When I was in college I used to work in a big studio’s QA department during summer breaks. The building we were in was situated where QA lived on the 3rd floor and all development and management were on the 4th and 5th floors.  As a result regular QA rarely ever met with or talked to the developers, and it felt very much like we were not part of the team.

This was the top shared concern among QA employees when the company was taking input on the designs for it’s new building.  We must have made an impression because the next summer we were moved to a cheap used warehouse down the street while the Dev teams got a new building built specifically for them. 

Go Team!

I was hired for my first job in the video game industry yesterday - as a QA tester. I thought it would be the best job ever. I was so excited that I started google searching for tester related stuff, and found this site.

Then I read the tales archive. My favourite one was where the guy works 70 hours a week for no pay while surrounded by hostile co-workers, and then gets laid off when the game is done. I’d give you the title, but I can’t remember - I read the same story so many times they’ve sort of bled together.

I start my new job on Monday.

Shit.

A little over four years ago, I was working in QA at a large publisher testing a music title of note. We were working 7 AM to 7 PM Monday through Friday, and 7 AM to 4 PM on Saturday for about four months straight.

About a month into this overtime crunch, we got a build that implemented microphone input for the vocal sections (up till this point we had to use debug commands to automatically score 100%). I’m singing obnoxiously loud on a crowded floor where two testers share each cubicle when a lead comes up behind me and tells me through half-hidden chuckles to “shut the fuck up.”

Still singing, I pause the game to turn around, only to realize that the game is looping about one second of what I was singing into the mic when I paused it. Nodding to my lead, I turn around,  unpause the game, giggle, make a fart noise in the mic, and then immediately pause the game. Much to my excitement, the pause screen is looping the fart noise, creating an infinite fart.

The smile I had was one of pride as I watched the ensuing wave of laughter billow through the packed floor, leaving productivity utterly demolished, as if my fart noise was at first wind blowing through an open field, only to become a fart tornado of destruction.

I was working on a short contract for a children-focused game that was coming out on most major consoles. One of the juggling acts the company has to… juggle when making a game across multiple platforms to make sure they finish at roughly the same time so they go on sale simultaneously. One thing preventing this are the hardware manufacturers who each have their own unique set of rules and regulations all games must adhere to before they will be approved: the dreaded TCRs.

Nintendo is historically a harsh master, with a reputation for having a very high standard before they’ll approve your game (remember the ‘Nintendo Seal of Quality’?). I was told at the time that Nintendo will always fail your first submission no matter how much care you take in respecting their TCRs; they’ll find something you missed, or find some other bugs and just fail you on those regardless of how bad they are.

So it made sense for us to prepare the Wii build a little earlier than the others, to test for and fix only the most glaring issues, and send that build in so we could get that first doomed submission over with and have some guaranteed time to fix everything else in the Wii version for the second submission roughly a month later.

Nintendo passed the game on first submission.

It was decided to not submit a second time.

I used to work at a small gaming company that went through some pretty rough times and involved the never ending work late grind that seems all too common in the industry.

After a whole intense year of ‘just one more week’ till launch 60-80 hour weeks, we were finally treated to an office Christmas party.

Of the whole team, many people had worked very hard to improve a struggling, dismal company in the face of an extremely poor management team, headed by a really unpopular managing director.

In spite of this, everyone loved working together and we were really proud of the project.

At the Christmas party it was announced by management that they would be rewarding the employer of the year with a great prize.

Everyone gathers around the announcement from the CMO.

He announces that the winner is a great leader, showed amazing insight and added the most value to all departments of the company. He then proceeds to (no shit) play ‘The Final Countdown’ while announcing that the winner is the managing director (they even made a trophy, a t-shirt and a gift basket of prizes).

Needless to say, after that about 20 people in the business handed over their resignations, myself included.

I was on a big name sports project. Everything was going well, and I steadily bumped my hours from 21 to 40 during my first 6 months.

I got more and more leadership roles, then one day nearing beta they announced a special demo mode for previous game owners, I had already had leadership in one area of the game, so they gave me leadership over the new demo mode as well! I had be in contact with QA in another state where the game was being developed while still being in charge of another part of the game. I’m a lowly contractor, but hey the job was kind of easy.

As we kept nearing beta, i eventually hit a week where I did not submit any bugs. I had been running back and forth giving new builds out, checking old bugs out to make sure they were fixed, and if not, I’d have to download a new build and check it on there, then submit a bug SPECIFIC for just that build if it was on there.

After a while I realized I was staying extremely busy but nothing was ACTUALLY getting done… So fast forward a few months, the beta’s done and getting ready to get certified. People are getting moved off the project and you know what us leads do? Play games, browse the net, and go around the building… me included.

Then I got moved to an extremely easy project. I love being in QA. It’s so good.

I once was tasked to a last minute helper job at a large media production house which produced (later all failed) flash based MMOG products.

Because of a fallout with an important contractor, every single media asset had to be checked by a human to visually match a printed catalog of assets. If we found a match, we had to move it to a different folder and copy a black and white checkered placeholder image for it with the same filename. It was mind numbing how large the asset count was.

After long shifts wading manually through a small forest’s worth of printouts, we were called into a room. After 9 days without much sleep we were told that we now had to check if the games will still run “somehow” without

those missing assets and if they are still “marketable.”

Every game we started, we only saw an ocean of black and white checkered patterns stacked each over. It turned out that this outsourcing company had made 100% of the assets.

I’ve read all of the stories that have been posted here and I wanted to offer a contrasting perspective. I’ve had all sorts of jobs. In one, I sold homemade sodas at Renn Faires. I built stages for major concerts. I aided Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. Finally, I was in civil service for several years. Just as I thought I’d finally found my niche, dull as it was, I got laid off in the state budget crisis. I was out of work for a year before a friend helped me get on at a testing center.

That was two years ago. I’m still here. During my first year, I completely fell in love with the industry. My love for games grew instead of being diminished. One of the games I tested won a 2011 VGA.

I go to work with a smile on my face and leave with one, too.

It’s not all grinding employee abuse, guys. Sometimes, testing is a fun, rewarding, satisfying job.

I worked for a large company as a lead in customer service. As a major project launch date approached, management realized more skilled testers would be needed and moved staff familiar with the product from other teams temporarily to testing. I was interested and actually excited to do this, because I had never tested before. I was under the impression that my involvement would help my CS team out in the long run, and the product would be better for it. Make sense?

I tested full-time for four weeks. I was given a huge list of testing scripts to work through but it was all mundane happy-path stuff. I thought I’d do better with some guerilla testing, and since I wasn’t officially a tester I didn’t have a supervisor to argue with me, I just ran around trying to break things. As it turned out, I broke just about everything.

I submitted an obscene amount of bugs every day because I wasn’t burdened by what were obviously poorly-conceived test scripts.

Somehow—perhaps because I was a team lead—I ended up in a final meeting of producers and testers where we went around the room and all the test leads unbelievably stated that their area was good to go. I assumed it had to be pressure from management, but I hadn’t felt any of this pressure and wasn’t going to lie, so I was the only one in the room that said the game should be a no-go.

I stated from my perspective that the title was probably a year out from being consumer-acceptable. The testers all stared at their hands. The managing producer nodded thoughtfully and said “Okay, we’re launching on schedule.”

The game launched two weeks later and was a buggy disaster. My team, the poor CS guys, were overwhelmed by rightfully pissed-off customers for months.

Two years later the company found themselves in the same position and again reassigned internal staff to testing. The only lesson they apparently learned? They didn’t invite me to test again.

QA testers have an unusual relationship with gaming press. I’d like to elaborate a little. You see, every time a member of the press plays any game that requires a second player, you’re playing alongside a member of QA. We have the most experience, and handing the game off to some unpracticed marketing guy with no idea what bugs dodge would be a catastrophe.

So here’s where it gets awkward on the QA end. We have collectively spent the last 6 to 9 months playing nothing but this game for 8-16 hours a day. Once you hit 1000 hours spent playing a single game you ascend beyond mortal skill. Multiplayer games against each other are measured in single bullets and millisecond reaction times.

Now imagine asking these people to lose.

We are asked to collectively throw the game while playing you. To appear like we are trying but never kill you. To make you feel like a champ.  I really hope that didn’t shatter egos.

Now to rein this back in and turn it into a proper story.

It was roughly 4 years ago, and I was on the 30-ish person large Multiplayer team for a AAA Shooter.  The brutal grind known as the prep for E3 was winding down and it was game time. The name of the game was 3 days of non-stop multiplayer against the press.  Breaks and lunch taken at our desks. The entire time only maintaining the facade of a game taking place. Bullets flying everywhere but to no real effect. Like storm troopers.

We periodically get feedback from the attendants on the floor with the press. Things like “he’s lost over by the docks, someone get over there and keep the action going,” or “people are noticing the bad lighting on those trees. Keep the action elsewhere.”

While we were getting feedback from our liaison, some obnoxious dude was hanging out near the booth loudly proclaiming “Wow, is that the best AI you could come up with? Those bots are terrible!”

Our lead asks what Marketing wants us to do about it. Our Marketing liaison utters the magic words through the speakerphone.

“It’s an hour until we pack it up, Let ‘em off the leash.”

The ground shook. The heavens split. The world exploded.

First off, I’m an artist not a member of a QA team.

I worked for this one company in England (Cambridge to be exact), and one member of the QA team would always add art critiques as bugs, offering their opinion. This normally would be frowned upon, but it was known to be a direct order from the owner of the company to this tester.

Now this went on for about a month during which time the art director wasn’t on speaking terms with the owner… yeah I know. So everyone thought that these “bugs” were legit.

Then one day (shortly before our big E3 playable) we received this bug:

“(insert name here) feels flags need to be blue not red and should have this logo in it’s place. please revise.”

This took us some time to change and push to the new build, because there were a LOT of flags. Well the owner lost it. He couldn’t believe the art director made such a sweeping change without his consent, blah, blah, blah. Until I pointed out the “bug” and a whole string of other “bugs.”

So of course instead of dealing with the problem in a logical manner, the QA person was moved onto the design team.

I worked as a QA tester for about 6 months (long enough to realize I never wanted to do it ever again) when I was in desperate need of work and, you know, money. After I was laid off, I thought I was done with the job. But as it turns out, you’re never done.

Years later, doing a university course for something I actually wanted to do with my life, I find myself in the animation studio of the school taking photos of students. Some of them were working on making a game for some reason. A very excited girl runs up to me, asking if I could pretty please play test her game build for her assignment.

“Sure, I don’t see the harm.” I say, and I sit down and play a horrifically broken FPS and show her exactly where it’s unclear how to progress and what’s wrong with her level design, and offer suggestions on how to improve the product.

“Wow. You’re really good at this!” she exclaims.

“Oh? Well I guess it’s just ingrained in me from when I worked as a game tester.” I respond without thinking. Her eyes widen with excitement, and my heart sinks.

I then spent the next 12 hours testing every single game in their class and giving comprehensive analysis to each of them about the builds. I was also asked to come back in a week to do it again.

I was passed around like a lump of meat loaf and wasn’t even offered any kind of compensation for my time after the fact. They all thought “Playing games for 12 hours” was payment enough…

My tale takes place in the bygone days of yore.

This was an era in which the WELL was the closest thing to an Internet that existed.

In those days, scientists had recently announced the achievement of placing an entire gigabyte of information onto a single silicon chip! (though they could not believe it could be of any practical use…)

Yea, those many eons ago, when Atari had just released its new gaming console to eat all other gaming consoles: the Jaguar.

In that time before even the now long-extinct Game Sharks had crawled out from the primordial sludge, its ancient ancestors still ruled the land of console gaming prehistory.

This was the age of the Game Genie!

I, as one of the very lucky few, the chosen ones, had been hired by the great Galoob Toys (Requiescat in pace), creators of Micro Machines and distributors of the Game Genie, to test Game Genie cheat codes.

Engineers plugged away in some undisclosed location, hacking hexadecimal codes to enable the unskilled and unscrupulous child to cheat at - now antique - video games. Our job was to check to insure that these codes, when entered into the Game Genie with proper ceremony, would actually do some sort of cheating in a manner somewhat similar to the engineers’ descriptions sent with these same codes.

When the description was inaccurate, a better description would be written by the tester. (ie: this isn’t infinite lives! this is 99 lives!) When the code was ineffectual, it was the testers’ duty to see it was discarded.

In this way we toiled, and so earned our wage.

Our tiny, two-cubical “code testing” department was planted smack in the middle of the incredibly cool in-house art department, who would constantly converse boisterously on all manner of topic, usually of great hilarity and some little bawdiness, astounding we wee gamers in their midst with their wit, and all the while would they be busily turning out colorful packaging and adhesive sticker designs for Galoob’s licensed toy franchises (such as Biker Mice from Mars and The A-Team).

I actually got paid to sit in a room filled with entertaining, creative people and play video games - full time. (and to cheat with honor, no less.)

When the Genie’s sales were done, so were those halcyon days of my youth. I was laid off. When my final day arrived, while all these wonderful persons I had grown so fond of in that never-to-be-returned-to place of joy were happily nibbling away at a huge cake in my honor - trite condolences and wishes for my future good fortune scrawled upon it in cold sugar - I, in my loss, hid myself away on a loading dock out behind the building and I wept great tears of grief and sorrow.

Long hours are required in game development.  That’s just the way these projects end up.  Producers have to schedule a way to create the best game possible before the entire team gets sick of it and quits, which means lots of stuff gets pushed to the last minute, and QA can’t test something that isn’t created yet.

Because QA comes in at the tail end of a production schedule, they have the final deadlines to hit.  While your bosses might not say it outright, you are discouraged from being anywhere but at work for the (your) duration of the project.  The large majority of Quality Assurance Testers work on a contract basis, around 6 months to a year in length, and often a month or six will go between contracts.  While this can get hard financially, the (f)unemployment period between each contract can be seen as merely unpaid vacation time.

If a tester gets hired on full-time by a company, they will be working on this project and then right on to the next project.  If a tester is made a Lead Tester (a supervisor) they are expected to be around ALL THE TIME during every project.  No turning down overtime, no days off for recouping your sanity because you’ve got a team to lead.  The pay grade doesn’t go up much, though.

I have to ask myself, are those couple thousand extra dollars a year worth giving up my sanity-saving vacation time?  Do I even WANT to leave entry-level contract work?  If game publishers/developers respected their QA, it might be a job I want all year.

As a newly hired junior programmer I was given the esteemed responsibility of shepherding a content pack for our recently released game through platform certification. It was intended to be a pretty simple job that a newbie like me could take care of all on my own.

Unfortunately for me the platform certification team liked our game so much they happily ignored a large number of bugs and decided to rectify this when the patch required to support the content pack was submitted. They found saved game bugs, sound, language and a whole slew of networking issues. A real crash course in the certification process.

To top it off we didn’t have an internal QA team so I had to deal directly with the publishers QA. They would take a single certification issue and turn it into as many bug reports as was humanly possible, bordering on the ridiculous. If a button state was wrong in an English play session, they would report the same bug for French, German, Italian, etc.

The publishers QA also had a habit of not explaining in any detail what undesired behavior was being reported and instead as the final repo step they placed a single word: Observe. Whenever I read that
word it made my blood boil.

Six months of ‘observing’ and being bounced again and again by certification, I was so pleased when it finally shipped. Much later our own QA team would occasionally throw an ‘Observe the screen’ into
reports just to get a reaction out of me.

So I recently decided to give online dating a try due to my increasing lack of free time.  I made up a profile and everything.  The profile included what I did for a living. (Software QA)  I’ve worked in QA for almost ten years with the majority of my experience being in game test and test case documentation.

So I have a first date with this one girl who seems really cool.

