It's a simple truth that pretty much all of us are here because we love games. We all have different jobs, those of us out in the workforce that is, where it may be a little different those much younger that are working in small little stores in retail and what not. But there is always that thought that burns in the back of many of our minds, if I love games so much, why not get a job in the gaming industry. Recently a blog by a fellow CAG member here LethalDose84 that really sparked me to write this blog. The question of whether or not is it really possible to break into the business fairly easy. The bottom line is that being in the video game industry is like any other job, its work, a lot of work. There are different approaches to trying to get a job in the video game industry though. What is important to acknowledge is that while there are many games out there, people do need to realize that getting in the video game business doesn't mean you'll be a rock star of the business. But let's get back to the directions one can approach....
Let me first start by saying that I am no expert in being in the video game industry. I am like many others right now, having ambitions and desires to work in the industry. About 8 years ago now, I did work for Acclaim Entertainment who released games like Turok, Burnout 1 & 2, and All Star Baseball, as a Full Time Game Tester/Analyst. It was the most fun job environment I've ever been in because while the games were garbage really except for those choice few like Burnout, everyone really cared about making games. When I mean, everyone, I really mean everyone. The producers, the testers, the programmers, the artists, all of us had such a passion for the games we were trying to make. From my perspective, it wasn't testing crappy games even though they were, as a tester its basically your job to make sure the game suffers as little garbage as possible. I was a hard-ass tester. I was very detail oriented and I nitpicked every damn bug I could find. I knew most of them would be passed over or disregarded, but they want that. They want to know these things because they want to see what possibly they can improve with the directions that the programmers and artists are approaching in other projects, perhaps a sequel. In essence, the in-house testers are the upper level focus group. Most studios have the PR department goes out and locates individuals that would fit the target audience of the game to be tested by the group. Then that group would be given a small amount of time to give their opinion of the game. But the in-house testers, while they look for the bugs that break the game, comments about the game in question are always welcome from the testers by the studio. Allow me to stop myself here and organize my thoughts on this, but I'll end this segment with just clarifying that what I say here, while may sound educated and informative, this in no way makes me an expert about the video game industry. With that out of the way, let me begin...
Where to begin to try to get into the business is something you always hear. What do I do, where do I apply, what do I need to know, these are all questions that really can be answered by just doing a little homework and research. Our humble hosts here CheapyD, Wombat, and Shipwreck, can attest that getting to this point has taken a lot of work to have this strong community and bring us all this news and information. This doesn't mean that it can't be done, it just takes work. Gaming Journalism is essentially easy to do because all you have to do is write, but grabbing an audience and fan base is the difficult part. As I sit here and write this blog, those you that will read it will probably see the view number and honestly I predict the views count wouldn't reach over 170 perhaps. If I was a well known blogger, doing this 15 years, posting on numerous sites, I would probably have a good number of followers and perhaps even my own site. But the truth is that, I don't. I can only hope that this blog will help others out there looking for the same dream of getting into the business. Gaming Journalism is fun for me, but its not where I want to ultimately end up. I believe I would have fun doing it on a regular basis, but its not my focus target of study.
Game Tester is the bottom of the barrel in terms of the industry but it is essential. As a young person, say the ages between 13 and 18, and you have desires to be in the game industry, being a game tester would be right up your alley. But there are problems with that age group, and the location of where such positions can be found. Another CAG member here Count, made a really good point in explaining that a good number of tester positions are contract positions lasting anywhere between 3 to 8 months at times. At the same time, because of that young age group, you'd be more likely in being a Focus Group Game Tester. In that position, you'd be seeing games mostly in their near released versions, preparing to go gold. In-House Game Testers see games at their raw level with debug code all over it, developer tools, essentially a cheat version of the game that lets you skip levels, enable invincibility, boost power ups, and so on. The essential requirements of a tester is simple:
- High School Diploma
- Great writing and communication skills
- A genuine passion for games
Some other unsaid requirements are:
- Tolerance of all types of games
- Tolerance of extremely repetitive actions
- Willingness to work overtime
I guess you can see that tolerance is something that is stressed, but not said. A Full Time Game Tester can usually hope to make as low as $9.00 to $12.00 an hour, and that isn't bad just for playing games. Being good at games is definitely helpful because you have to manage through just about any game, but the tolerance level is what I stress in terms of being good at games. As I was a tester myself, I can tell you it wasn't always playing good games. Mary Kate and Ashley games really did suck to play, but it had to be done. If you test games at studios like Epic or Blizzard, you know you'll be testing games of a fairly narrow scope of games. But other game studios such as EA and THQ, these are not just developers but publishers that push out a lot product by many studios that spin away from some of the games you may like. EA publishes Madden, Medal of Honor, Mirror's Edge, and so on, but they also publish games like Harry Potter, G.I. Joe, and Facebreaker. Harry Potter isn't the greatest to play and with such games like Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Madden, Rock Band, Crysis 2, even The Sims, sitting at EA testing Harry Potter while sitting next to someone playing Crysis may seem discouraging, but you have to cast that thought aside because its not about being put on the good games. You're there to do a job, and unfortunately, if you are looking to be a tester, be prepared to play some garbage games. So how do you get to be put on the big titles? Do your job well. You can't just sit there playing games like you were in your living room having fun and cracking jokes with those around you. I mean, you can, but you have to keep your eye on the job while you do it.
