 3/23/07 2:52 PM
To:
Hello,
I am writing you this email to find out your current availability status. We have you listed in our system as being 'available but on break'. There are many reasons available candidates can be set to the 'on break' status (ie. back to school, found another job, on 3 month mandatory break, out of town etc.).
I am trying to put in an accurate status for each of our employees. Can you please let me know what yours is?
Also if you are available and looking for work, we are going to be getting lots of new and exciting titles this summer so there will be work in a couple weeks. Please indicate if you would be eligible to go back on assignment.
Thanks
RE: Availability status with Nelson onsite at Sony Playstation
From: *******@playstation.sony.com
Sent:
Mon 3/26/07 10:41 AM
To:
Great, We should be getting titles in next week. I will give you a call
**********
Staffing Coordinator
Nelson Staffing, San Diego
On-Site at Sony Computer Entertainment America
Please don't pass what you don't know off as fact.
i used to be a game tester when i first started in the industry, it was very tedious, boring, your brain will die because you WILL GET SICK of the game you're testing for months.
I have some advice to you... RESPECT THE DEVELOPERS PLS. and we'll respect you when writing your bug report...
as a developer myself, when i get some of the bug report to fix things, testers sometimes report the most STUPIDIEST THINGS, make sure find the important ones that would help make it a better game than what you can nitpick on. Also, decribe it as simple as possible... we dont want to read essays....
I have some advice to you... RESPECT THE DEVELOPERS PLS. and we'll respect you when writing your bug report...
as a developer myself, when i get some of the bug report to fix things, testers sometimes report the most STUPIDIEST THINGS, make sure find the important ones that would help make it a better game than what you can nitpick on. Also, decribe it as simple as possible... we dont want to read essays....
InterMoniker
Member
:lol I know your talking about that Collin's College commercial!Eric WK said:
Hahahahaha So cheesy.
MikeOfTheLivingDead
Grapetastic!
Oblivion said:
I worked as a game tester for a about a year, then made games for like 9 years. Here's some advice...
Your communciation skills are crucial. Use proper grammar, spelling, complete sentences, and descibe the issues you encounter thoroughly. Do not submit hand writeen notes especially if your penmanship it atrocious. Type up your reports.
Document everything you do.
Do not even try to use technical terms unless you are absolutely positive you understand them and know what you are talking about.
Try not offer your opinion on game play or game design, unless the developer or producer solicits it from you. The developer usually has a dozen people who have never written so much as a line of html telling them how to do their job, don't be one of them.
If you have to prioritize your own bugs, think long and hard about the severity of a bug and if the issue is even a bug. Nothing worse to a developer than having to sift through 500 "bugs" trying to determine what actually needs to be fixed first.
Rather than just sitting and playing through a game repeatedly, try to develop a specific method for testing the game.
Even after a bug is closed, test it thoroughly on every subssequent build you get.
Good luck, have fun.
JoshuaJSlone
Member
Just curious, what kind of bugs do you mean that aren't worth bothering with?mrpogi23 said:
HylianScribe
Member
I continually fail to understand why so many people wish to be a game tester. After working for a game company for awhile, even in that time frame, our game testers were rotated out several times and nobody liked that job. Sure, Hollywood and interweb culture glamorize it, but it is a crappy job. And you're only next move is to Custom Service typically, and from there, if they care enough about you or you have something to offer, maybe a GM (for online games).
Too many people have these glamorized visions of what it is to work for a game company. Unless you love the company and the games, you will be miserable typically if you are an avid gamer, esepcially one with an opinion. Also, anything to do wtih PR, Marketing, or Community, this holds especially true. I just couldn't come to grips with feeding the community I was handling BS day in and day out. It was insulting to them and you look like an ass. After awhile, I don't see how anyone could take it unless you really desperately needed the money and knew you couldn't get another job.
Somebody said it best - don't mix hobby with work.