She’s pretty, into video games, a fellow homeowner, and she has a good sense of humor.  The date is going well, we’re talking, laughing, and she seems to be into me.  At one point I start talking about the game
I’m currently working on and she seems surprised.  She suddenly gets quiet, stops really responding to my attempts at conversation, and just seems uncomfortable all around.

Me:  “Hey, is everything alright?  Seems like something is bothering you?”
Her:  “Well your profile said you worked in software, I didn’t realize you were a game tester.”
Me (Surprised):  “Is there something wrong with that?  I thought you enjoyed video games.”
Her:  “Well, I’ve dated game testers before and I don’t think I could be with another one.”
Me:  “Oh I see, you’re one of those people.”
Her (Angry and Annoyed):  “What do you mean, “those” people?
Me:  “Well, I mean people who like to categorize others but don’t like it when it’s done to them.”

Needless to say the rest of the date didn’t go so well and we never saw each other again.

I remember the meeting well, it was just before ‘crunch time,’ and we were all called into a room. On the board was a list of items we could buy with our royalties payout once the game had broken even. On it were purchases such as sports cars, houses and other expensive luxuries.

When we left the room, I noticed how inspired my co-workers were, willing to bleed and give up every weekend to secure that payout. I felt for them as I already knew the reality from a game released months before.

After many overtime hours worked their first payout equalled eighteen pounds and fifty pence.

While working one day on a moribund cross platform licensed AAA title, my concentration was broken by the sound of a raised voice coming from the design corner. “Settle down!” was the command shouted over the cubicle by a worried looking senior designer. It was directed at a fuming mid-level, heavy with the stress of broken zone boundaries, a looming milestone and compounded by an upcoming WoW guild performance review for his level 80 Healer.

No big deal, but I decided to leave one earphone off just in case things did escalate. No sooner do I glance back at the code as my attention is broken again by a blur of producers running full tilt over to the troubled designer who is now brandishing two of the studio’s birthday-cake-cutting knives. He’s absolutely fuming as he stabs one of the knives into his desk and stands up. Now he has undivided attention.

“Just put the knives down. Put the knives down and we’ll talk. Let’s go outside.”

Luckily our studio is the kind of place that hires producers with previous experiences in pub management. Our stressed out designer made one feeble swipe before being escorted from the floor to wait for the arrival of police and ambulance.

I used to work for a small game team working as … a contractor to a contractor to the people who funded the game. We were a small QA team, but we worked as hard as we could for Directors with no direction, unrealistic deadlines, no support, and dwindling budgets.

We reached the final stretch before our target launch date and were all asked to gather into the meeting room.  We were told that the team was in danger of losing funding if we didn’t meet the deadline and exceed expectations.  It was suggested that we were on the verge of our product being “ship ready”, and that they couldn’t pay us any OT due to the ever shrinking budget, but if we worked really hard and shipped on time our jobs would be safe.  Moreover, the Producers told us that they had gotten word that the next version would be ours if we met this one final goal, and so we started to develop those levels in good faith during down time or while blocked on our current version to be released.  One of our animators couldn’t have been sleeping more than 3-4 hours a day.

A week later, an Artist and a Producer from our team were fired to show that they meant business.  They said that it was due to poor performance, but everyone knew that it was because they had voiced their concerns about the risks involved with our current trajectory.
Before ending the meeting the higher ups that came to fire our friends said that they understood that these people were our friends, and so in order to make things right with us they wanted to show us how they take care of their own.  They gave us free t-shirts that they had been given for agreeing to use a lighting engine.

About a month before I was to be married, and about two weeks before the game was supposed to ship, I asked one of the heads of my Game Team (who was actually a direct employee of the funding group) for a week off for my wedding with a few days off for my honeymoon.  He responded with “Oh, no… You’ll need more than that, don’t you think?  You should take three weeks off, paid.”  Ecstatic, I gladly accepted.  We worked tirelessly for the next two weeks, and got the game to the state in which it needed to be to ship a day before the release date.

That night we went to a local pub and celebrated with a makeshift release party, which was paid for entirely by our Producer and ourselves.

The next day we came to work and were greeted by the same higher-ups that had flown in from the mother ship to tell us that they were shutting down our studio and that we were all to be laid off.  They told us that they had known for months that we wouldn’t be able to secure funding, and it was really an unfortunate turn of events.

All in all, I worked about 400 hours of unpaid overtime to release a game for which we were promised a renewed contract for a new version of said game.  A while later they released our games new version’s levels that we’d been working on in our off time as their own work and didn’t give us credit for any of it.

On the plus side, I got more than three weeks off for my wedding.

I am the sole developer for an in-house fully custom CRM. It was developed by an amateur and was clunking along managing a mid-sized company’s affairs. It was undocumented, messy,  and riddled with tricky bugs. I was brought in to maintain and extend it.

The first thing I wanted to do was document it, clean it up. Nope. “That’s not what we’re paying you for” I was told. “We need you to fix the big problems and add features, and we need you to do it fast.”

Okay then.

I made a herculean effort to give every senior employee every item on their wish list, no matter how nonsensical. The timeframe I was given was something like half of what I needed to do a good job, so I half-assed it. I’d write a new feature, test it once, and call it good.

Months down the line, I’m still getting so many requests for new features and behaviour tweaks that I have absolutely no time to make sure my code works well. Occasionally, something will fail spectacularly and I’ll have to scramble to fix it. My boss will not allow me the time to slow down and do a better job, and when asked if I could have a tiny percentage of someone (anyone!)‘s time in the office so that I could have SOME kind of QA I was told that my code shouldn’t have bugs in the first place. This was accompanied with some pointed words about my upcoming personnel review. I attempted to explain that ALL software has bugs, and that QA (and documentation!) are a necessary part of the process. No joy.

The lesson here, fellow trenchermen, is twofold, number one, INSIST on the time and resources you need to do your best work. If you do not get what you require, communicate that you will not be responsible for problems down the line. Put it in writing. The second lesson is don’t work for a boss that can’t code. It sucks big fat hairy monkey balls.

As a systems admin, I’ve had to do my share of testing, but nothing compared to when I was first starting in the field.

My cousin ran a QA firm in the west coast and often would call me up for little projects he needed an extra hand with, especially during the crunch. It was good contract work but I always knew it meant no sleep and no soul. The first job was on the website for that awful ‘Yo Mama’ show that MTV used to run. They made this e-card sender where you could upload a picture of your face, enter your friend’s name, pick some details, and a little animated version of you would tell crappy jokes about your soon to be ex-friend.

This was fine, except for the fact that we had a list of hundreds of names, spoken by male and female, and over a hundred jokes in three categories. Picked at random. This led to thousands of tests to check everything off the list. The hours began.

It started fine, It was even a little funny as we IM’d the most awful jokes back and forth, but then my cousin had to shift to another project. I was left alone with a pot of coffee, a million bad jokes, and a buggy flash interface. I finally wrapped up at about 7 AM the next day as the sun came up, I laid down on my bed and dreamed of punching the host repeatedly, but at least the site could launch and I got paid.

The TV show was canceled two weeks later. I still cry.

Been working in the industry for a while now in a creative capacity.

Had enough bosses to understand that they come in all shapes and sizes. Producers that feel they’re one man developing machines and everyone else is along for the ride. Producers that delegate everything to everyone else, then just browse the internet all day. Or producers that think they’re the biggest thing to happen to game design since the microchip.

My ‘favourite’ kind of boss I’ve only encountered once; this kind of boss will listen to your ideas, nodding thoughtfully and agreeing with what you say. The outcome is always the same though; by the end of the conversation he’s forgotten what the subject is and is nodding just so you don’t figure that out.

The best part is that, about one to two weeks later he will come back to you and tell you, in a sincere voice, that he’s had a few ideas for the current development, then proceeds to parrot back to you everything you’d discussed with him the week prior, looking proud of these clever ideas he’s plucked out of thin air.

Now when I have ideas I e-mail them to him, and CC myself and at least one other person.

I had only been a tester for a few months, so the shine was still in my eyes. The heart beating in my chest wasn’t yet a blackened thudding thing pumping coffee and cynicism. My skin had not yet gone London Level pale from the many hours confined in the testing bay colloquially referred to as “The Dungeon”.

Like Pandora’s box, I still had hope.

So it was to my joy and delight that I learned I was to be sent to test “on site” at an actual developer’s HQ several states away from the Publisher I actually worked at. I hadn’t yet learned that only a fool wanted these assignments.

For a while you often made a lot of extra cash, since food and accommodations were comped, and you put in as much overtime as the developers during crunch. You were also quickly forgotten when it came time for review. For all your inattentive manager knew, you might have been on call for the time you were gone. Even if HE was the one who sent you on the trip in the first place!

Soon I was sent on my first real business trip! So exciting! I even had a traveling buddy; another junior tester, though my senior in actual age. At first I wondered what could lead a 38 year-old to enter this profession. By the end of the trip I found out; really shitty divorce settlements.

When we arrived, it was quickly discovered that the developers didn’t know know what to do with us, who we were, or why we were there. But they did know to be on guard. We were quickly introduced to the FOUNDER and CEO of the studio, who expressed his confusion in as polite and fearful a manner as possible while my traveling buddy and I stared at each other in disbelief.

“Man, these developers must really respect the common tester!” I thought.

Alas, but no. It had just been poor communication. Hasty emails had been sent a week prior with crunch rearing its ugly head, and all they knew was that the publisher that had purchased them only a year or so prior was sending two of its number to the relative safety of their offices to ensure that they met their deadline.

When he learned that they had just been sent extra help rather than auditors, the tense smile on the FOUNDER and CEO of the studio broke into a relieved mask of pleasant superiority. He soon sent us to an underling and we soon never saw him again.

But before the underling got there and took me into my first foray into overtime hell (where I learned that there are in fact 36 hours in a working day, you just don’t see the extra 12 until your eyes bleed a specific mixture of despair and deprivation) an impromptu meeting occurred with other key members of the senior staff barging into the FOUNDER and CEO’s office.

Once it was explained that we were testers not spies, my traveling companion and I were quickly ignored as the dev-team’s staff complained about the early reviews coming out for the PC version of the game we were all working on. The total anonymity of my status allowed me to see a side of a development team I thought impossible before.

They were hurt that a publication they had invited to preview the game early had the gall to call their game “run of the mill”, and “mediocre”, which surprised me as I didn’t realize developers took these reviews so personally. It made sense though, this was a project these folks had spent years of their lives making getting torn to shreds in the few minutes it took to write a few paragraphs. Which is probably why they acted like petulant children, promising revenge by vowing to never give an exclusive to these folks ever again.

But more importantly, they proved to be either severely lacking in taste or delusional. Because the fact of the matter was, the review was right.

Perhaps because I was new to the industry, I still retained some semblance of what made a game good, and the game I had been playing over the last few months, the game I had been sent so far to work on, could easily be called “mediocre”, if you were being nice about it.
The more commonly used words were"garbage”,”****-pile” and several combinations therein, as it was one of the most rehashed concepts ever done in as generic a method possible. It reinvented no wheels, had nothing to say, and its “plot twist”, as ineffectual as it ended up, was touted on the back of the damn box.

It was the day I learned directly that developers are only human, and were all too capable of losing their objectivity. That spending two years struggling just to get a game out the door under grueling conditions made you forget that perhaps you should occasionally keep a few villagers on hand to tell you that you’re naked.

It was the day I learned HOW bad games get made even when the people making them are all otherwise fine, talented folks.

It was the day that the first cracks appeared in my sense of hope.

It took about a year before it crumbled entirely, but then, I was always an optimist.

In a decision last year of the Ontario Labour Relations board, a ruling was made on a claim against Digital Extremes, a London, Ontario company producing video games. They ruled that a QA tester is NOT an “IT Professional,” and therefore the Employment Standards Act regulations DO apply to his/her working conditions.

Therefore QA testers should be paid time-and-a half overtime for hours a week worked in excess of 44, and all the restrictions on working hours do apply (see ESA 2000). For example, you cannot be asked to work more than 8 hours a day, or 48 hours per week.

Digital Extremes accepted this outcome by voluntarily complying and paying for the overtime they owed. This claim can be cited in administrative actions against video game companies in Canada for overtime pay.

This is from the days of me being a game development student.

I was working diligently on our final term project as a team leader, responsible for four other people who were working on art asset creation.

While testing our latest build, fairly close to deadline, I noticed that none of the models from one of the artists had been committed. I asked him about this, and he sort of avoided giving me a direct answer, citing a technical issue with his portable drive.

I asked if I could take a look at his drive, and he reluctantly allowed it. Not only did I find almost no assets usable in our game, but I found something else altogether unsettling. The most recently modified files on the drive (by a long shot) was an iterative series of a 3D model of Sarah Palin.

...I only wish I had kept the models.

Several years ago, I worked on a AAA title that was fast approaching it’s release date, but still had issues both minor and major. The company decided that rather than fix the problems before release, that they would go gold with a version of the game they knew didn’t work.

When I say it didn’t work, I mean it was actually impossible to complete the game because of a major glitch that would crash the game EVERY TIME you got to a certain point. They figured they would make the release date and just issue a patch quickly to resolve the issue.

Needless to say, the reviews and forums ripped the game a new one. The company was under intense pressure to release the fix, so once again they do the logical thing - released the patch without having QA test it first. We found out from Blues News that our own patch had been released, and were told by development to download and test the patch from the public link.

It had to be re-patched.

(I was just catching up on The Trenches when I thought of this story. Then I got to the strip entitled Phantasm. You guys do realise what you’re writing isn’t actually fiction?)

The first game that I worked on culminated in a 36 hour day for myself and the other tester working on it. I was trying to track down a repeatable method for our last, show stopping crash bug. I seem to remember his duty for most of the night, and following day, was sitting next to one of the coders to nudge him should he fall asleep.

It was hell, but eventually we found it, fixed it, shipped it and were sent home. We were even given the next day off!

In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have driven that evening. I remember getting in my car and starting the engine. I remember waking up in my car and finding I was parked on the street outside my house.

I have no recollection of anything in between.

All things considered, I fared better than the other guy. He reported seeing cartoon rabbits in the road. Actual, cartoon fucking rabbits.

Wearing waistcoats.

He had to stop his car to let them get out of the way.

My first project as a QA tester was on this big game, one that everyone’s heard of.

Now, normally, you get the usual horror stories. Long hours, dull repetitive work, developers who consider any feedback to be a slap in the face. Well, there was all that. But I had a particular, unique horror.

You see, by sheer coincidence, my last name happened to match one of the Player Characters. Okay, ha ha, amusing anecdo-

Oh, wait, that’s the only name he’s called. In the whole game.

Oh, and the person giving the orders? He’s a VERY well known actor.

I was on that game for nine months in total. I was the person who, nine times out of ten, was asked (read: told) to do the campaign sprint with each new build. Where I was being ordered, by name, to get to the objective NOW DAMN IT WE DON’T HAVE TIME TO STOP!

Throw in some sleep deprivation, and you have a wonderful mix of complete madness.

...I got better.

I was selected to take part in a closed beta test of a game created for a popular social network, one that—if I had to describe it—was a “multiplayer single-player game”: each player manages his/her own environment, but players can interact in limited ways like sending gifts or purchasing each others’ items.

The game was rough, but I loved it. I played every day without fail, for varying increments of time, and almost at the expense of everything else. I couldn’t fathom how the company could profit from such an asset-intensive game, where most of the work clearly went into the number of different things that the player could interact with… until the game went to open beta, and premium items and cheats were introduced as a way for the game to pay for itself.

