In the final part of a four-part series, Shadegrown Games founder Matthew Burns remembers trying to score his first job in the game industry as a tester. Read the first, second and third parts of his experiences of the dark arts of quality assurance.
The typical size of bug databases for the larger titles, stretching as they often do into the five-digit numbers, is a testament to how the central miracle of a not insignificant number of games is how they ship at all. Modern software development is characterised by its complexity, and games compound this by adding an equal number of decisions of an artistic nature into the froth. Thus one can browse reports of a crash, a small visual seam between two polygons, a magic spell that is too powerful and makes the game not fun because whoever has it wins automatically, or a minor plot inconsistency all in the same repository.
This is the biggest difficulty of game testing: unlike quality control on a website for a bank, for example, where form and function are easily separated, in games they are often married inextricably. If a tester is playing a shooter and the guns sound too soft to him, what should he do? It’s possible that a real bug in the audio code is muting them. It’s also possible the sound designer wanted them that way as part of his artistic vision. One tester I knew bugged a graphic that was supposed to represent a spaceship that had sustained damage but to us more resembled a grey cube with a corner dipped in white fondant; the bug came back with an acerbic “What are you, an art critic?” from the developers. (Our usual excuse was “oh, I didn’t know that was supposed to be final.” We said that about anything we didn’t like.) And because bug databases have very real monetary and political implications – among other things, the test department’s findings might have used as cause by publishers to withhold payment to an independent studio – something written by a kid on his summer break about why the electromagnetic burst grenade is worthless and ugly besides could balloon into huge points of contention, with acrimonious flame wars erupting in the database before the managers could stop them.
While we were encouraged to keep our reports exclusively about technical problems, things that were clearly incorrect and not opinions about aesthetic choices, the point at which technique ends and art begins is vague– especially in this medium, which is frequently dominated by its own technology. The standard software development methodology that sustains the game industry’s ability to ship big titles year after year can also collide messily with the creative process. The maddening non-science of an activity presupposed to be logical and rational but which was also prey to the benefits and risks of artistic choice serves to make game development a line of work hazardously prone to uncertainty and self-perpetuating delusions.
Of course, just sitting around playing a single game for unnaturally long stretches of time (and not one you would choose to play on your own– sometimes a children’s game, or a game about BMX biking) can lead you to a strange place. Phrases become internalised; images persist inside the eyelids; music meant to be exciting grows soporific with enough repetition. And the play itself, the mechanics of the game, disappear somehow– subsumed into the place beneath lucidity, like a morning commute. Slouching in our hand-me-down office chairs in the dark, eyes fixed on the screen but with no particular intensity, we chatted with each other in meandering threads that trailed off indistinctly as we interrupted ourselves to exclaim at our television screens or take note of some odd behaviour in the game world. We mostly talked about what games we were playing on our own time (that was the one thing we universally had in common, after all) and about the sad injustices of life as a second-class citizen, such as having to wait for our ice cream. Most of us, we felt, weren’t so bad; we had been given an unfair reputation by some of the more extreme behaviour that had become associated with our department, and we reacted to every reminder of our image in the rest of the company’s eyes with the self-consciousness and shame that one feels about the backwardness of a home town.
As the second year of this supposedly temp job began ticking away, my inability to escape the dank oubliette of the basement disillusioned me, and I often despaired of ever moving “up,” literally in this case, to the offices on the above-ground floors where the serious work was done. Seeing others hired after me make the transition only intensified my budding resentfulness, so it did not take me long to begin caustically laying into the company’s games, its marketing strategies, its requisite corporate goofiness. The very novelty to others of the idea of a job playing video games started to make me hostile, too– upon a non-game person asking me some innocent question like “so do you fill out a form after you are done playing?” made me respond as condescendingly as possible “it’s a little bit more than that,” and launch into a ridiculous litany of the QA process that nobody deserved to hear. (After several interviews I finally did get my break, and moved to a new position where among other things I wrote the polite and perfunctory little disclaimers that come with your game stating that if your computer has a certain brand of motherboard you may notice some hitches while you play, and if that happens please try updating to your manufacturer’s latest chipset driver.)
But there was little else I felt I could do at the time, especially given my negligible talent at actual useful things, like programming. For a long time, testing was one of the few reliable ways into the videogame industry, and not a few well-respected creative directors, producers, and executives in the business today can count a stint in the dungeon among their early experiences. In the last few years, however, universities across the world have been adding marvellously rigorous videogame degree programs to their offerings, which, combined with their internships and work study programmes, give aspirants an excellent new route into the ranks of game developers. But the idea of sitting around and playing games all day for money still holds a kind of mythical allure, as indicated by our fascination with The Tester.
Matthew S. Burns is a writer and videogame designer. Prior to going independent, he was a producer at Bungie where he worked on the Halo franchise. More of his writing can be found at www.magicalwasteland.com.