In the third 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 and second parts of his experiences of the dark arts of quality assurance.
If you like games, walking for the first time into a place where they are made is usually a letdown. Film and television naturally lend themselves to behind-the-scenes tours– a peek behind the curtain is already somewhat compelling because the simple act of viewing a scene through the eye of a different perspective other than the camera’s feels like secret knowledge, and the pageantry of the set, with its small army of support personnel in their bustle of activity, can be an aesthetic pleasure in itself.
Videogames are the exact opposite. The most dramatic creative choices are made in airless meeting rooms or on computer screens, and a game development office looks disappointingly like any other office, even though they are often unimaginatively festivised with various video game paraphernalia. The strain for visual interest is nearly palpable in the making-of videos for games: the quick cuts of grey polygons on a monitor, the close up on the hand holding the controller. This hidden banality, lying in wait to ambush wide-eyed and bushy-tailed visitors to the company’s headquarters, made the QA department an important stop in any official tour of the building. Its attraction was due solely to its mildly impressive scale, being as it was a big undivided room striped with banks of televisions and consoles, like a call center without partitions, or a control room manned by stoners. It was dingy but noisy, with dozens of games being played at once (for some reason very few used headphones, even though sound was ostensibly one of the things that was supposed to be tested); even an unmanned bank of machines might be left at the menu screen of a title, its insipid background music repeated in a five-part echo across the room in circular cacophony. And there were shouts, too, over the din of grenades and machine guns: “Cease fire! Hold your fire, everyone! I just saw a bug!”
So the groups on tours would come and slowly walk down the aisle. “This is, uh,” the executives would say, trying to remember the titles of their own products shipping that quarter, and a big Iowan kid I had befriended named Doug and I would make fun of them as soon as they were out of earshot. One time this was happening but the two of us had made the mistake of doing our impressions as soon as we saw them, before they came towards us, so that when they did and performed exactly as we had parodied moments earlier, we involuntarily began snickering madly, sitting right there under their noses. I chewed my cheek in vain, coughing and sputtering, leaving them to walk away perhaps thinking that we were laughing because we were having a grand old time playing their new game, or maybe how irritatingly precocious these two kids were. (Doug later vanished into a cloud of pot smoke and World Of Warcraft, and his parents flew out from Iowa to stage an intervention and bring him back home.)
Other times, an intrepid marketing man or woman would descend into the basement to ask the gamers what they really thought. I imagine the logic was something like “we don’t need to spend the money to call a focus group – we have a sample of our target market already assembled in this very building!” The effect was akin to walking into a comic book shop and asking the grognard of a clerk what he thought about this or that character. First he might recall some bitterness from several years back at some plot twist that he could never fully accept, then launch into his own theory of why something in the fiction was the way it was, and what ought to be done about it, the talk attracting the other patrons of the store to wander over and compete to get their words in edgewise, the poor interlocutor nodding haplessly as the conversation barrelled along towards some train wreck of a uselessly detailed and biased conclusion. The marketing person would be left to wander back upstairs dazed and having learned nothing but that the guys in the basement thought the game pretty much sucked.
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.