Almost immediately, it seemed, there was an uproar about the premium items. Not problems with how they worked, but the fact that they were premium at all. “Why should I have to pay real money for health?” ignoring that it was a cheat for those who wanted to keep playing instead of losing a battle. “I’m not giving out my hard-earned cash for pixels!” ignoring that it’s free-to-play, whereas the entry fee for an off-the-shelf game is upwards of $60 USD. Between the game’s persistent bugs and the steadily diminishing interest, it’s really not surprising that the game was finally taken offline after all of a few months of testing.

I just want to take this opportunity to say, please, with sugar on top. DON’T complain that the premium items in games cost money. They’re premium items for a reason, because nobody can afford to work their asses off and get nothing to show for it, especially in this economy. Multiplayer games in particular take a significant amount of time and money to implement correctly, and if none of the thousands of subscribers will pay even $1 toward a game they’ve otherwise enjoyed for months, how can the game possibly keep going?

If you like something that’s being offered to you completely free of charge, support it. That’s how social games, especially, get to keep going. I appreciate the service they’re providing, and I’ll gladly throw in a dollar now and again if you can’t afford it, but I can only pay so much on my own.

During crunch time for a triple A title, we were working 16-18 hour shifts. To keep the team going, a co-worker purchased cases of energy drinks and took a dollar per can toward the purchase of the next case.

At the time, the energy drink company was running a promotion to collect can tabs in exchange for merchandise. (T-Shirts, Hoodies, Hats, Etc.) We figured it would be cool to get the co-worker who originally bought the cases one of the hoodie sweatshirts.

By the end of our 3 month crunch, everyone had a three piece suit consisting of a beanie, T-Shirt, and hooded sweatshirt branded by this energy drink company.

The first actual, real job I ever got was in working as a Tester (Quality Assurance) for a big name company that is primarily well known for it’s wrestling games. The interview process included a five page written test containing multiple logic puzzles, including the famous “Get the grain, chicken, and fox across the river” question, in addition to asking how you would teach an alien how to use a cell phone.

After passing the interview, you went into Boot Camp. A two week course that teaches you how to actually be a tester (famous in the industry at the time). You are not actually hired at this point, as the entire course is just another test in the form of orientation while sealed inside a dim room tinted red like the emergency lighting from those submarine movies.  Those who pass this period of salaried education were hired.

I still remember my elation of not having my name announced as one of the failures.

The next business day, I was shown to my shared cubicle in the most humane and habitable area of the office (I was spared working in the region named “Death Row” for it’s tightly packed humans and lack of airflow) and given my assignment.  I was to work on computer games!  An RTS flagship project!  I had narrowly avoided being assigned to games that were geared towards twelve year old girls on the Game Cube!

I was selected as one of the best in the batch of a lengthy and rigorous screening process, and I felt that quiet pride in myself and the company that had invested their trust in me as an employee.  And it felt good.

So I sat down with a grin on my face, fire up the computer, and just after I finish installing the game I’m supposed to test, some guys come into the cubicle and tell me that they need to alter my computer.  They
never said why (I assume it was to swap components for testing computer makeups), they just took my computer and monitor away, saying I would get it back later in the week.  I talked to my supervisor and
asked what I should do in the meantime.

He shrugged.

I spent the next two days wandering the office, finding the people who went through Boot Camp with me, and having small talk, whenever I was not sitting inside my cubicle and staring at the gray wall.

On Wednesday I brought in a book to read while I waited at my cubicle for my computer or an assignment.  Within half an hour the head of Human Resources ( turns out her office is five feet from my cubicle ) gave me an almost kindly worded but firm chewing out that I was not allowed to read anything that was not given to me to read by the company during work hours.

Who was I to talk back?  So with a book I wanted to read sitting next to me, I sat and stared at the wall for the rest of the day.

And Thursday.

And on Friday I got my computer back.  Rapturous, I hooked everything back together, and turned it on.  In two seconds there was a crack, pop, and the system went offline.  The power supply exploded the first time I used the remodeled computer.  And so I reported it directly to the company hardware guy, and lost my computer again.  And I spent the rest of that day sitting and staring at the gray wall of my cubicle.

I soon formed a routine.  When I wasn’t in my cubicle, I was wandering the office in one big loop.  I’d ask people what they were testing. Get guys to customize their Teeny-Bopper character’s make up to make them look like abused wives.  Watched a guy who’d spent the last nine months playing through the sidescrolling airplane level of a black and white Game Boy adaptation of a child’s cartoon for the 18,000th time (he was only allowed to play that one level).  But I could never risk straying very far from my cubicle or for very long.  And so I would always return quickly, and go back to sitting there.  Staring at that gray wall.

I spent a total of three weeks without a computer.  An entirely new load of testers made it through the Boot Camp and assigned to stations during my purgatory.  I heard them going on the guided tour behind me, as I sat there, staring at the wall.

I still don’t understand why I wasn’t fired or reassigned to a different team instead of being left to my own devices until a new computer finally came down the pipe.  The Head of HR was right THERE, my supervisor knew my situation exactly, and it’s not like there were no other games being developed.  I was being paid full time to sit there and stare at a wall.

Eight hours a day.  Five days a week.  Three weeks straight.  Sitting.

And staring. 

At that fucking wall.

I’m amazed I was still sane enough at the end of that period of time to understand the slow stripping away of human rights we Testers suffered over the course of the next ten months, until I was fired for being happy in the workplace.

There was a time when I thought being selected to test video games was an honor. What wasn’t to like? You went to a studio or a headquarters, banged around on a yet-to-be-released triple A title and got paid to go and do it. Two summers ago, I had been selected through an agency that specializes in this kind of thing to test a new rhythm game that was to be shipping later in the year.

Little did I know…

I had considered myself pretty good at rhythm games, having made a fool of myself at parties for ages hammering away at plastic instruments while my friends drunkenly sang around me. This assignment was supposed to be cake: test the near-gold version of the game for final bugs. I had agreed to play on the “Expert” setting for this test. It was important, they told me.

My assignment was for eight hours a day for seven days.

The first day, I learned what we were doing. The Beginner, Normal, and Hard players were to be playing through the “career” mode of the game to determine if everything worked all right. A small handful of the Expert players were doing the same. Five of us “Experts” were selected for the “special assignment.” We were to play through a song and gain a perfect score.

Four times.

The same song, over and over, until we managed perfection four times. Then we would move on to the next one.

The test lead insisted that they encountered severe bugs pertaining to this test. I still think he was lying to us. I sincerely believe he wanted us to suffer.

The five of us were locked in a room, basically, and told to play. One slip, one single mistake, and you started over. After you achieved perfection to the fourth power, you moved on to the next one. I could hear the songs in my sleep, play the game with my eyes closed. My fingers hated me more than I hated myself.

At the end of the assignment, I had my ill-gotten gains but nothing more to show for it. I see this game on the shelves now and I can’t even bring myself to buy it despite the fact that I love it.

It’s hard to shell out money for something you’ve already perfected.

Four times.

I recently moved and obtained a job working for a HR group that ran the some of the testing for a very large company. You started out at this company as what they called an “on call” tester.  Meaning they would call or email you, sign you up for shifts, and you would do them.

Needless to say this did not always work out correctly. They usually overbooked, causing an alarming number of people to lumber out of their beds for a 7:30 AM shift only to be turned away.

This created a problem financially for myself.

Most people got shuttered into the “on call” corral for years before being offered a position on the permanent testing team. I worked three shifts as an on call tester before they offered me a permanent position.  I have no idea why, nor did anybody else for that matter.

I gratefully accepted the position, which was promised to provide me with, at a minimum, 20 hours of work a week, hoping for something a little more stable to pay the bills. After working three shifts in the permanent department, they stopped signing me up, and the testing staff dwindled to about 3 people working a week…after three weeks of that, they called and said that I was being laid off because they had hired too many people.

A week later they called and offered me a test lead position. I declined. I don’t think I will be working with this company anymore.

Years ago, I worked as a contractor for a hardware company that ran gaming benchmarks on their products and competition. Benchmarking effectively means starting some script, playing games/watching movies/etc. for two hours, writing down the results, making one change, and doing it all over again.

Everyone loved their job except for my team. My team lead had the sole goal of becoming a manager, but decided that with only two employees they would never make him one. He decided to make it look like we had so much work to do that they needed to give him more testers.

While everyone was playing games, we had to look like we were working in a lab with no windows. We began working 60-80 hour weeks doing random busy work. Even better, he was a time-Nazi who would give us 10 hour long assignments at 5pm that were due the next morning, and then he would yell at us for showing up at 9:05 AM after a whole three hours of sleep.

After eighteen months of working these hours, while also taking a college course during work hours that was approved in writing by my team lead, I was told by upper management that I was being considered for full employment. Two weeks later, after working over Christmas, I was called by the contracting agency to tell me that my contract was not being renewed for missing too much work.

It turns out that my team lead kept a spreadsheet with all the days I showed up even a minute after 9 AM, and showed me as skipping work during the hour I left to take the course he had approved. When they told him about hiring me on he showed them the spreadsheet, said I was missing too much work, and convinced them to hire two high school kids on the cheap to replace me so he could have more employees.

Another team lead later told me that when they announced that I had been let go, the other team leads insisted that they would have taken me, and asked if they planned on firing any other good testers. By the
time they realized their mistake they were restricted from hiring me back for three months due to my contract. I got a call three months later, but I had already taken a management job elsewhere.

A long time ago, I was a tester at a video game company in Montreal.

For some time, each week, we had less and less people on the floor. It was probably a good indication that the company was in trouble, but the real tip came when the coffee and hot chocolate machine went
from free to 50 cents. Our paychecks began to come late, and we even got the classic “The financing check is in the mail, we just have to wait” and “It must be lost in the mail.”

One morning, I was busy breaking the piece of software I was assigned to, when the accountant busts out of the president’s office shouting “You can’t do this Don!” How bad is it when the accountant is shouting at the president in front of the whole office?

Three weeks later, on a Monday, I got a promotion. On friday, a special meeting was held. We all got envelopes, thinking it was our due paychecks.

“Those with thick envelopes are fired, permanently. Those with slim onse are for 6 months.”

I eventually got rehired… One morning, waiting for the elevator, a guy asked me to give the president a letter, and left as soon as I took it.  It was unsealed, so, curious like a rat, I peeked. A partner was suing the company.  I left the next Friday.

Funny thing - that place is still in business.

I was brought onto an existing QA team to bolster their numbers as they headed towards the forced and planned overtime hours that this particular developer was known for. Despite the dire situation, everybody was fairly relaxed and cavalier about their work, taking extended lunch breaks and playing League of Legends on company time.

One of my jobs was a complete playthrough of the game with a specific set of choices to see if everything played out as expected. Along the way, I encountered numerous audio and video bugs not pertaining to my area, but that seemed pretty critical to the final product given how far along we were in the dev process.

As is the policy, I searched our database for the bugs, and having found nothing, asked the group if anybody had seen them. Our team leader hated duplicate bugs, so he encouraged us to ask each other about big bugs that weren’t entered in case somebody was currently writing one up. When I asked about a particular nasty bug where a critical-path NPC just vanished, nobody answered. I double checked with my senior tester and was told this:

“If you’ve seen it, chances are the better testers have seen it, and the devs probably know about it.”

Even though there were no bugs for all of the late game issues I found, I was told time and time again that somebody had probably seen it, and to just stick to writing up things directly pertaining to my area, even if I came across other larger issues as a result of my testing.

In the end, I had to ask myself: If the devs knew everything wrong with the game, and the more experienced testers had seen but not documented everything I had come across… why am I even here?

After being laid off from an Internet start-up, I wanted to find a way to break into the games industry, so I took the advice of a friend who suggested that QA was a good foot in the door. I got a job at one of the largest publishers and was a little stunned to find that my working environment had gone from the typical hipster Internet thing to something resembling a dungeon.

I found my station and tried to make some small talk with the guy on the bench next to me, asking him what his favorite part of working there was. He seemed somewhat annoyed that I had the audacity to talk to him and after a minute, without looking up from his screen he stated, matter-of-factly “What I like best about working here is that I am empowered to fart freely.” “Fart freely?” I asked. “Yes,” he went on. “It’s so loud in here that nobody will hear the deed, and there are so many fat bastards in here that if the smell gets around nobody’s going to blame me.”

I assumed that was his way of telling me to fuck off and mind my own business, but I found a different seat, just in case, and started to dig into the task at hand - a PC port of a console game based on a moronic TV quiz show. The game was pretty simplistic to start with, but since they had only implemented 5 test questions at that stage, it was mind-numblingly boring. Later in the day, the Senior Manager called everybody into the center of the room for the weekly all-hands, and I was incredibly happy for the break.

As all the testers gathered around, he surveyed the crowd, and then started, somewhat severely. “I’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about today, but unfortunately I have to bring up the same thing that we talked about last week. Listen guys, I don’t want to have to tell you again - you’ve got to flush and wash your hands.”

I worked there almost a year, before moving on into another area of the industry. Once I got used to it, it was kind of a fun job and lot of the people there turned out to be pretty cool. However, starting with my second day on the job I carried a bottle of hand sanitizer with me wherever I went.

We were about two months into “crunch” when they decided to up our hours AGAIN, taking us to over 80/week. The only available day to squeeze these extra hours in? Sunday!

I arrive at the building Sunday morning, only to find it locked—no other businesses had Sunday hours. I call my supervisor, who proceeds to fuss at me about interrupting his “family” time. My team had all arrived for work by that point, which just seemed to make him angrier. He tells me he is on his way and hangs up.

Flash forward ten minutes. We’re all still freezing (it was winter and -10 windchill) when we see his car come around the corner at the end of the block. He drives up the road, rolls his window down, and THROWS the office key at me—all without ever slowing down.

He calls me twenty minutes later to make sure we had gotten in, then informed me we would have to make up the time we had “wasted” waiting on him. He ended the call telling me to never interrupt his family
time again.

I had no working experience and was an IT university dropout. Literally begging for work at the job center got me a contract with a temporary employment agency, and I was promptly allocated to software and IT environment testing.

In the first month, we assembled a team of five people without a clue, got a vague assignment for a flash game, close to no resources, and an ever-absent boss who dropped us a mail once a week.

I got my first paycheck, except it wasn’t a real paycheck but instead “unemployment benefits” with another name to it, even signed by the job center. I began to inquire the job center about this “job” I had and got nothing but legal threats.

After another 2 months, we somehow got a crappy little game done - which was never released.

We were used by a bogus company to rake in funding by the state. It’s like a full blown industry here to pass around jobless people and keep them from getting real jobs. On top of that, the job center forced us to shut up under threat of prosecution (false testimony) and continue “working” a full 12 months in that joke of a company.

You may argue now that at least I had a job and wasn’t camping under a bridge…

Submitted by: Anonymous punter for the MN Vikings, first initial Chris, last initial Kluwe

You want to hear some shit? Let me tell you about my average day. It starts off with waking up at 6:45 in the morning, which is waaaaaay before the sun comes up, which means it’s cold. Real cold. So cold that the steering wheel heater in my BMW takes at LEAST five minutes to warm up. Sometimes I even have to hit the three zone seat heater, which is not a step I take lightly. That thing chews right through ultra-premium gas.
   
Once the climate problems are dealt with, I have to fight my way through ten, maybe fifteen minutes of light traffic. Occasionally there’s an accident, some person in an Oldsmobile or something, and I have to drop down to 55mph. Let me tell you, there is nothing more depressing than driving past a broken down minivan filled with screaming children, and you can only do 55. Just awful.
   
Finally I get to work. My clothes are freshly laundered and hung in my locker, but the industrial strength drying machine they use sometimes shrinks my pants and I have to ask for a new pair. They always give me some, but it’s just so humiliating to actually have to talk to the equipment managers. Rarely, they’ll make eye contact, and what am I supposed to do then? Acknowledge them? Pretend to remember their names?
   