The best way to know if you have what it takes to be a game tester, here's what you can do. Take any game you play, and find a place in the game where you may have found a graphical glitch, maybe just a flickering texture of some kind. Now that you have that, write down steps as to how you would find the graphical glitch in the game. Once you have, ask someone who never played the game before to follow your directions and see if they can find the glitch you are describing. If they can, then you got it. If you can't, you won't last long. The reason being is that studios are usually broken up. While you may be testing games in LA, the programmers might be in England, or Germany, or maybe Virginia or Minnesota. So more than likely, you will not be able to verbally describe to the programmer where your bug is to be found. The obvious bugs are not what they worry about like if you said in God of War 3, when Kratos grabs Helios head, and begins to turn it, Helio's eyes don't move with the turn of the head. That's an example of what an easy bug is because the programmers know that the player will eventually get to that point in the game. There's no dodging that scene because its one of the linear portions of the game. But if you think about a game like Borderlands or Grand Theft Auto 4 that are so large and massive, you have to think about landmarks and exact moments that cause the bug to occur. Say for example, you were passing through Time Square in Grand Theft Auto and you angled the camera at one point looking towards the huge TV at the Y intersection and there was a texture missing that allowed you to look through the whole building. While it could be just as simple as looking towards the TV one can see the missing texture, it could be possible that the position of the player may be the cause. It could be the position, the time of day, if you were in a vehicle, was there an explosion that occurred in that area, did you change your outfit, does it only happen in single player, does it only occur after a certain event, does it happen on the east side of the street and not the west side, all these questions are things you have to ask yourself about these bugs. But at the same time they want you to pay attention to detail, you have to look at this in a reasonable amount of time because of course they don't want you to analyze one missing texture for a half hour. Finding bugs while quickly isolating their cause is what they look for, and again, being able to give directions as to where to easily find it or how to get it to happen again, is what is key because you issues will go to the programmer to go and find it so they can fix it. I'd say if you're horrible at giving map directions, you wouldn't do well at game testing.
I'll close out this blog with some notes now. I myself don't have everything figured out about what it takes to get in the business but I do believe I have a good direction and a logical theory of what it will take to get there. Will I be successful? Who knows at this point, but I'm working at it, and I feel I will succeed. Currently I'm in school studying Game Art & Design to hopefully be a Game Writer, Concept Artist, 3D Animator, or perhaps even a Game Designer someday, and its a lot of work. I read a lot and I play around with a lot of software to learn what goes into games. I will close out this blog with some nice recommendations. My first recommendation is this book....
It's called Fundamentals of Game Design by Ernest Adams. This book will describe and show you an analytical side of all types of games from puzzle games to first person shooters, it lays down the ground work of what developers do to create the game experience of all sorts of games. It's a hefty book but its a great read and I finished it cover to cover, and believe me that doesn't happen often as I'm not the fastest reader. It's available on iBooks and Kindle if you can't find it in paperback, but I think it will give you a great perspective on why games are made the way they are. My second recommendation is following David Jaffe's blog and on twitter.
Creator of the God of War series and Twisted Metal, he is one of the most outspoken, named #1 Outspoken Game Designer by Game Informer, but he is very opinionated about games and what makes games great. I have followed and spoken with Mr. Jaffe briefly on Twitter and he has provided me with some awesome advice and insight about the game industry. You may not always get a response from him, but his blog is really informative about his production process, and he really does care about the opinions of people that are fans and play his games. I do warn you though, if you blast at him, he will blast right back. You can follow Mr. Jaffe at twitter name @davidscottjaffe.
And that's my blog. Hope you enjoy it. Thanks for reading.
- Game On! Blog also posted to www.cheapassgamer.com in their blog section. Always full of good stuff.
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