There's also the polar opposite. When I started at this former position, our lead GM was the biggest fanboy of the game in the world, had been playing the game for years...couldn't just set aside his hobby and fandom and be professional on the clock. Got let go within a month of me being there...so it goes both ways.
At the end of the day, it is still business, and the company is typically run by people thinking about $$$. If you want glamour and control, go indie. If you want to be somebody's bitch for life, join a mainstream publisher. Chances of you being a "rockstar" for a publisher along the lines of a Miyamoto or Kojima has to be somewhat in the same league as you making it to the NBA as an all-star...
Too many people have these glamorized visions of what it is to work for a game company. Unless you love the company and the games, you will be miserable typically if you are an avid gamer, esepcially one with an opinion. Also, anything to do wtih PR, Marketing, or Community, this holds especially true. I just couldn't come to grips with feeding the community I was handling BS day in and day out. It was insulting to them and you look like an ass. After awhile, I don't see how anyone could take it unless you really desperately needed the money and knew you couldn't get another job.
Somebody said it best - don't mix hobby with work.
There's also the polar opposite. When I started at this former position, our lead GM was the biggest fanboy of the game in the world, had been playing the game for years...couldn't just set aside his hobby and fandom and be professional on the clock. Got let go within a month of me being there...so it goes both ways.
At the end of the day, it is still business, and the company is typically run by people thinking about $$$. If you want glamour and control, go indie. If you want to be somebody's bitch for life, join a mainstream publisher. Chances of you being a "rockstar" for a publisher along the lines of a Miyamoto or Kojima has to be somewhat in the same league as you making it to the NBA as an all-star...
I was a tester at EA (now in dev somewhere else) and there was definitely a bug quota. Other testers I've known from Activision and other EA's had similar experiences...it's why they hire you...to find bugs.comrade said:
IIRC there were (on the projects I've worked on) somewhere between 1000 and 2500 bugs per game. If you got called back (and weren't fired to begin with) after completing a project where you only found one single bug, you my friend, are part of the most inept QA dept in the industry.
For those whinning about testers that don't do their job properly (i know alot about that believe me) you should go look where the problem really is.
You complain but you know that those guys are almost randomly hired and receive no god damned formations. If all of our employers were caring more about that job and actually give formation to those testers, you wouldn't be ranking all those "tester commandements" in the thread here.
You complain but you know that those guys are almost randomly hired and receive no god damned formations. If all of our employers were caring more about that job and actually give formation to those testers, you wouldn't be ranking all those "tester commandements" in the thread here.
HylianScribe
Member
kassatsu said:
Even if it was a game you loved...you have to play it when and where they want you to, it's not on your own schedule. They will grind you until you hate the very game you once loved.
I think Game Testing should be a punishment for fanboyism...maybe even a cure...
DeceitDecide
Member
Just fyi... the testers that have it tough are the ones that work for the big publishers like EA, THQ, Microsoft, etc. Those are almost always temp positions that simply bounce candidates back and forth once every 5-6 months. There's virtually no room for advancement, and no way out of the cycle for a lot of guys. I work as a product analyst for a developer (granted a developer that's owned by a major publisher), and I can tell you this is a whole different ballgame. I interface with our artists, animators, sound guys, game designers, and programmers on a daily basis. Really my job is more developer support than strictly entering bugs into a database. We'll have the poor saps from our publisher do that hammering when the time comes for our projects. So, anyway, I'm just saying being a lowly tester sucks for a lot of people, but it's not a dead-end everywhere you go. My two cents.
HylianScribe
Member
DeceitDecide said:
The company I used to work for, we had a guy go from QA to Custom Service to GM to Community Manager to Associate Producer in a year's time. I'm sure he's probably a producer now. So no, it is not a dead end job, but you have to be a rock star at your job. He also spoke Turkish, which was a major demographic for the game he was working on (around 60% of the CCU at anytime was Turkish). But he was just very good and very effective and in touch with the community and knew what the game needed to work.