After that disaster, the only way to calm myself down is to head up to the cafeteria and order some freshly made pancakes and scrambled egg whites, but the kitchen staff create a very hostile environment. They also put out biscuits, gravy, waffles, hashbrowns, thick cut bacon, thin cut bacon, sausage patties, a fruit and yogurt bar, a cereal stand, croissants, english muffins, bacon, and fully made breakfast sandwiches. How am I supposed to look at all that and eat healthy at the same time? Some people just don’t get it.

Once breakfast is out of the way (and I’ve been forced to bus my own dishes over to the dishwasher), it’s time for meetings. These last for an agonizing forty five minutes before I can finally escape, and if I fall asleep during the meetings I get yelled at. It’s so unfair - don’t they know how early I had to wake up? Then I have to somehow find a way to fill the next two hours before lunch; usually the only option is to play dominos, but sometimes I lose and that really sucks. It’s super hard to stay focused in at work once you lose a domino game. It can ruin your entire day.

After lunch (with its measly selection of four different entrees, three side courses, a salad bar, a sandwich bar, a dessert bar, and an ice cream freezer) there’s another hour of dead time that I’m supposed to fill. Usually I’ll sneak into the equipment room and read the paper, but the couch there is getting old and the dryers are moderately loud so it’s a less than ideal environment. It’s really hard to focus on the crossword puzzle with a dryer rattling around. Other times I’ll go take a nap in the lounge, but there’s only the two couches so if it fills up quickly it’s a real bummer.

Then comes the worst part of the day: practice. I have to actually put on my cleats and go punt a football for THIRTY MINUTES.
 
Thirty minutes. I’ll let that sink in a little bit.
 
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I’m done when the punting ends either - then I have to go inside and pretend to lift weights so I can sit down. The coaches don’t let us sit down on the field, and I think you’ll all agree that that’s basically indentured servitude. I’m considering filing an OSHA complaint.

After all that grueling work, practice finally ends and I have to hurry up and head home at three so I can avoid traffic. Exhausting. My only relief is to sit on the couch and play games until midnight to unwind from the stress.
 
So when you video game testers think you have it hard, in your air conditioned rooms with your fancy electronics, take a minute and think about us poor NFL punters. We deal with the real shit, out in the real world. Our trenches run deep.

I started my new job as a video game tester with a burning desire to advance. I was passionate, dedicated, and clever. I found bugs deep in the core tech, I exploited systems in new, awesome ways, and pulled over 2500 hours of overtime in 10 months. I lived and died by our project.

Periodically I asked for feedback from my lead, who always replied with “if you were doing something wrong, I’d tell you.” I heard the same from my supervisor and the head of the department. My six month review date came and went without hearing anything, and when I asked I was told they were running a little behind and to wait a week, then ask again. So I did. I was told to ask again in a month, so I did. I was starting to get nervous/frustrated when I was told my review was all done and they were just waiting on “corporate” to approve it… which was the case for promotions and raises.

My 9 month review date came and went without hearing anything else. Then, a year. I had been told now to *stop* asking about my review. All I got was the line about “if you were doing something wrong, we’d
tell you.”

My 1-year anniversary passes. Flash forward, and my 18-month milestone passes. My original review is over a year late now. I was told “corporate” had finally signed off, but now there was another year of service to evaluate, so the review had to be rewritten, BUT, I was told raises (of which now I was looking at two) were retroactive, so hang in there.

Finally, my boss brings me into his office at the ~22 month mark.

He tells me I’m being laid off in 60 days.

Flash forward to my final day. My lead finally takes me in for my 6 month review, which had become a year review, then finally, an exit interview. Only then, at the very end, did I learn about their laundry list of completely fixable complaints they had about the way I worked, for almost two years, and how their concerns had culminated in their decision to let me go.

I asked why they hadn’t been telling me these things during my repeated requests for feedback. My supervisor simply shrugged.

I lost my dream job, because….*shrug*

My company hired a director to oversee a large and budding portion of our team. This was a man with very little experience in the industry, but had come from a managerial background at an aerospace company. What those who hired him did not understand is that he was likely the single most condescending and passively sexist/racist person I’ve ever known. I’m also not sure he ever did a days work in his life.

What made him more interesting was his typical day. It was so regimented that we decided he was very likely a robot and created a workflow to show how his programming functioned.

1. Davebot arrives at work, walks in the front door.

2. Davebot looks to see who is around.
2A. If no one is around, Davebot heads to his desk to fiddle with his phone.
2B. If someone is around, Davebot’s insult programming is initiated. Pick from one of the following insults:
I. “Hello cupcake”
II. “Hey Ladies”
III. “I thought turtlenecks went out of style”

3. If Davebot has not already gone to his desk, head to desk and commence fiddling with his phone.

4. Davebot is bored, Davebot stands up and walks to the desk of one of his employees.
4A. If she is there, sit down, steal snacks and begin gossip protocol.
4B. if she is not there, head to the kitchen and get a Talking Rain Sparkling water.

5. If 4A was accomplished follow up with 4B.

6. Circle the office and reinitiate insult programming (there’s now a bigger audience to choose from).

7. Once insult programming has been executed, head back to desk and commence smart phone fiddling.

8. 15 minutes later, recycle to Step 4 of Davebot programming.

9. Cycle through stages 4 through 7 until 1 PM and initiate exit strategy.

10. Head to managers desk and invite to drinks.
10A. If accepted, leave for the day and head to the bar.
10B. If not accepted, head back to desk and retry in 30 minutes.

11. Once the bar protocol has been executed, stay at bar for the next 5-7 hours, or until intoxicated enough to avoid Davebot’s crappy existence.

12. Get in car, Drive home (drunk) and commence hibernation.

This was literally an everyday occurrence. We actually timed it.

All was good until I met the “beast.”

The beast tricks you with the promise of great things and lures you with false promises into a binding agreement.

This beast does not die, it does not sleep, it feeds! Feeds from the blood of innocent developers only to return scraps. (That is if you are lucky enough to get the scraps)

This hell spawn profit sucking beast of a publisher refuses to die even when they don’t have any real assets other than the name of the beast.

You might think I am talking about big publishers like EA or Activision but no, this one lurks, when everyone thought it was gone for good it returned only to once again feed on developers, this time
not even indie developers escape.

Run you fools! Do not sign with beast! You would be better off giving your game away for free.

I was hired on as a software engineering intern at a company in LA. Early on, one of my coworkers urged me to never fix the printer less I become “The guy who knows how to fix the printer.”

Lord I wish I knew what he meant.

I was assigned to a team project, and, thanks to a background in IT, I turned out to be really good at fixing builds and determining whether a bug was legitimate or if it was some failure of the vm or machine.

Honestly, 90% of the time, you just had to rerun the build script to fix the problem.

Now, the QA team we had in LA was great, we got along well as the QA would actually sit at desks next to the developers, and bugs would get shown to us immediately (a QA was considered a team member and
would participate in meetings and daily standups).

But we had a few QA teams in India, and apparently we were having some trouble with them, as almost no bug they reported was reproducable on our end.  My boss, knowing my knack for this assigned me to work with the these teams via teleconference.

Essentially, this ended up with me doing nightly conference calls and remote desktop sessions where I’d explain what a build script did… Repeatedly.  The QA team members were in batches of 3 or 4, and seemed
to have the technical prowess of the average grandmother.

...a few weeks in, it was reported to me they’d been filing bugs like this for 3 years, and not one had been verified, or even checked… Guess who got that job?

I haven’t written a line of code in weeks.

My tale isn’t so much “from the trenches” as much as it is about how close I became to being deep inside the foxhole.

It was November, 2004 and my graduation from undergrad was rapidly approaching. I had already received a job offer I was seriously considering, but before I could accept that offer, EA contacted me and said they’d like to interview me. “Great,” I thought, “it’s every developers dream! Working for a game studio!” We set a date and time for a phone interview and I began eagerly counting down the days, until…

...remember, this was November of 2004. For those of you who forget, or who wish not to remember, or who were simply not around at the time, let me remind you: this was the month the story of EA_Spouse broke. I can’t do the story justice, so instead I will simply post a link to the original: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

I e-mailed ea_spouse never expecting to receive a response, but lo and behold, she responded, asking which office I was interviewing with. When I mentioned the office, she basically told me to avoid in no
uncertain terms. This sealed the deal for me. I had no intention of doing my time at a company that abuses its workers in so cavalier a fashion.

The day of my interview came. After exchanging pleasantries and talking about my experience, I had my chance to ask questions. Since I knew I had no intention of joining EA at this point, I decided to confront. “So, I recently read an article published by the spouse of someone who works at EA. I was wondering if you’d heard of it and what you thought about it?” A pause. A clearing of a throat. A roaring, awkward silence that I could feel through the phone.

“Ah. Er. Well… you know, certainly when deadlines come, hours increase, but, er… that usually tapers off pretty quickly, once the product ships. Really. It’s, ah, usually only for… a couple of weeks.” I debated pushing. I wanted them to admit that the long hours were the status quo and not the result of pushing to meet a deadline. I wanted to reduce them to tears. I wanted blood. For the proletariat! For the people! Vive la revolucion!

Except I didn’t. I didn’t push. Because I’m a computer geek and computer geeks tend not to be the confrontational type. In the end, they didn’t offer me a 2nd round interview (big shocker), and I went to go work as a programmer for a faceless investment bank where I work worse hours than I would have at EA.

Vive la revolucion, I guess?

The tales from the trenches are tales of woe.  Constant refrains of “The hours are long.  The pay sucks.  Everyone misunderstands that we do much more than get ‘paid to play games all day.’”

This is all true.

But I’ve never been happier.

Being a game tester is almost exactly like being a waiter/waitress in LA.  Most of us dream of something bigger, better.  This is what you do, until you can prove you can do better.  And I knew it was going to be terrible. I did my homework—I read the horror stories—I thought I knew what to expect. But what I didn’t expect was for it to be actually really awesome in a lot of ways.

So many jobs in this wide world are in the service of others.  You sell people things, or you cook their food, or you transport their goods.  But as a game tester, you’re simply helping to create.  It’s not the noblest creation, sure. At best you’re helping to create a multi-million dollar franchise that people will fondly look back 20 years from now as the birthplace of teabagging. At worst, you’re giving people something to entertain themselves while they hide in a bathroom stall to avoid their actually shit job.  But it’s still extremely fulfilling, seeing all your hard work sitting on a store shelf or on an online marketplace.

Yeah, we’re the bottom of the totem pole. We’re scapegoats, we’re peons, we’re the first on the chopping block when funds have run dry. You have to wait 20 minutes to find our name in the credits (don’t blink), if we’re even there at all.  But we are also critics, loud-mouthed nightmares of the lazy designer or programmer, and the last line of defense between money-hungry suits and the unwitting consumer.

I guess everything I’m writing isn’t really a tale, so here goes:  I moved some two thousand miles, and got a game testing job.  I make enough money to pay rent in the middle of a metropolis, with enough left over to eat, buy video games, and subscribe to a gym.  I work at a place where everyone knows, loves, and is passionate about my primary interest: video games—definitely not something I found all those years working fast food, retail, or at a factory.  My boss is
awesome, and her boss is awesome, and…well frankly I’m not really sure who his boss his but everyone in a position of real power has been honest, good people.

Sure, I still have my horror stories. I’ve worked 70 hour weeks in a game that I wasn’t credited in.  I’ve had countless days of genuine, mind-numbing work be thrown back in my face as a Won’t Fix without so much a word as to why.  But when I put it in perspective and look at how many friends I’ve made, how the games industry is growing and QA’s role is expanding, and how many far worse jobs are out there, I know how fortunate I am.  The trenches are tough and unforgiving but if you’re smart, competent, and good-natured, then you can easily thrive here.

I was once hired to do QA for a big company in the industry. It was a temporary position, contracted for 6 months, but had potential for upwards movement.

That was 3 years ago.

I’m still temporary. I was laid off once, only to be re-hired a week later with a new contract. I’m pretty sure that what this company is doing by keeping me temporary is illegal, but I don’t want to say anything because I don’t have another job lined up.

I scour the internet everyday for a new job.

You guys post stories from people other than testers, right? If so, cool. I’m writing to you from the outsourced world.

You know how so many games outsource a lot of their code and art to countries where the living rates are much more humble than our entitled western asses? Well, some of them also operate through this new thing catching on called “virtual offices.” It’s cheaper, since everyone works from home on their own PCs, plus you aren’t limited to hiring in you local area, or even in your country. An outsource group in Asia can employ some aspiring pixel artist in the US, even.

Which is pretty much how I fit in. Companies hire out the group I work for to make additional 2D art for their games, who in turn pay me to draw and animate stuff. Mind you, my work is almost exclusively shovelware. Nothing cool here. Though when we don’t have a client, we work on our own indie games. Well, my boss’s indie games. No one else really gets any say in what we make.

For example, my boss asked me for any phone game ideas. I’m overjoyed he might actually listen to me. All of my ideas are rejected. He says we need something casual and simpler, so we end up doing a clone of an unsuccessful open source phone game. He said that to be successful on the iPhone, you need to steal someone else’s idea, and just make it prettier. I didn’t necessarily think that was the formula for profit, nor for establishing some solid integrity, but I’m typically not heard. My boss decides the art style should look like high-resolution, high-color, animated concept art. Not exactly practical, and I express that, but again, I don’t matter. I still got it done at least. A few month later, I’m told to revamp most of the art and add more levels, because we can’t get a publisher. Turns out, no one wants simple games anymore, so we were going to start slapping on extra levels and features until we can get a publisher. Mostly means more detailed animations for a game that’s still crappy.

So, I get the long hours typical of game development, no respect from my boss (typical of most jobs I’ve had though), no satisfaction in my work since I don’t like any of the games I worked on (I’m not picky, I like all genres… I just don’t like bad games), and I do it all for about $400 per month. It’s not all bad though… I’ve lost 20 pounds in the past year doing this work, which would be quite awesome if I wasn’t already skinny.

I try looking for extra work elsewhere. There just isn’t much demand for pixel artists or 2D game animators. Indies seem to want some, but tell me I’m overqualified, and they can’t possibly afford me. Most everyone else is content just outsourcing.

So why don’t I just go flip burgers, where I could make more money is less time? Honestly, I feel like this job is what I’m suppose to do.

Maybe not specifically with throwaway games, but the pixel art and animation for games. I’m not one for destiny, fate, or any of that crap, but I feel like I was made specifically for this. I’ve been doing this stuff for nearly as long as I can remember, and I’m going to keep stubbornly working at this. Hopefully, I’ll eventually get either respect, satisfaction, or a livable salary for this niche specialty. I’ll settle for any one of those.

I was part of a team that started out with five people and quickly grew to twelve. We built and maintained a casino-like site (meaning we handled peoples actual money) which had some domestic success and
subscribers started rising.

Eventually we needed a new level of QA, bugs were slipping through that we simply couldn’t allow so the team was re-organized to meet the new plan.

The more hardcore programmers were set to do only programming, we hired dedicated server-personnel instead of relying on a hosting-service, and I was put in charge of the newly formed QA-team.

I was given new responsibilities and new orders, I was told that I had the final sign-off before anything was to be published. Nothing was leaving the production environment until my signature was on a document stating that the new release had been tested and the remaining bugs had been accepted to be fixed in the next release. We also set up a schedule which stated that a new release had to be signed of at a certain date and uploaded no earlier than 24 hours after said deadline.

The day before I was supposed to either sign off or reject the first scheduled release I already saw that there was no way this version was finished, we couldn’t allow it to go live. So I called my superiors to inform them what was going on and tell them that we needed to reschedule.

