You Do Not Talk About Fight Club

So your job's going well so far. You're finding a good number of bugs, and they like the way you write them up. Good deal. Just keep this in mind as you go:

Don't break your NDA.

You're on the inside now. You know things about upcoming games that almost no one else knows. You might be tempted to tease your favorite message board with the promise of a spoiler or two, or to anonymously leak out a screenshot and let people try and figure out which game it's from.

Or maybe you see people bad-mouthing the game you work on, people who have the wrong idea about what's in the game, or imagine that it sucks when you know it doesn't. Maybe you want to put them in their place, or maybe you just want to gently nudge them toward a more positive viewpoint.

You might be mad at your boss, or at the company, and want to blow off steam, tell a funny story about how your boss dropped the ball. Hell, you don't have to name names; just let everyone know what a jackass he is.

Or sometimes, you just want to strut your stuff, impress people with a hearty, "Hey, guess what game I'M working on!" or, "Guess who I work for!"



When you're hired, you sign a contract not to discuss the company or its products outside the office, and they take that damn seriously. If you leak anything, they will find out it's you — believe me, they have ways — and not only will you lose your job, not only will you be blackballed from ever working in the industry again, but they'll punish your friends and teammates long after you're gone.

Why are they so harsh? They have their reasons.

If you present yourself as one of their employees, without their authorization, you're representing the company, and doing it without permission. (If you explicitly have permission, of course, that's a whole different story, with a different set of rules; more on that down the road.) Even if you have the best of intentions — say you like the game you're working on, and want to help promote it — you can run into PR flaps, and, worse, legal trouble; if someone tells you, "Hey, I've got an idea for that game!" and that idea is something the game already has, or might have down the road, you've got a potential lawsuit on your hands. Usually a groundless lawsuit, sure, but more of a headache than anyone needs, and they'll blame you. (Hint: If, under whatever circumstances, someone pitches you a game idea, the correct response is, "Yeah, sorry; we can't accept game ideas. Legal reasons." If they try to give you any materials for their idea, give them right back.)

Causing any sort of leak will also undermine people's trust in your department, and even in your office as a whole. There was a case a couple of years ago where some jackass at a disc manufacturer stole a copy of a game and posted all the cutscenes on YouTube a week early, ruining the surprise ending. Would you hire that same manufacturer again, if it was your game he stole from? Almost certainly not; even if the rest of the employees are perfectly competent, what he did on their watch undermines them all.

I've seen it happen more than once. I've seen very skilled and useful testers, good friends in some cases, just destroy their own careers — good, promising careers — with one mistake.

Don't break your NDA. And if you do break your NDA, don't break it on the Internet.