UntoldDreams
Member
It's a new Hannah Montana title isn't it?
Admit it.
Admit it.
Raging Spaniard
If they are Dutch, upright and breathing they are more racist than your favorite player
MikeOfTheLivingDead said:
Perfect advice.
Theres nothing worse than a tester with absolutely no idea on how a game pipeline works going to your cube and telling you how to do your job just because they once did a map in Quake 3.
Main problem with testers is that the job gets to their head and actually act like they're some sort of hot shit because they're "good" at videogames. Some testers do grow and become producers, engineers etc and thats great, but those are marked exceptions. Another issues is that they get used to looking at such particulars in games that their impression of what makes a game good or bad is completely lost, specially with what an average consumer enjoys (this happens a tad with game media too, but eh)
Ive actually been told things like "Oh, you wouldn't be able to beat me in "x" because I'm so used to holding the 360 controller all day and can get to the buttons faster.
So yeah, follow what Mike said, try not to talk about games too much at work, because youll probably go on a rant that nobody wants to hear, and have fun
I'd have to say the most detrimental aspect my job is that it forever altered my perception of games. The duty of picking out flaws and technical mumbo jumbo eventually takes presidence over all games, not just the ones you test. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you become conditioned and hypersensitive to the tinniest flaws, almost to the point of being incapable of enjoying a game for what it is.
It's comparable to seeing everything in code, as cliche as that sounds. You can't go back.
It's comparable to seeing everything in code, as cliche as that sounds. You can't go back.
SketchTheArtist
Member
My first game I worked on as a tester was DUKES OF HAZZARD: Return of the General Lee.
Wasn't fun but after playing it for a month at night (the developpers worked in Australia) you kinda 'like' it in a way since you become really good at it. Even though the game's not that good. :lol
Wasn't fun but after playing it for a month at night (the developpers worked in Australia) you kinda 'like' it in a way since you become really good at it. Even though the game's not that good. :lol
Oblivion said:
1- Don't go to a developer complaining "it's broken", "it doesn't work". No matter how frustrated you are, be as specific as you can and tell them exactly what doesn't work.
2- Learn how to isolate the problem by simplifying the system, changing only one parameter at a time, etc.
3- -NEVER- lose a hard to reproduce bug. Of course since you don't know which bug easily repro's, this means don't let go of any that you have not seen before.
4- keep track of what you are doing so you can explain the repro steps later on.
5- There is not much future in "black box" testing. Learn the system and technology you are working on as deep as you can.
6- Assume -nothing-. You will surprised how many times I have debugged issues that testers thought are caused by the same bug (because the symptoms were similar) and they were not.
7- Once you find some bugs, you will notice that you (subconsciously) avoid circumstances that would trigger them. Fight the habit!
and finally
8- Load the right symbols...
Good luck.
Hey, I think I have the same kind of job that you do.DeceitDecide said:
Definitely for the majority of QA people I can see how it is a "dead end" kind of job, but only in so far as they themselves make it so. There are people who I saw at the main QA branch who I could never fathom getting a better job in the industry based on their work ethic (or lack therof).
I'm a great bug-writer myself. Just a one line summary directly to the point of the problem, then a list of accurate (ie. tested more than once and on multiple machines) repro-steps, plus some notes about the build and that's it. I've only gotten one bug so far that came back as an NMI (need more info) only because they needed some particularly detailed screenshots with debug code in it.
Apocryphon
Member
I'm surprised they asked you how you'd imrove the visual quality of a game. That's not what games testers do. It's about quality assurance, so the only time you'd get to make any sort of input regarding the graphics is if there were visual glitches, ...and even then you wouldn't be talking about how to "improve" anything, just making extensive notes of where they are and how they're activated.
Games testing is extremely boring. Long hours, little pay and as much time spent playing will be spent writing. You have to have excellent literary skills and an eye for detail, and thats something they look at in the interview. You play levels over and over, spot bugs or glitches and detail them extensively giving long descriptives as to where and how they appear.