“Oh, that release? I had the programmers push that version live last night.”

Later on the bugs came back to bite us in the ass and I got the blame, naturally.

I worked for about eight months testing budget games before I came to my senses and decided I was worth more than that. Though the work wasn’t great, it wasn’t quite the sweatshop drudgery that some others have experienced. I don’t have any good stories about incompetent bosses or corrupt management, just memories of boredom and exhaustion… and one particular coworker, who I’ll nickname Paul.

Paul must have liked to “wake and bake”, because for the two months I knew him, he came in five days a week, every week, with bloodshot eyes and smelling like he’d just doused himself in air freshener to cover up a different smell. He always had this laid back attitude and spoke slowly and casually.

We all talked about him being blazed behind his back, good natured joking, of course, because he was never an irritation to anyone. Nobody ever had the guts to ask him about it to his face, and he never brought it up himself, but we all knew.

At first we all figured he’d work for a couple weeks and they would let him go for lack of productivity, but he’s the thing - he *kicked ass* at his job. I don’t know if being in an altered state of mind helped him divine bugs, but he was cranking out reports left and right, finding problems the rest of us would have never dreamed of. Our behind-his-back conversations took on an air of admiration. I respected the guy for what he accomplished and tried never to begrudge him for making us all look lazy in comparison.

Then one day, walking back from the bathroom, I overheard the boss having a conversation with him. “Paul, you come in every day with your eyes bloodshot, and you seem slightly disconnected. You do good work, but I want you to start getting more sleep.”

I still don’t know if the boss was trying to give him a subtle hint, or he was actually clueless where those bloodshot eyes came from, but after that, Paul started coming in to work sober, and his productivity dropped like an ACME anvil. Two weeks later, he stopped coming into work altogether.

May be there’s a lesson in there, but I probably shouldn’t look for one.
Good luck Paul. I hope you wore sunglasses to your next job.

This was way back before I even broke into the industry full-time, but I still had enough of a resume to get callbacks.

Over the course of a few weeks, I’d been interviewing with a small local developer. They didn’t do anything famous, just the usual licensed or second-tier games that can keep a little company going. But it was an entry-level position and it’d look good on my resume, but most of all, I’d finally fulfill my dream of working in the exciting world of the game industry. (God, how stupid I was).

I did the first interview with HR and it went well.

I did the second interview with my potential lead and it went well.

I did the final interview with just about everyone in the company and
it went well.

I get home from my retail job to a voicemail from HR that they really liked me and wanted to talk specifics about compensation. Here we go! This was my shot! The call was time-stamped for 10:30am and I called back at 3:00 pm.

The HR girl answered with the background sounds of activity, as if people were boxing up to move. She told me in a strained but pleasant voice that the company really liked me and they were just getting ready to make me an offer, but unfortunately as it turned out the company was a front for organized crime and the FBI was there RIGHT then and she had to go.

And that’s not even my worst story from the industry.

After college I was looking for a job… any job, really. I was lucky enough that “any job” for me turned out to be QA testing for a large game company. After putting in about half a year, I got promoted to a team in charge of a specific type of testing. Over the next 18 months, people either left the team or were laid off, and I found myself running the show.

People noticed that I was doing a good job running the tests by myself, and someone suggested that I apply for a producer position within the company. I applied, got the job, and have been having a blast in my
new role ever since.

I’ve been in the trenches, have friends in the trenches, and I know what they can be like. But I’ve also seen people find amazing opportunities—sometimes in production, development, or even senior positions in QA—on the other side of no man’s land.

When I worked in the trenches, I was a QAC, or a person who organized groups of testers and went over their work. As such, it was my ::cough:: privilege to read and edit every bug they wrote. Being a good tester is all about being able to describe PRECISELY any problem you find in a game. As a consequence, the best testers are often good with words, and can come up with accurate yet funny titles for their bug reports. Below is a collection of my favorites.

“Gender confusion ends the game”
This was a bug written for a cell-phone game. The main character is named “Sam” and is a tiny sprite on the screen. At the end of the game, Sam is shown frenching a hairy, moustachioed male. Turns out ‘Sam’ was short for ‘Samantha’.

“Licking bush causes unit to vibrate uncontrollably”
This one is from another cell phone game. The main character was a yoshi-like thing with a long tongue used to eat enemies. If you used the tongue attack on the ‘bushes’ in the game, the cell phone would vibrate without end until you pulled the batteries.

Finally, my personal favourite:
“Not enough whores in the whorehouse”
This was for a console game some of you may know. There is a mission in the game where the main character goes to a whorehouse. The main character has other characters talking into his ear over the radio. One says something like “woo, look at all that hoochie”; another says something like “stop staring at the T & A and get to work”. The problem? Not a single whore. The level was empty except for enemies and other objective.

I worked at a major game retailer. Let’s call it a place you’d Stop. For Games. I started as seasonal help, but I was good, so I got keys a couple of weeks before Christmas. Within a year, I had a store of my own.

The thing is, selling games, particularly on the preorder/buy used model, turned into a hard sales gig a lot faster than I was really comfortable with. I saw district managers order store managers to break the rules to boost numbers, then fire them for said violations in order to look good to Loss Prevention. After all, high turnover rates mean you don’t have to pay anyone more than 28 grand a year for a 50 hour a week salary position. It was a mess. I was one of the few managers making quota without doing anything shady, so I knew my time was limited.

They transferred me to the middle of nowhere, 50 mile commute each way. I was given 3 months to fix a store that had been run into the ground by three years of bad management. I figure most people could have turned it around in half a year, but I still almost made it.

Funny thing though, I kept getting really tired, started showing up late. I thought it was from working 70 hour weeks with that hour drive on each end of every day. After a few months of that, they fired me.

Two weeks later I found out I had cancer. With no family history or chemical exposure, stress was considered the main contributing factor. But hey, they gave me rehire status…

The first game development I did for public consumption was an add-on for Quake II. We were a team of about ten people, and I was the only software developer; everyone else was graphic artists, map designers, modelers, sound engineers, etc… all spread across the United States.

As we neared our planned launch date, I began to get moderately concerned about the fact that during the last year of development, even though every one was able to play the game on their own systems, not once did we have an actual deathmatch in which we actually played each other.

As a programmer, this was unthinkable: releasing a product specifically made for deathmatch without actually testing it for deathmatch was unimaginable, but I was outvoted by the rest of the group. They simply wanted to get the game out there so they can scream “Look! I made that!”

We released it on a Saturday morning, and less than half an hour passed before we were notified of the first “showstopper.” The bug: if two rockets collided in mid air, the game crashed instantly… and violently. It was an issue that was impossible to detect in an environment outside of deathmatch, or even in a controlled testing environment, but in the real world it happened all the time, especially in Quake II where the hit boxes of rockets were cubes two feet across.

So we pulled the release and we (or I, as the case may be) immediately went in to repair mode to release a patched version. The rest of the team finally listened to me and decided to create a test environment, but rather than do a closed alpha test they decided to invite players from the outside world to test it along with the developers.

So after I fixed all the bugs I knew of (and there were still several I didn’t know about), we hosted a deathmatch server with the “alpha” build. All eight members of the team joined in and waited until other players showed up.

Two players, anonymous denizens of the Internet that responded to our call, showed up, and through in game chat we asked them to test this by trying to take on the developers. Just for kicks, we decided to make the teams exactly as they stood: one team had all eight of us, the people that actually created the game, and the other team were these two unknowns that didn’t even know the game existed until an hour earlier.

No other “showstoppers” were found, but the two anonymous players literally decimated us. It was a rout unlike anything ever seen in the world of deathmatch. I think our death-to-kill ratio was 40:1 by the end of the match.

After a few weeks, we finally released the product… and I went my own way to work with groups that understood the concept of game testing.

On a semi-related note: one of the bugs reported was that if you uninstalled the add-on, it would also uninstall the entire Quake II directory. We had several emails from players complaining “Damn it!!! Now I have to buy Quake II and return it again!!!”

My second job ever just happened to be as a tester at Activision in 1999. You don’t need to edit that, because I have absolutely no plans to ever work at Activision again. The industry back then was *different*. Different in a good way, where people could have fun, express themselves openly, and have direct lines of communication to developers.

QA testers at Activision’s Santa Monica office were all corralled into the basement level of the building, and we called it the Vault. While there, I had foolish aspirations of being an artist. Foolish because what I didn’t realize at the time was that I sucked. I was awful. I would spend my lunch-hours drawing, and caught some flak for it by my co-workers, as it was all I’d ever do.

I’m mentioning this because one day my Lead pulled me aside as I walked past, and we had the following conversation:

Him: “Why the hell did you do this?”
Me:  “What? What are you talking about?”

He stood aside, and behind him on a large whiteboard was a crude drawing of a Tyrannosaurus Rex wearing sunglasses. There was a word bubble next to the dinosaur, and within were the words “I’m a T-Rex! I eat shit! Shit shit shitty shit shitty shit shit!”

It’s been twelve years, but I remember this precisely, word for word. I was 18, and while stupid, this was hilarious.

I laughed. He didn’t.

This was not my work. I couldn’t draw to save my life, but THIS? Whoever drew this not only lacked ability but all common sense. There were people in suits walking around the Vault every now and then, showing off the area to other people in suits, and the chances this shit-talking dinosaur would be noticed in such a high-traffic area were quite high. My Lead was skeptical as to my innocence.

Him: “Dude, I realize you love to draw and all that, but this isn’t cool. You can’t just go around writing “shit” on the walls.”
Me: “I didn’t do this! Come on, Really?”
Him: “You’re always drawing, dude.”
Me: “There are almost 100 people working down here, man. Surely someone else is capable of drawing a crappy dinosaur with shades.”

I was laid off a few days later. They never said why, but I knew.

After we shipped the first installment in a major AAA franchise, it was pretty obvious to everyone that there would be a second title forthcoming, but no one was saying anything about it, even internally. Security had been pretty tight on the first game, but for the new project the production team decided to go for a total information blackout. I mean total “I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you” stuff.

One day one of the producers called me in to her office and we had this conversation:
Producer: “So we’re doing a second title in the series.  I need you to give me a detailed test plan for the new project.”

Me: “I haven’t written it yet because I haven’t seen the feature list. Could you send me the design docs?”

Producer: “Oh, no, I’m afraid I can’t do that.  We’re not distributing any information about features to anyone yet.”

Me: *blink* “I can’t write a test plan for this game if you won’t tell me what’s going to be in it.”

Producer: “Sorry, you’re not allowed to have that information at this time.”

Me: “Well, fine, you already have my test plan for the first title. That’s the best I can do right now.”

Producer: “That’s not acceptable.  I don’t want the old test plan, I need to see your new test plan.”

Me: *boggle*

This wasn’t a simple misunderstanding, either; the argument dragged on for WEEKS.

One of the publishers that I’ve worked for had all of the testers in the basement.  Literally the basement of a very large office building. Three hundred of us would be in there, *comfortably* seated at plastic folding tables rife with various game systems, monitors, and the occasional computer for entering bugs into the database.  In the middle of this single, giant room, were the glass cubes in the sky serving as management offices.

The only time that testers entered these offices were when they were hired or, in this case, when they were fired. You see, there was a tester on my team who believed that his job was to either test the Pause Screen or perform a Front-End Menu Soak Test. Mostly though, he talked on his cell phone. How it got reception down there is beyond me. But I digress. Despite frequently encouraging him to at least put the controller in his lap and periodically wiggle the thumbsticks to “simulate” testing (and thereby keep his employment), he chose not to even pretend to care.

As such, on one particular evening, he was summoned into the manager’s office / plexiblock.  We all knew what this meant.  It meant that for the next five minutes, Tester X had a captive audience of three hundred.

He approached the office door, but stopped - perhaps ten feet shy of it.  Then, slowly and methodically, he undid his belt, lowered his jeans, and defecated on the short-pile rug. With the same deliberate speed, he stood up and rebuckled his pants, all the while holding a defiant stare with the QA manager.

To say we were shocked would be an understatement, but the night only got better.  First one of the other testers was asked to clean up the mess.

“You must be joking.”

Then a subordinate manager was asked.

“Don’t we have janitors for this sort of thing?”

So a janitor was asked.  An elderly, almost stately man who always nodded to us as we entered or exited the building.
“Oh, y’all can go fuck yoself!”

If I recall correctly, he actually threw his broom at the QA manager, but that might be a creative embellishment on the part of my subconscious. Needless to say, no one wanted to clean up the detritus, even as the stench of it slowly filled the cavernous test room. Not the security guard who had been called to escort Tester X out of the building (he didn’t even want to touch the tester after learning that he hadn’t wiped.  Which is odd, I’d have thought that a cleaner option than if he had wiped, sans toilet paper). Not any of the other testers. And certainly not the actual QA Manager.

In the end, the local Haz-Mat division of the police was called to clear the “human waste” and the entire test department had to shut down for the evening, giving us all a paid night off.  This actually led to a corporate memo that testers who were deemed incompetent should not be fired, but rather should be laid off at the end of their current game’s test cycle in order to avoid future “poop incidents” and keep the rest of the test plans on track.

Tester X, I later learned, enlisted in the Police Academy.

I was working as an intern, which means I helped out with all manner of work including some very strange marketing projects involving the Nintendo Wii.

The boss man sheepishly explained the situation: Nintendo only gives you the money for the sales of your game upon hitting certain sales thresholds, and our game was reaaaally close to getting there, but sales had slowed and we needed the money before the fiscal quarter ended. He had pleaded with Nintendo to no avail, so, with a Wii in his hands, he gave me the project from hell. Get the Wii friend codes of some people who would like our game, and gift the game to them for free. Sounds great! We aimed for 200 gifted games.

Here, I learned the reasons why a Wii is not set up to handle this sort of volume. Let me walk you through the process.

In order to gift anything, a mutual friendship must occur. You add their Wii number, they add yours, and it takes a day-ish for the system to accept the bond. I believe you can have a max of 50 friends in your address book. That made gifting 200 people very difficult. I had to hope that they read the email, entered my Wii code correctly, and submitted theirs correctly as well. Sometimes they just wouldn’t add. One less gift to worry about, then!

It takes a while for the connection to occur. A lot of the time I was staring at greyed-out names (I entered the names as numbers, ranging from 01, eventually all the way to 247) waiting for it to accept.

Alas, a connection! Time to gift. Go through the complicated storefront, find the game, gift to friends list. ...Then, keep track of ones I gifted so I don’t try to send it again and waste time. Have to exit all the way to my address book to manually change the names of the ones I gifted this round.

I’d get a confirmation mail that the gift was picked up. I’d delete the recipient from the address book. I’d add more. I’d wait. Every day 2-5 more would show up ready for gifting. I would gift. Wait. Delete. Add. Wait. Repeat. Every day. We needed to gift 200 of these.

To prevent fraud, you cannot have more than $50 or $60 of Wii points in your account at one time. It caps out. That means if I gift 5 games at $10 apiece, I have to go all the way back through the store, input my credit card number manually, including the full billing address. Every 5 games. Sometimes I didn’t have a USB keyboard on hand and had to do it with the wiimote.

Wii sometimes switches up the position of buttons in the prompts. Wanna gift a game? Go find it. Gift it, you say? To which friend? Are you sure? Here’s the kick. At the very end, the “are you sure” prompt, they switch the buttons around on you. What was once “OK” becomes swapped with “CANCEL.” Thus, a zealous gifter such as I had pressed many a Cancel button. But it doesn’t just take you back to the gifting screen. It exits you out of the whole 9-button-path process and you end up at the storefront. Fresh and ready to rage.

