What to Expect

"Video Game Tester." Sounds like a dream job, doesn't it? Especially when you're young, you love games, and your other career options might be limited. Hell, you could stock shelves, deal with customers, or get paid to play video games all day. Which would you choose?

Well, know what you're getting into first. A lot of movies and TV, from Big to Grandma's Boy, portray the game industry as a place to lay back, toss around ideas, beat your friends at DDR, and then maybe whip up a game every once in a while.

Forget all that. A very few places tried to run their businesses like that, places that took the money from their first hit and built a gamer's paradise. To the best of my knowledge, none of them are still around; they burned through their money, didn't produce enough to bring more in, and dropped off the map.

Before you consider getting into testing, here are a few things to know.

The pay's not great. It's all right, but not great. I've seen testing houses pay minimum wage, and I've never seen any pay more than $12 an hour; keep in mind that's before taxes. And most places hire testers only on a temp basis, so forget about health benefits, or any other kind, for at least your first year, and maybe longer.

Now, depending on the place, you may have the opportunity for overtime. Some places require it. Some places run you ragged with it. On the upside, overtime pays time-and-a-half for every hour in the day past 8, and double for every hour past 12. On the downside, of course, if you're pulling 12-hour-plus shifts, you won't have time for much else, and enough of it can wear you down hard.

I've seen places demand 12-plus hours a day, every day including weekends, for months. Some people throw three months at those kinds of jobs, make ten grand or so, and then take a month off. If you're on your own, that's not bad, but if you have any loved ones, be aware of how much time you might spend away from them.

Promotions have their ups and downs. You can also make a little more, of course, by landing a promotion. The types and numbers of promotions vary from place to place; some go "Tester > Lead Tester > Project Lead (essentially the boss of several lead testers)," while others have a "Senior Tester" rank below lead. For the most part, getting promoted within your testing department is a good thing; it makes you more likely to be noticed, pays better, and brings you that much closer to the possibility of benefits. But be aware of the consequences too:

— The higher up you get, the less you see of the games. Testers spend all day with their hands on the controls; lead testers and up spend most of their time sitting in meetings, organizing schedules, and writing reports about reports about reports.

— As you move up, you gain certain freedoms — most importantly, the freedom to make contact with higher-ups you wouldn't have been able to talk to before — but you also lose some of the freedoms you enjoyed as a tester. More specifically, those freedoms will be replaced by responsibilities; for example, while a tester can usually arrange a day off without much of a hassle, a lead tester has to jump through extra hoops to ensure the project keeps running smoothly in their absence. You'll be expected to stay each night until your last tester has gone home (or until someone qualified can watch them for you), and you'll have to be the first one there in the morning to ensure that everyone hits the ground running every day.

— Generally speaking, testers are too low on the totem pole to notice much trouble higher up. As you start climbing, any office drama will become clearer and clearer, and will get more and more likely to eventually involve you personally.

— On a related note: In this business, pressure and heat come from up above, and diffuse as they move downward. A producer might pressure the head of your QA department, who passes most (but not likely all) of that pressure onto his or her immediate subordinates, and so on down the ladder. As a tester, you only get a whiff of it, but as a lead or higher, you can expect anything up to a full-force gale if things aren't going according to schedule.

— Remember also: Not everyone can be a lead, at least not all at the same time. Depending on where you work, there might be three testers for every lead, ten testers, twenty, or more. Only the sharpest, most capable, and most productive among those testers will be considered for promotion, and that's if there are any higher positions available, which isn't always the case. (And if you get passed up in favor of someone you work with, don't get too upset, at least not the first time. Sometimes, the decision comes down to a coin toss.)

— Lastly, if the company does finally make you a full-time employee, the benefits are usually nice (and, if you need health coverage, obviously necessary). However, when that happens, they may switch you over from hourly pay to salary; that usually means no more overtime pay. You'll get used to it, especially if you need the perks, but at first, it may feel less like a promotion and more like being conned into working for free. If you do end up pulling a lot of overtime, check with your supervisor to see if there are other ways you can be compensated for it. Some places offer extra time off in exchange for the extra time worked.

Climbing up will make you more money, and can put you in a better position to get what you want out of the industry. But you might sometimes look back at the old days, when all you had to do was find bugs, and miss the simple life.

On the other hand...

Testing can be extremely boring. Sometimes, it's great. Sometimes you get your hands on the next big hit, before anyone else does, and not only do you get to play it first, you get to be a part of it.

But that's not what usually happens. You don't have much control over which game you're assigned to. You might not like that game. You might hate it. It might be completely outside your tastes or expertise; you might be the world's greatest RPG guru, but that won't stop them from putting you on Barney Learns the Alphabet, if that's all your department has in test at the time.

You'll play that game for hours a day, over and over, for weeks or months at a stretch. You'll explore every corner of every screen, every variable of every menu, and then do it all again when the next build of the game arrives. And that's assuming that the game's fully playable; you might start off with incomplete builds, or trial versions, or promotional demos, where all you have is some tiny little slice of the game, and all you can do is run through it again and again, looking for anything and everything that could possibly go wrong with it.

If it's a trivia game, you'll learn every answer. If it's an action game, you'll learn to beat it blindfolded. If it's an RPG, you'll know all the dialogue by heart, and spend the day making fun of your favorite scenes with your fellow testers. (Well, that can be fun, at least.) Even if you start off liking it, chances are very good you'll be sick of it long before the end.

And it might not end when you think it's going to. You could be a day away from submission when some new out-of-the-way bug pops up and necessitates redoing the whole last week of testing. Believe me; that happens all the time. You might think it's all over and done with, only for one build on one region to come back into test over and over again, like some undying curse.

You can easily be numbed into not caring, into going through the motions and calling it a day.

Don't be.

The ones who burn out are the ones who stop moving. The ones who get ahead are the ones who keep taking their job seriously, and keep kicking ass at it, even when there's no obvious reason to. Because there is a reason. There's always a reason.

Well, almost always.

If all you want to do is be a tester, that's fine. But you might have another reason for getting into the business, some greater ambition, a dream. Do you want to be the next great designer? Is there a game idea in your head, something you've always treasured and wanted to make real? Hold on to it, and keep fighting your way up if you want a chance at it, because:

Nobody buys game ideas. No, I'm not trying to crush your dream. But here's the reality: Game ideas are a dime a dozen, and there's nobody — yet — who's out there looking for yours.

It's not like Hollywood. In Hollywood, you can write your own screenplay at home, find an agent to help you market it, sell a studio the rights to the script, and then either go home with the cash or, if you're lucky, join them on the set to help make the movie happen. It's a very steep uphill battle, with many more failures than successes, but it does happen, and there is an established market for it.

In the game industry, not so much. You'll never sit down with a game publisher, pitch your idea, and walk away with a pile of money; game concepts just aren't a marketable commodity in and of themselves. Most concepts come from either within the publishers' own offices, or from established developers. Even most of those concepts — about 99%, from my experience — never get off the ground, and among those that do, a significant amount get cancelled in mid-production.

To carry a game concept from pitch to gold master is a phenomenally rare thing. But I've done it. And that should mean that anyone can.

In the posts to come, I'll say as much as I'm contractually allowed to about how I did it, and about how I got into a position where I could do it. There aren't any magic tricks to it; just hard work, good networking, a little creativity, and a lot of luck.

And if you're still interested in being a tester, I can tell you about that too, about how to test well, hone your skills, and get ahead doing it.

More to come soon.