You rarely have any direct contact with the team working on the game and most studios outsource their testing anyway.
It's never a permanent job, ...usually something like a 3 month contract, and the only agreements you'd have to sign are NDA's specifically concerning the game you're testing itself. The fact that you're working for a company isn't something you'd have to keep secret.
Games testing is extremely boring. Long hours, little pay and as much time spent playing will be spent writing. You have to have excellent literary skills and an eye for detail, and thats something they look at in the interview. You play levels over and over, spot bugs or glitches and detail them extensively giving long descriptives as to where and how they appear.
You rarely have any direct contact with the team working on the game and most studios outsource their testing anyway.
It's never a permanent job, ...usually something like a 3 month contract, and the only agreements you'd have to sign are NDA's specifically concerning the game you're testing itself. The fact that you're working for a company isn't something you'd have to keep secret.
AtomicShroom
Member
basis said:
Ulairi said:
Not true for me. I've been a tester for 3 years now and I still love gaming just as much. Hell I even play some of the games I tested because they're just that good.
beelzebozo
Jealous Bastard
DeceitDecide said:
what you say?
tanasten
glad to heard people isn't stupid anymore
Oblivion said:Yep, soon I will be testing on a sequel to a certain series. A certain series that I think GAF likes. However, the game in question and the developer shall remain shrouded in secrecy. Wouldn't want to be blasted by GAF in case this game turns out to suck when it comes around.
Now, as it turns out, I've worked temporarily as a game tester before for another series that GAF also seems to like. However, that was just more of an off and on position. This is the first time I'm going to be doing this full time.
If anyone has any advice, or any crazy stories in their experience in testing, speak now. I want to know what to expect. Though, it probably might not be that different from what I was doing before.
Well I have been doing QA lead for two years and now I'm back as tester in a Play Wireless.
I could speak to you tons of stories and things that went wrong and crazy in my experiences as a tester/Lead QA, but I'll say to you that... just be patient :lol
macksplack
Member
I have no advice for you, i just want to wish you luck with your new job.
BravoSuperStar
Member
I worked as a tester for awhile. Was fun until "crunch time" hit. I also learned to not try and turn a hobby into a profession and got out of the industry and just play games for fun now. Being a QA tester made me so burnt out on gaming it was tough to enjoy it in my leisure time.
Good luck, and I mean that. The job gives back what you put into it. Personally, my first few years in the industry as a Tester/Lead Tester were my fondest memories in the gaming industry. Pick the company you work for wisely. QA isn't just a stepping stone to other departments/companies anymore. Depending on the company, it can be a real career that will give you skills that you can take to other industries if you're smart about it.
I started in this industry back in 1995, and I still play games. They are just about all on XBLA/DS/PSP, though, since I have many other interests/hobbies/responsibilities. If you really love playing games, QA probably won't change that.
I started in this industry back in 1995, and I still play games. They are just about all on XBLA/DS/PSP, though, since I have many other interests/hobbies/responsibilities. If you really love playing games, QA probably won't change that.
Jon_Danger
Member
excite truck 2?
Wicked Mint
Member
Worst job of my life. I still refuse to play the game I tested.
Just remember to test it on all consoles before you claim it as a bug.
Also, if the developers put a wall up in front of a bottomless pit you found, the bug is not "fixed" it "cannot be duplicated".
Just remember to test it on all consoles before you claim it as a bug.
Also, if the developers put a wall up in front of a bottomless pit you found, the bug is not "fixed" it "cannot be duplicated".
oldschoolpinball
Member
as someone who was in QA for 2 years and now in production...QA is by far the most tedious and underwhelming position in the industry..but someones got to do it
Wicked Mint
Member
Brannon said:
It had a 3 at the end of it...
Dr. Kitty Muffins
Member
It has to be better than the job I have now. Too bad there aren't any game testing jobs in West Virginia.