The process was nebulous. Did we get credit for the game at the time that WE bought and sent it? Or was it when they picked it up? If we immediately deleted them from our friends list after sending the game, do they still get the game gifted to them or does it disappear? The address book was rather small, I needed more room to add new codes in a timely manner. I called in to Nintendo support about whether I could gift a game then immediately delete the recipient from my address book, and spent 20 minutes talking to a woman who, in the end, told me I should contact the developer of the game in question. Yes. I’ll get right on that. Oh wait. That’s me, and you’re useless.

The process took me about a month.

I checked it every day of my winter break. I took it to my family’s house on Christmas.

My boss did not understand why it was going so slowly, and found ways to ignore it when I explained to him how laborious the process was with a step-by-step document I made for any unfortunate interns to inherit the program after me.

It ended successfully. Then, 2 months later, they asked me to do it again for Europe… I was let go 2 months afterward, just shy of a year of work. Then I found the best job of my life. I guess things happen for a reason.

I put in my time as a game store employee. I won’t say exactly which store it was, but suffice to say that they sold “games”, thus one might “stop” there. I was young, impressionable, and drawn in with the promise of all the games I could ever play.

Like any retail job, the holidays were hell. I had a woman throw not one, not five, but seven PSP games at me simultaneously. At one point I was so sick that I stood by the door handing out flyers with one hand and taking swigs of Dayquil with the other.

But the worst part? Corporate created a new policy. It was as follows:

When the line at your register gets exceptionally long, make eye contact with the person in the very last place and ask them “Are you having fun yet?”.

Not only was it moronic, embarrassing, and insulting to the customer, but corporate sent out secret shoppers to make sure the policy was enforced. On top of all that, we worked in a less than savory part of town, and I was pretty sure several times that I was just going to be outright shanked on the sales floor.

Gotta love retail.

I was working at a third-party testing house and we were working on a game that accurately replicated the city of Manhattan. By the end of development the bugs numbered in the thousands. I ran into some pretty impressive/funny bugs during my tenure on the game, most of which got fixed.

Some of my favorites:

1. Early in development there was a slightly disturbing feature. Pedestrians, hit with explosive weapons, left limbs behind that were usable as weapons. The bug I found was that they never went away. The bodies vanished, but the limbs remained. After a particularly impressive rampage, I took a screenshot of Wall Street littered with limbs and sent to devs.

2. The crowd AI responded with mayhem if you shot someone in broad daylight. Testing this feature with a Sniper Rifle had some great results. At a certain range, no one would notice when an NPC’s head was shot. They would continue their casual walk while their friends’ head exploded.

At an even further distance, the NPC didn’t get register being shot. Instead they spawned sunglasses (a la Matrix agents) and went about their business while everyone near them ran around in a panic.

3. My favorite bug of all time. The game had certain buildings you could walk into. Grocery stores, med clinics, banks and, of course, strip clubs. When walking into a building, the game dynamically loaded the models of the characters. Very rarely, the game would accidentally load every character in the building as the same model, but give them all the correct animations. After repeatedly being told I was just plain wrong; that it was IMPOSSIBLE that this bug could exist, I had my day in the sun.

Hours spent finally reproducing this bug, I caught video of my character walking into a strip club and every single NPC model was a cop. Cop on the stripper pole. Cop as a cocktail waitress. Cop getting a lapdance from another cop. Cop. Cop. Cop.

Beaming with pride at reproducing the bug and catching it on video, I walk into work the next morning with a note from the developer:

Will Not Fix: Too Funny.

The finale of our project coincided with the acquisition of our development house by the publisher. The title had passed CERT earlier in the week, and we were being rewarded on Friday with a day out at Six Flags for our wrap party.

Everyone came dressed for a sunny day in the park, complete with shorts, sandals, and sunscreen. The buses rolled up to the company parking lot promptly at 9am, we loaded in for the trip, and our project manager handed out the tickets. We rolled right up to the main gate, and everyone quickly rushed out. The PM stood and waved and wished everyone a good time, and told us to be back here at sundown (about 9pm), and he departed with the buses.

We all went inside and had a fabulous time. The day rolled on and finally the sun was hanging low in the sky. Many of us began our exodus towards the exit, but no buses were to be found.

Ok, technically the sun wasn’t DOWN yet. I mean it was sunset but not actually NIGHT yet, so we all grabbed some burgers from that little front restaurant.

Still no buses.

The PA announced the rides are closing but the shops are open, so we head back to the main square and shop a little, checking periodically.

Still no buses.

Fair enough, maybe he meant they would be there at the official ”Closing Time” and not just when the rides stop.

Still no buses.

Ok, the park is closed, maybe they would be there once the parking lot had cleared a little bit and in/out had cleared. It was beginning to get the evening chill.

Still no buses.

Everyone with was trying to reach ANYONE about transportation. Some called family members and friends, others began to call taxis. Team members asked and bribed each other for rides home. I simply cannot properly describe the dark humor and delicious chaos of the situation.

By the end of the night, I ended up just getting dropped off at home, and intended on picking my car up the next morning.

On Saturday morning, I (and everyone else who came in the morning to pickup their car) was greeted with a surprise. The security code had been changed and the building was locked up. Literally locked up with heavy chain around the door.

As it turns out, the ”friendly acquisition” was a “passive dissolution.” While we were gone on Friday, the building and our accounts\emails\servers had all been put into lockdown to prevent anyone from deleting\damaging\destroying the publishers “new property.”

We were all out of a job, without so much as a pink slip and a “Goodbye” to show for it.

I worked for a major publisher as a contracted QA Tester. The pay was minimum wage, benefits were next to none, and we were treated as sweatshop labor, constantly cycling in new fresh-eyed college kids to
replace the dozen fired the week before. Everyday the Full Time employees and managers would come in, take a look at everyone’s numbers for the week, and decide who to fire.

Over a year period I watched as managers fired dozens of friends I made there simply for not reaching an arbitrary bug number the manager made each week regardless of the state of the project. I watched as we were only allowed two smoke breaks a day and the worst schedules to be at work while Full Time Employees came in and left at their leisure, and took smoke breaks upwards of 10 times a day.

Then one day, I applied for an open management spot, and I got it. I became a Full Time Employee.

And I never looked back. My hourly pay was doubled, I had insurance, I went out drinking with my manager and his manager. I fired people who didn’t meet arbitrary bug numbers, I took 10-12 smoke breaks a day because I could. I made up my weekly schedule based on what I wanted to work, coming in late or leaving early. Suddenly all the excuses I heard from people who got fired no longer mattered to me, I had numbers to meet and my raises depended on them.

I became the very thing I hated. 

I have no regrets.

My story isn’t a happy one.

Sometimes you find yourself on development projects. For me it was one of those AAA reboot titles for a series that hasn’t been around for years, and was still in development for an indefinite amount of time. You find yourself playing the game over and over, slowing learning the plot as new levels are finished. You get familiar with the characters, you spend all day interacting with these characters, learning their story, living their lives. Never did I expect to find myself *caring* about the game I’m working on. (You can only be so attached in QA after a couple months of the same project)

It’s rare to find yourself on a game that is truly a labor of love by the developers. You can tell they’ve all been working on required sequels and rehashed yearly releases for decades. This was a time for them to shine.

Then it starts to happen.

Crunch time comes and some producer steps in and decides the game needs to be streamlined. The next day you come in and realize the reverse is happening. Your character’s personalities are changed and new voice work is integrated. Whole levels and worlds are condensed and combined, whole story arcs removed.

The game isn’t streamlined. It’s gutted. As it gets closer to release more and more people are excited, you bracing yourself for impending disappointment. When you finally walk away you find yourself really upset. Some producer destroyed the characters for the sake of making it more “friendly” and mainstream. The developers you thought were lazy all this time were actually dealing with the heartbreak of releasing a shell of their former product.

It’s upsetting, but it’s how it goes sometimes. It’s why good developers leave good jobs to make games that aren’t trying to make a buck.

Last year, after graduation, a certain job offer caught my eye: Translator (from an Asian to a non-English European language) for a big company. Since I had majored in the Asian language and liked the company, I applied for the offer. I heard I would need to pass an exam, which I could only take once every two years, so I was advised to study well before taking it.

After a month of fastidious studying, I was eager to take the exam. However, in the final planning stage of the exam, it turned out that the contact person I was working with would soon go on vacation, delaying the schedule for three weeks. So I got back to the books and animated visuals. After those three weeks, I was told that the game company itself was now reorganizing and relocating. It would probably take a month. Again I delved into the books. After a month I received a final e-mail from my contact. The game company had decided to switch head hunting companies, and I was directed to the new one.

The contact from the second head hunting company was finally able to proffer an actual date to take the test. This was after telling me that the game company was now hiring all translators under different terms, i.e. reduced income and no more living arrangements included (the job was abroad). But that didn’t matter. It was still a dream job with my favorite company, and after a year or so, I might convince “my woman” to move abroad with me.

The day of the test came. I had prepared, specifically for this test, for four months now. I read all the guidelines, could make out the context of the extracts and which games they were taken from, and finished the test under the time limit. I was quite happy with the translation..

The following Monday I got back the results. I had failed. No further explanation. Four months of dedication to this thing, and that is all I got as an answer. The head hunter told me I should probably become a game tester and take the test again after two years. Often, I was told, it depends not on the quality of your translation, but on whether or not you minutely follow the guidelines they have stipulated. Only, as an outsider you cannot get access to these guidelines. So the game company wanted me to move abroad to become a game tester, on a wage that was just over half of the already reduced wage of a translator, and still rent my own place in a quite expensive town, and all that in the hopes of possibly passing a very ambiguous test two years later.

I declined, and thank goodness for that, for I have now read enough Tales of the Trenches to know where this was going. Now all I lost was time.

When I was younger and a more junior tester, I did my time as a footslogger in the testing war. I flicked through menus, loading screens and fairly boring apps thousands of times.

In April 2010, I thought I’d finally broken into a more lucrative market. I was scheduled to test a mobile app. My fellow testers and I were shown into the ‘secured’ testing lounge - a converted cafeteria which had been installed with a multitude of sound-proofed pods and cubicles (the Devs wanted us to test in isolation for the first few days, before we all met up at the end of the week to combine our results).

I sat in my pod, and a mobile device was brought to me. As I fired up the program, I began to get excited. The premise of the game was simple enough - various food items would be launched across the touchscreen, and using my fingers I had to chop through these delicious consumables whilst avoiding deadly explosives.

So for a couple of days I sat riveted, slicing away. I didn’t even care about the repetition, it was refreshing to test a fun game. I didn’t even really need to fill out any bug reports, the app was working really well.

I gathered with my colleagues on the third day, excited to compare notes (and most importantly, scores!). We sat around a table with the Devs, and I reported first. I commented on some minor Scoreboard bugs, and a couple of crashes I had on loading screens. I also complimented on the nice Watermelon graphics in the game. Everyone was silent in the room - ‘Did … did no one else think the Watermelon was nice?’ I inquire.

The Lead Developer took the mobile device from my hands, before informing me that the app I should have been working on was a data management app for medical professionals. Apparently someone on the dev team had taken a test device home and their son had installed the game on there.

I was asked to leave the facility for wasting company time and money. No one seemed bothered that I had wasted my own time sitting in a booth playing phone games - though I suppose many people see that as a normal day at the office.

Back in the mid-nineties, when I got my testing legs at a fairly large publisher (that had just started to peak), a bunch of us were testing late, pumped up on Coke and Starbursts. It was so late, in fact, that it had turned to morning, and the sun was peaking in through the windows. Apparently, one of the windows was open a crack, because a giant wasp (you know, the kind that has its abdomen separated by about an inch from its head part) had somehow infiltrated the QA area and was terrorizing us.

After a few over-caffeinated and unsuccessful attempts at swatting it in mid-air (which only served to piss it off even more), someone finally managed to hit it and stun it long enough that it fell to the ground, at which point a buddy of mine quickly squashed it. Another tester, clearly still in shock from the whole experience, asked, “What kind of bug was that?” My buddy who stepped on the wasp said, “A once bug.”

I was working for a company testing satellite receiver software.  On this particular day I was doing a retest of software due to hit the satellite in about 4 hours for customer’s to download and upgrade their receivers.

I had found a bug while navigating menu’s that caused the remote to stop functioning and all user settings to get wiped, basically like resetting factory defaults.  I let a manager know and was met with disbelief, after all. . . it is a retest.  No way it was missed.

After being instructed to test on multiple test revisions, multiple hardware revisions, and live production software the department manager wanted to see it done. 

Within a few minutes I had the director of Engineering, the lead programmer on the project, the project manager, and a hardware engineer around my desk watching me factory reset the receiver by simply navigating the menus.

My only thanks? Getting to watch two real good friends being escorted out of the building over the next couple of days.

Can you think of any other profession where you use HTML, C#, LUA, Visual Studio, VBA for Excel, Microsoft Project, Outlook, Word, Photoshop, Maya, Bug Databases, and various other proprietary scripting languages, map editors, video, audio, and development kit management software on a daily basis and get paid $12 an hour with zero benefits, no PTO, and no chance for full time employment?

QA, you are a cruel, cheap whore.

For the sake of this story let’s say my name is Antonio. And, hypothetically, we’ll say I was working for a video game “documentation” company that created ancillary products deemed necessary by many developers and customers (but not all of them).

I spent 9 months on a project, and every day I would have a series of e-mails or a phone call with my contact at the game publisher. And because my contact would not let me have direct interaction with the developer (it might be a “distraction”) the ONLY person I talked to about this project was him. One guy. And we communicated every day, minus a few weekends… for 9 months straight.

We battled on a few issues. Nothing crazy, but I pushed on some things and he’d push back and more often than not he’d win and I’d do more crazy hours to make it work since he was an important person in a billion dollar gaming company and my employer was a leech-industry that depended on the goodwill of billion dollar gaming companies to survive.

I gave him just about everything he asked for, on time, on budget, and to the great satisfaction of the developer (I found that out later when I finally got to talk to them).

After 9 months of constant, daily communication, I got a final message from my contact - an email to me that had my name in the actual email address and which was a response to a message that had my name at the bottom and in my signature.

This message read:

“Well, it took a long time but good job Andrew.”

As my first job in the game industry, I began working for a small game company in 2007 as a tester for a multiplatform shooter. The company I was with was on the West coast, but was working closely with a company on the East coast. In order to control revisions on the game, we both used a program called Perforce, which basically just saves everything to a central server so no one will lose whatever they are working on. I had never worked with this program before this.

About a week into my job, I arrived to work and went to the morning meeting as usual. I could tell something was off. My manager began by reading an email he had gotten at about 4 AM that morning. It simply said:

“USER (my username) HAS SHIT ALL OVER PERFORCE!”

Apparently, the night before I left my computer with a file locked out and it unleashed some sort of digital-demon onto Perforce, causing the East coast company to be unable to work on anything. To say they demanded blood would be a bit of an exaggeration, but they were clearly very upset.

Luckily, I had the best manager ever. He went into work that morning at 4:30 AM and fixed everything. He even withheld my name from the other company, so they could not send a ninja after my family to which I am very grateful.

My first testing gig was on a turn-based strategy game. After a couple of months, I was getting really good, but the scenarios that were part of the main campaign were very hard. We had to save often and reload regularly just to get through some of the initial scenarios.

During one particular scenario, I’d been reloading, and reloading, and reloading, trying different permutations of whatever options I had, but I couldn’t get past a particular point. At the same time, I’d caught some kind of flu and was starting to feel it in the back of my throat. After almost a whole day of just trying to get past this particular scenario, I went home, feeling sicker and sicker as the day wore on.

The following night, my fever reached its highest point, while at the same time, my mind kept ruminating over the scenario I couldn’t get past. During one of my fevered dreams, I found the solution to my problem, and I got past the part of the scenario where I’d been stuck, at work. I woke up immediately after and realized that the solution I’d dreamed would actually solve the issue was having in the real world.
I hope some QA managers and game producers are reading this. Sleep is not just “time when your people aren’t working.” Sleep, and especially dream time, lets the brain process what it’s done and learned during its waking hours and rearrange all this information in various configurations, leading to new solutions and better productivity.

It was a busier day, and I was trying to help by running triage at the support desk. The easier problems I fixed myself, while I passed on the more time consuming issues to the techs.

That’s when one of the more odd employees approached the desk with laptop and charger in hand.  We’ll call him wax man.

I had seen wax man around before - He always looked disheveled and nervous coming in and out of his office on the second floor of one of the buildings. I always chalked it up to him being a quirky programmer.

He seemed almost panicked as he handed me the laptop. This was nothing new, and I was used to dealing with the eccentric and crazy types. Wax man mumbled, “My laptop won’t charge anymore.”  He must be in a big time crunch I thought to myself. I took one look at the laptop and charger and immediately handed it off to the tech sitting beside me, who looked at it and then back at me before immediately dumping it off to HIS coworker. The pair looked at each other, dumped the laptop and charger onto ANOTHER guy (let’s call him Kevin), and left the room.  Kevin looked down and then back to me with a puzzled look.

Now Kevin was a newer tech, but one of the more brilliant minds I’ve seen. He simply lacked common sense. As we stared at each other, the conversation ran silently through our heads. Why are they passing this off? This is the easiest problem we’ve had all day.

After a brief moment, Kevin began diagnosing the laptop.  He quickly deduced that the adapter had failed and announced to wax man and myself that he would order a new one.

While inspecting the adapter for the appropriate numbers, Kevin stopped and looked to wax man.  “What’s this all over the cord and adapter?” he asked.  Wax man tried to answer as non nonchalantly as possible, with an obviously well thought out answer, “It’s candle wax. I knocked a candle over on my desk.” 

Kevin replied, “Oh, well hot candle wax probably shorted out the adapter or something.”  I buried my face in my hands. I couldn’t look. Kevin scraped the adapter clean with his fingernails, got the information, and handed everything back to wax man.

As soon as wax man was out of ear shot, the two others fell through the back door laughing.  “Candle wax!”  The three of us were literally rolling on the floor laughing.  Kevin desperate to get in on the joke began pleading for an answer.  We stopped laughing long enough to explain wax man’s private office and lack of candles.

A few years ago I got my first job as a video game tester for a mobile game. The team (myself and five other people) had been working for about three weeks out of the five that we were contracted for. Running tests that were required, filling out bug reports…pretty standard stuff.

Oddly enough during the project whenever we would send in a bug report nothing ever changed; same bugs, same glitches, every week. It wasn’t until the start of the fourth week that one of the testers noticed an article proclaiming that the product we had been testing had officially been cancelled and would never see the light of day on a retail shelf. 

That was news to us since we still had two weeks left on the contract. After some digging, our lead confessed that the company who hired us never pulled the contract, so we had to just sit there in our crappy “office” without our shitty phones (since the company took them back), and our two computers that had internet for the duration of the term because, “we’re testers and this is what we get paid to do!”

The punctuation mark “?!” is called an interrobang. It can be written as either “?!” or “!?” but the former is generally considered more correct.

I was testing the latest installment in an action/adventure series that had a lot of confused excitement in the text. Apparently, the writer hadn’t been going by any sort of punctuation standard, so the majority of the interrobangs were written as “!?” while the rest were “?!”

This was an issue for someone higher up. A major issue. It was so important, in fact, that I was tasked with seeking out every interrobang and ensuring that they all matched. I wasn’t given any guidelines beyond that, so I opted to put the question mark first.
After close to two weeks of testing every piece of dialogue in the game, my lead approached me.

“Hey, you’ve been working on punctuation, right?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m nearly done,” I replied. My bug count for interrobangs alone numbered in the hundreds at this point, so saying that I was nearly done had become a comforting mantra of sorts.

“Well, here’s the thing,” my lead continued. “The producer says we’re supposed to stop looking for text bugs. Finish up your last one.”

Well, that wasn’t so bad. I was sick of interrobangs, and I was happy to do something different. Later that day, though, my lead found my again.

“Hey, remember those punctuation changes you were making?”

“Yes,” I replied, “but I’ve stopped.”

“Yeah, well, they put all your changes into the new build, but the producer noticed that you missed a few.”

I was a bit confused. “I thought he told us to stop looking for text bugs?”

“Yeah, he did, but he’d like it if all the punctuation matched. So, can you go back and change all the ones where the question mark comes first? He wants the exclamation mark to come first.”

This should have been simple. I could pick up where I left off, then resubmit all my previous bugs with a minor edit. It would have been fine, except that in this new build, colors had been added to differentiate between different characters’ dialogue, and I was told that every bug report had to include the color of the text that was being displayed.

So I played through the whole game, again, writing all-new bugs to undo the previous ones. Then, just as I was getting close to the end (again), I was told to stop looking for text bugs.

This time, the producer had decided that the interrobangs were fine as they were.

I was working 3rd Key at Gamestop a few years ago and we were preparing for the winter holiday. My shop was in a lower income area and was prone to an incredible amount of theft, so throughout the year we had been stockpiling “locking, theft-proof” peg hooks for our controllers from other stores.

Over time, we’d managed to get enough so that every controller and accessory in the store was theft proof… Until the District Manager arrived to give his pre-holiday inspection.

We being his only real non-mall store, the locked up merchandise seemed wrong because it wasn’t “convenient” for the customer.

$2500 dollars in accessories was stolen in the first month. The thefts were mostly blamed on the staff and we were all individually questioned and then fired that following January. The same district manager still works there to this day.

A main character’s lips were not animated in the cut-scenes, and I was the first tester to notice. I logged the bug but, being relatively new, I asked my boss if I should log each cut-scene separately, or classify the whole thing as one bug. He told me to avoid cluttering the system and to just create one report.

With each new week came a new build, and with each new build, I was assigned to do bug regressions on this same cut-scene issue. Each time, I had to play through the entire game to check each cut-scene and ensure that the animations were done, each time logging any remaining issues under one bug report.

After about a month of this, I was called into HR. They tell me that I am being let go because I’m not logging as many bugs as my co-workers. After a moment of shock, I explained that this was because I was stuck working on one bug that took all week to check and pleaded for reason.

They fired me right there, once again citing my low numbers, but they were “nice” enough to let me gather my personal things and say a few goodbyes. After shaking my hand and sending me off with a few regretful words, my now-former boss turned to another tester and said, “Take over this bug and split it up into separate reports for each cut-scene.”

I worked on a server based multiplayer shooter where you could fill your character with any shape or design you could set your mind to. Of course, this being the Internet, it took about half an hour after the game went into beta for someone to start making dicks and Nazi symbols on stuff.

The company was fine with just about everything that you could make in this. All manner of obscene images were created by our users and plastered over everything from their characters foreheads to their hooded sweatshirts. The thing is the German government isn’t too hot on showing Nazi symbols on ANYTHING, so as QA testers, we had to go into people’s accounts and remove any offending symbols as soon as they were reported.

After about two weeks of going through characters and deleting a huge number of really mindblowingly offensive images we started to get a little, uh, playful with our user-base. We went into the offending accounts, found the images in question and replaced them with pictures of rainbows and unicorns and snowflakes.

Things went on like this for a while until someone posted on the forums and said “OMG my account has been hacked! Someone! Help! All my symbols got changed to unicorns and rainbows!”

One of our team posted in the same thread saying “You know full well why your images have been changed. If you want we can tell everyone else what they used to be.”

Guy locked the thread pretty soon after.

This isn’t a Tale From the Trenches, but hopefully a ray of sunshine for all those testers out in California. The state recently passed a law requiring 60 days’ notice before doing a massive layoff. The text of the law itself:

Cal Lab Code § 1401
(2012)

§ 1401.  Notice requirements for mass layoff, relocation, or termination

(a) An employer may not order a mass layoff, relocation, or termination at a covered establishment unless, 60 days before the order takes effect, the employer gives written notice of the order to the following:

(1) The employees of the covered establishment affected by the order.

(2) The Employment Development Department, the local workforce investment board, and the chief elected official of each city and county government within which the termination, relocation, or mass layoff occurs.

(b) An employer required to give notice of any mass layoff, relocation, or termination under this chapter shall include in its notice the elements required by the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (29 U.S.C. Sec. 2101 et seq.).

(c) Notwithstanding the requirements of subdivision (a), an employer is not required to provide notice if a mass layoff, relocation, or termination is necessitated by a physical calamity or act of war.

Oops! An update!

Actually an unfortunate correction

I don’t think you guys will run this, but I figured you should know
that the law mentioned today probably doesn’t cover most video game
testers:

(g) (1) This chapter does not apply where the closing or layoff is the
result of the completion of a particular project or undertaking of an
employer subject to Wage Order 11, regulating the Broadcasting
Industry, Wage Order 12, regulating the Motion Picture Industry, or
Wage Order 16, regulating Certain On-Site Occupations in the
Construction, Drilling, Logging and Mining Industries, of the
Industrial Welfare Commission, and the employees were hired with the
understanding that their employment was limited to the duration of
that project or undertaking.

The salient part is “with the understanding that their employment was
limited to the duration of the project or undertaking”

Part of the sales pitch was “get your foot in the door, work hard, and move up!” Turns out testers were privately thought of as gophers just there to do whatever bitch-work no one else wanted. The mentality was “if you were good enough to do anything other than test, then you wouldn’t have been hired as a tester.” Yet these same people loved to talk publicly about how testers are “the designers and artists and programmers of tomorrow!” Funny what you learn at a release party when people start drinking.

When layoffs hit, the boss had a big meeting to discuss the Elite Super Magical Awesome Team that would get to stay, and had big charts and diagrams to show how the selection process was going to work. He was going to have numerous closed-door meetings with his assistants, review everyone’s work history, and use a “secret” algorithm to determine an unbiased, impartial list of candidates, then interview each one personally. By some amazing coincidence, every single person kept (out of a pool of a few hundred) either played fantasy football with him, was a roommate, or was a drinking buddy.

It’s a pretty screwed-up system when a 22-year-old with 8 months experience gets kept over a seven-year industry vet with a wife and two kids.

We were compelled to work every major holiday except Christmas. We were told we would get “floating” days in return after the game shipped. After that magical day, I approached the boss about using one of my (many) accumulated floating days. He just laughed and told me now we had to crunch for DLC. Years later, I never got my days off.

Being a QA Tester at a big publisher can mean a BIG RAMP UP and an EVEN BIGGER RAMP DOWN. It’s just how the industry is. It’s not uncommon for a publisher to ramp up over 100 testers in a 3 month time frame, knowing that they’ll have to dismiss 90% of them by Thanksgiving.

Something to note is that QA Testers are Temporary Employees, so you don’t get to participate in the company morale events that the Full-Timers do. So when you ARE invited, relish the opportunity because it is rare. We managed to ship 5 titles in the month of November (a truly an epic feat if I do say so myself). We had been promised, with patches and on-going support services, we would be kept on until after the New Year. Coinciding with this joyful news, we were being invited to participate in the November morale event, catered Ice Cream from Ben & Jerry’s!

This publisher is a BIG place. Each floor contains hundreds of staff, so the PA system called down 1 floor at a time, starting with the Executives on the top floor. Floor by floor, they called each department down, and finally they got all the way down to the basement and called QA to the indoor park. We came up and quickly filed into organize lines.

So there we are, basking in the warm southern California afternoon sun, eating delicious sundaes, enjoying camaraderie and companionship about a job well done and enjoying the recognition of our 80 hour weeks for the last 3 months. The HR and QA Manager come in and stand up on the dais near the back to the park; “Excuse me, everyone, may I have your attention.”

“Thank you for the hard work these past couple months. This holiday season we’ve got 5 titles coming out, and we could not have done it without you. Please give your badges to security, they will go bring your things from your desk. If you drove here today, please see

and she will give you parking validation so you can exit the lot. Thank you again for your hard work.”

We stood there for a moment, trying to comprehend what had just happened.

The dark realization began to sink in, and you could hear people in the crowd softly sniffling, and rubbing eyes as they were trying to hold back tears. Some were angry; they had made plans, promises, and commitments. Some were bravado. They were sure THEIR hard work had spared them (which of course, it did not). One by one, security brought up peoples possessions in little cardboard boxes. We said our goodbyes every time security would come back up. We all shook hands and promised to stay in touch (mostly for finding leads on the next job). Eventually my box came and I said my goodbyes as well. It was over. I went to my car, drove home, and told my loving wife the news.

In an afternoon in the golden sun of Southern California, 100 QA Testers were mass fired while they dined on Ice Cream.

My short stint as a tester was almost entirely devoted to one game. My team discovered two holes in a map that just shouldn’t have been there. It looked solid, but if you walked over it, your character would sink into the ground up to his or her shoulders and be unable to do anything but spin.

One of these holes happened to be near a treasure chest, so rather than actually fix the hole, the developers merely moved the chest on top of it. The testing team had some fun debating whether the the developers were being clever or just lazy. Lazy won the vote on the simple merit that the other hole had not been fixed at all.

The ticket is re-opened and a few patches later they get around to “fixing” it. Not having a convenient treasure chest this time, they simply put an invisible object on that space anyway, so now there is a small area you simply cannot walk on.

I entered the world of QA the same way most people do. Wide eyed and bushy tailed. However, it became apparent to me the moment I began training in this shiny magical world that every gamer dreams of, that I had quit my job based on a gamble.

Under the impression that I would have a full time position, I was informed that I was “freelancer” and would gain work on a day to day basis and if not, would be on call until work became available.

I was mortified.

The worst were the ‘cafeteria shifts’. When work began to peter off, or a publisher pulled funding for a project, consistent QA shifts would become scarce, forcing many into employment insurance if they could get it (most couldn’t) You would come in each day and wait with a dozen or so other people in the cafeteria, all of which were competing against you. If you could put up with that, pitted against your peers for a day’s pay, there was a chance a spot would open. That was if you were popular enough with the lead of that project.

I survived four months on my final project in a tiny room of a sweat shop. I passed into the bowels of that company like a prisoner, where I was forced to compete with my peers for a high bug count so that I would have work the next day. I live in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and some of you reading this know where I speak of.

Montreal, where QA is exploited and abused and grossly underpaid.

A few years ago, a coworker and I along with several testers from our company’s head office were sent to Japan for a month in order to test a video game at the developer’s studio in Yokohama, just outside of Tokyo. It was a long, grueling schedule with ten to twelve hour work days, six days a week, but the chance to visit a foreign country, especially Japan -  the video game, anime, manga, and electronics mecca of the world - made it worth it.

One of the things that made this particular tour of duty unusual was that, normally, bugs are entered into an electronic database accessible via computer with either a local network or Internet connection.

Not so with this developer.

We started out writing bugs by hand but soon graduated to filling out PDF forms on our workstations and printing them out. That, however, was as sophisticated as it got. This process was made even more tedious by the fact that, once our submitted sheets were looked over and approved, they were forwarded to the company’s localization department so that they could be translated from English to Japanese.

Only then would they be sent to the programmers so that the issues could be fixed.

What boggles my mind to this day is, despite the inherent primitiveness of this setup, almost every bug that we submitted was fixed within 24 hours and a fresh new build was ready and waiting for us every morning when we came in. I’ve worked on dozens, if not hundreds, of different games over the years where there were no language barriers to overcome and have seen bugs languish for days, weeks, or months in the database before being addressed (if they ever are).

Only in Japan, people. Only in Japan.

Three years of art and animation school. One year of game art and design. I’m finally here. After a good chunk of my young life I am finally in the videogame industry. I worked my ass off for my post secondary life, casting aside relationships and friendships. I’ve lost most people that ever said they were close to me. They didn’t appreciate the 18 hour days of dedicating my life to this “abstract” thing.

I graduated top of my class in game art and was hired by a developer one week out of school. I walked into that new job, talked to my senior environment artist and the first words out of his mouth were “Yeah, I’m going to need you to come in on Saturday. We have a milestone coming up, and we really need to get this done.”

I worked my ass off, as did my fellow co-workers. I’d see them working 13, 14, 15 hour days without even breaking a sweat, all with their own families and responsibilities at home. We never really complained, we just did it. Was this all worth it?

Yes. Absolutely. Never in my life have I experienced such a group of like minded people, so bent on pushing themselves to their limits so that in the end the product ships and does well. From QA to programmers to management, every single person at this studio wanted to be there. Never in my life have i experienced such joy from producing my own art. Seeing it placed into a video game and having people come up and congratulating your small team on making something that never existed before.

Never have I met people who adored what they did, each and everyday they would walk in with the biggest smile on their face, or the funniest story to tell all their friends.

Each and every day was a joy to be there, even during the really shitty times.

Unfortunately (as is the nature of the industry) this small to mid sized company went under. Our publisher pulled their contract, and 90 people were out of work. I saw all those people who I had the pleasure of calling my friend lose their job.

What shocked me was the response from each and every person there to what they would miss most. It wasn’t the income (which wasn’t spectacular) it was not the location, but it was the environment. You make this place a home, and the people in it a family whether you like to or not. You place your trust in these people to work to the best of their abilities to deliver. You see them in their lowest and in their highest. Every single person there was sad, because the next week they wouldn’t see their friends at their place of work.

Fortunately most of those people found work (I’m not one of them sadly), and they’ve all moved on to their new families. I guarantee if you were to ask 90% of those people if what they do was worth it, you’d hear the same response. “I wouldn’t do anything else”.

At the townhall company meetings, the developers would air their grievances about how unfair it was that their bonuses were *only* 6% that year.

Mind you, this was their annual bonus they were talking about, not their completion bonus, nor their performance bonus. They would fuss and whine for a full two hours about how unfair it was, meanwhile the testers were taking home less than $18k a year.

My first job out of college was doing QA for a game that, by all odds, 99.95% of you have played or at least heard of. Triple A title, huge revenues, the works. For the last two months, someone’s always there testing. Day shift is going six days a week, with staggered days off, and 12 hours a day, including lunch and dinner and breaks. Similar deal for the night shift.

And all we’re doing is checklists. No new bugs are being considered for being fixed, unless its nasty. We’re just there to check if bugs are fixed and to sweep the game to make sure nothing new broke horribly. This isn’t the most soul-crushing work can get, but its pretty close.

When you’re not at work or commuting to work, you’re eating, catching up on your email, and maybe getting an hour of relaxation. Or sleeping. You do a fair bit of sleeping too. Also, your days off? Might get some relaxing done there, but it’s mainly for doing laundry, getting groceries, getting all that upkeep that needs to happen so you can work the other six days.

But, its not all bad. The company provided lunch. There was a strict policy that no one could do seven days of work in a row without higher level approval. The leads were respectful and understood the grind, and there was never a feeling of being taking advantage of.

Of course, that was likely the point. The generosity? All company policy. Not to say that the floor leads weren’t good guys, but it’s that they needed to have strict company policy basically coming down to “We’re not going to grind these testers into mincemeat and spit them out. We suffer if the testers do.”

I was actually one of the lucky ones, because I wasn’t immediately laid off once crunch time was over. Thank god for PC games and fifty different distribution models.

This was only a few years ago. Makes you wonder about what happened that made them start enacting these policies (or maybe you just have to look around the archives some…).

Nearly a decade ago, I worked a stint as a mid-level tester on a certain console-based first-person shooter. We were less than two weeks from Gold, and each member of our relatively small testing team had carefully delegated assignments.

I had been tasked with testing a new gameplay mode - a single-player survival-type level which used AI from the campaign but behaved like a multiplayer mode. Midway through the mandatory 120-hour testing phase, the boss confronted me with a “shortcoming” on my part - I had not yet completed testing the new mode.

I tried to explain that other than brief tests of other features, I’d been working nonstop on the survival level since it was assigned to me. He wouldn’t buy it; apparently completing the hours as fast as physically possible wasn’t fast enough. “This needs to be completely done, or it can’t ship,” he reminded me, deaf to my protests that it *was* being done and I simply needed to complete the testing.

Despite the misplaced incrimination, he had a point - this was a console game, and if there was a major problem with anything we couldn’t patch it after release. Although I kept assuring him I could finish the testing before release, my pitiful human limitations that prevented me from logging more than an hour’s work per hour apparently exceeded his patience.

The new mode was scrapped and never shipped. I was given full culpability for the matter and fired upon release. The industry rolled on, and I rolled on to a different career.

I am a programmer by education, trade and passion. I enjoy math and logic and enjoy solving a good programming puzzle any day.

I was a frequent poster on a popular online board where people ask questions and discuss issues related to the language of programming I was relatively fluent in. On the forum, some of us had gotten relatively close, and many people knew each other outside of their “forum handle.”

A friend from the forum mentioned that there was an opening at his company for QA development, and he had suggested I apply. He was higher up in the company and provided the HR department and the department hiring some of my forum posts, showing my ability to program and also be helpful in a large, collaborative environment. 

Many emails went back and forth with this company. My current day job did not allow for phone calls, and I worked the entire work day of this company, but this was a great opportunity and I suggested I make a day trip out for a roundtable meeting.

Now, I have a name that, by all extensive purposes, is supposed to be male. Not one of those “Leslie” or “Dana” type names, but a straight-up male first name, despite having no Y chromosome. It never was an issue for me, nor for my husband for that matter. Nor did I think it ever would matter. It usually was a great ice breaker at conferences or when meeting someone for the first time.

Arriving at the company for the meet and greet, I was ushered in to the meeting to stares of people at the table.  They had no idea, apparently, that I was female… And a not too bad looking one if I do say so myself.

I was not even allowed to have the meeting. Apparently having a “female” in the “all male company” would be bad for policy and productivity. I was removed by security from the building. I left somewhat ashamed. And my friend on the forum who suggested me blocked me and never spoke to me again.

I’m at a great company now where my gender isn’t an issue, and the company that I tried to interview for has since been bought and merged.  I still get a bad taste in my mouth when I see anything online about them, though.

I tested cellphone games for a studio that ported games that other branches of the company had developed for other phones. In pre-iPhone days, every game needed to have a million different versions to account for hardware differences, and your game had to be on all of phones to reach enough users to be profitable.

At one point I was testing the “online” version of a Breakout/Arkanoid clone. The only thing setting this game apart from the “offline” version released the year before was an online leaderboard. Everything else about the game was exactly the same. Same brick layouts, same powerups, same everything.

Obviously, it was important that the leaderboard be working correctly.

The problem was, it wasn’t. Like most online leaderboards, it was a one-score-per-player affair. But it wasn’t showing my BEST score, just my most recent one. I could score a zillion points and be #1 in the world, but if my next game only scored 5 points I’d dropped way down to the bottom with 5.

Worse, the ONLY way to see the leaderboard was to submit a score. There was a “Leaderboard” option on the main menu, but to contact the server it had to submit a score of 0, so if you ever chose this option, that would be your new “high score”. This leaderboard was meaningless. If you placed highly, did you really earn that rank, or did a thousand better players have their scores reset?

You couldn’t check to see if anyone had pushed you down in the rankings, because the very act of checking your ranking would change it. You couldn’t even scroll up to see if anyone beat the score you remembered getting, because to cut down on data transmission you only received a small portion of the list immediately above and below you.

I sent the bug, but we couldn’t fix it because the bug existed in the “master version” that had already been released; our studio wasn’t ALLOWED to fix bugs that existed in master versions. I proposed that we could fix the bug on the server side: still submit scores, but the server checks if it’s actually higher before overwriting. For whatever reason, this wasn’t possible either.

So we shipped a game which had one feature differentiating it from an already-released game on the same platform, and that feature didn’t work.

A number of years ago, I was part of a testing department at a large dev studio. Management at this time had become somewhat obsessed with performance metrics to the point that they no longer seemed to care if any actual work got done. A particular game, which will go unnamed, had been struggling to make the important milestone of zero bugs in the system. To solve this they simply threw more testers at the game, namely, yours truly.

There must have been some disconnect between the higher ups and my manager because I was thrown on the game and promptly told not to enter any bugs. One should take note that my job description entailed entering bugs, eating lunch, and then a further round of entering bugs. That is to say, they had given me the job of not doing my job.

The ends, to this means, was to artificially achieve zero bug status so that someone somewhere in metrics land would smile and pat themselves on the back.

Any bugs I actually found were slipped directly into a word doc and saved for a rainy day. Among many other smaller bugs, I had discovered about 10 crash bugs and a number of desync’s (I was on the online team) during those two days which, for that stage in development, was a prestigious number. The next day when the milestone had passed (Hazzah!) my writing bugs ban was lifted, I dutifully copy and pasted all the bugs I had found the days before, as well as a number I had found that day, into the system in about a ten minute period.

Apparently, this broke someone’s metrics.

My manager appeared about 5 minutes after that.  He tells me that I was supposed to enter those bugs slowly over the next few weeks.  I suppose I was supposed to intuit this from him, as I was never given such instructions.  Never the less, the blame for doing my job fell squarely on me and it was apparently a bad thing.

The game shipped filled with bugs.  I quit shortly thereafter.

- They routinely made people work every day of the week without a day off, which is illegal in our state. They would then lie to HR and production about it. When they were finally busted on it, they started giving people “split” days off, i.e. 12 hours off one day, and 12 hours off another day, which is just as illegal.

- Management would frequently give “rousing” speeches during crunch every day at 4:55 about how necessary our overtime was, and how we should proud to be giving it our all because it’ll be just so worth it when the game ships. Why 4:55? Because management left at 5:00.

- One day we were locked out of the building. It was the weekend and the complex was closed. I called the boss to tell him we needed let in, and he bitched me out. He eventually drove by and threw his building key out the window then sped off.

One new tester was an absolute twit, but he used to be a teacher so went from training straight to “assistant trainer.”

Now, this guy was a *terrible* tester, with no instinct for testing whatsoever, but man could he write those Powerpoint presentations! For a year while we crunched 70+ hour workweeks we saw this dick work a cozy 9-5 and have weekends off and get every holiday off. He got promoted to full-time, “Head Trainer,” then promoted again to Senior Testing Lead and was put in charge of a AAA title without ever having written so much as one bug.

The worst was he would sit in the breakroom and talk about how fantastic the industry was and nobody had any room to complain—after all, look how successful he was!

I worked briefly as a concept artist for a game company that shall remain unnamed. (I fully admit, I had no previous experience within the industry, but a friend of mine who worked as a designer/developer thought highly of my drawings, and dragged me into said company) Names have been changed here to protect ... me.

Project Alien required me to do the initial concept drawings of the standard 3-4 angles and pass them off to my friend to be rendered into lovely 3D sprites. After several weeks of designing the world and critters in it, (and mucho hours worked) we were called in to a routine meeting.

The gentleman in charge decided that in the interest in time and money, and apparently fewer computers than needed, we would be working on a side-scroller instead of a 3D ‘verse. I admit, my friend had to take me aside and explain what that meant for me.

I can’t say I was happy about having to do old-fashioned frame by frame animations. It was suddenly a lot more work for me, and little for my friend - who is trying to build a rep in the biz - to do. We grumbled, but tried to make the best of it. He was the boss, so as long as we were getting paid to do it, right?

Yeah, right. That.

Two weeks later we were all called together to a large meeting in Toronto. For me to get there cost about $60 in parking and gas alone, not to mention unpaid time off my other job doing graphic design. Everyone was supposed to arrive by 9 AM so we could consolidate responsibility and get everyone on the same page. My friend would be joining us via Skype, being sick with the flu.

6 hours and no lunch later, the boss showed up at 3:30pm. His 2IC had convinced most of us to stick around, telling us the Head Cheese had been in a car accident, but would be there shortly. “Car accident” in Headese translates to “I was busy landing a contract for another game” in English.

He strolled in, admitted there had been no actual accident, but that he had taken up a new contract with developers already on staff, so he didn’t need us there anymore. Oh, and he had spent all the funds for the project I was on to buy new computers and software for the new project. Hence - WE weren’t getting paid. I thought the 2IC was going to kill him. Then I had to call my friend and tell him the news. He’d spent 5x the hours I had working on this project.

The kicker is, he called me 5 weeks later to ask how far I had gotten on the 2D animation cells, and whether I could overnight them to him.

I said they had been in a “car accident”.

I’m not in the game industry, but I’m sure you’ll find this story relevant. Working as an animator for broadcast television is a luck of the draw for what show you’re working on. Where you’re placed is the difference between drawing colorful squares and circles for toddlers or pushing the lines with some crazy new WB title. Quite frankly, you’re happy as long as at the end of the week there’s a paycheck with your name on it… and even that’s a crapshoot.

A now bankrupt company that once ‘employed’ young men and women fresh out of college (taking in almost all of my classmates that year) in downtown Halifax, realized that halfway through the contract that their show would no longer have any chance of finishing or staying within the budget.

Their solution?

Instead of pay, employees would receive royalties from the shows that would never be finished! When notified of this new “arrangement,” we immediately tried to contact the studio head, to no avail, since he never actually came to work. I know several that slaved on for months in a desperate hope of scrounging a rare paycheck as they ate away what little they had saved from their previous paychecks and student loans.

Management would receive their paychecks by walking out to the studio head’s car in the parking lot at a designated time confirmed ahead by cell phone.

Many of the employees were as bankrupt as the company, and the studio head has since started a new company in a different region employing the same strategy.

I now work for the Canadian military as an electrician.

We were doing localization preparation for a project which needed to be localized in Spanish. After a week or two of receiving and compiling bids from translation companies, we presented them to the Executive Producer.

His response? The cost is outrageous, and he instructed us to drive down to Taco Bell and find some Spanish speaking people, and we’ll pay them under the table to translate the game for us.

It was common to find out about “concerns” only when they had matured into something for which they would write you up. I was written up for “unsatisfactory communication to production” and when I asked for examples, my boss had none. No print outs, no emails to show, nothing. He just said, “well it’s been a pattern for the last year.”

I said, “So for the last year you’ve let me hang myself and never told me.” His response was “If we see a problem, we want to see if it auto-corrects or not, and you didn’t.” I was denied a promotion and a raise for a “concern” that was never communicated to me until it bit me in the ass.

On top of that, I regularly sent requests to management for feedback on how I was doing, only to get back generic “you’re doing great!” emails.

I started as a game tester about 8 years ago and worked my way up through the ranks until becoming management, making about $50K a year, salaried, so no matter what, I got the same amount of money every other week. $50k was a pretty penny - especially during early Milestones when hours were significantly less than the ‘required’ 40 a week that NONE of us filled.

However, my last project in the industry, the games I worked on were particularly in the weeds, and we pulled multiple 80-100 hour weeks just to get it out the door, only to have to turn around and do more ridiculous hours when we bounced from both our internal certification, as well as first party certification - MULTIPLE times.

One of my employees, who knew the salary scale for our department, revealed the truth about salaried positions at about 5 AM on a cigarette break. “You know, I think at this point, with my OT, I actually make more per hour than you do.”