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In honor of the first tantalizing glimpse of work at the Fallout Forum, I figured I’d put up a little image I whipped up last Valentine’s Day. It’s just a modification of an already-known public piece of Fallout 3 promotional material, which was done by a fellow who’s a much better artist than I am.

I never expected it to go outside the internal company, but Ashley really liked it, and suddenly it got out to the world. It’s quite an honor, really, and while it’s obviously not anything like an official statement of what the game is like, it is a nice little thing to share with everyone else who loves the games as much as I do.

Now, back to work for me!

Well, you may have noticed my most recent two posts were about: (1) how I’m planning on updating more often, and (2) how effective working in QA can be for preparing a person for other development positions. Funny thing about that, you see…

Apparently, the narrative universe realized that it was a perfect time to fill up my free time by leading me to a new, higher position at work. Sure, I may have done the working, writing, applying, interviewing, and general awesome-Fred-being that impressed the right folks, but my life is too full of happy coincidences to take full credit for it. At least, doing so would shatter what vestiges of humility I’ve still got.

So obviously I’ll be busy forging my creativity into concrete results outside of this webpage, but I’ll still keep the updates coming. As always, they won’t be about my particular workplace or, of course, anything on which I’m working. That would hardly be professional. But the observations about the industry will continue unabated.
After all, I’ve just moved to a slightly different perspective, and that’s bound to lead to new insights!

Nay, it is my solemn duty to feed the hungry maw of curious readership, and to keep at bay its furious boredom. Oh yes.

To that end, I promise a more regular update schedule, and a feed for RSS 2.0. And while today’s update is but a mere downpayment on the promise of regular updates, I can offer you the full RSS feed right here and right now. Enjoy!

Everyone loves to compare games with the film industry, so let’s see if we can find any parallels in the cinema. During the growth of the film industry, there was a story that everyone knew:

A bright and promising youth would go to the movies and somehow the flickering images would ignite their imaginations. They would yearn to be the shining star on the silver screen, become enraptured with the possibilities of the camera’s lens, or feel their own stories well within them and ache to tell them to the world. And unlike the passing fancies of so many of their fellows, they would stick to their vows that someday it would be they - yes, they! - that would be the name behind the film! And to achieve those distant dreams, they would pack up everything they owned and embark for the big city in the West and its big studios, wrapped in confidence of their unique talent.

And then they would find that they weren’t the only prospector to flock to California’s second gold rush, struggling to stake their claim to fortune on the silver screen.

Some would take any job near a studio, waiters and cigarette girls hoping that their brilliance would catch the eye of a big name who would open all of the doors to them. Occasionally, it would work, but for most of these hapless souls, their time would lead only to bitterness and frustration. Some incredibly skilled few actually would have the skills to get in the door, but for each that became a sensation, others withered under the real strains of the industry.

But for most that made good, success came from taking whatever work they could find on a set, starting as a simple grip or assistant, and learning the real skills of their craft by watching everyone else on the set. They worked their jobs and studied the jobs of those around them, earning respect and trust until they found their chance to shine. They were apprentices who learned their crafts from the ground up.

Fade up to the present day, and you’ll see that at least as many promising young talents are entranced by the sparkle and gleam of games. They yearn to draw that dashing hero, to push that powerful processor, or to introduce players to the worlds within their minds. And unlike so many of their fellows on the fora, they take the chance that they - yes, they! - would be the name on the box. And to achieve those dreams, they pack up their best works and apply to those big studios around the globe.

And like their predecessors, they find that they aren’t the only person on the ‘net to try to get to that glittering gem.

Some spread themselves across the internet, posting in fora and news sites, hoping their insights would catch the eye of a big company who would open their doors to them. Occasionally, it works, but for most of those hapless souls, they descend into cultish sniping and deluded irrelevance. Some incredibly skilled few have the portfolio to get hired from obscurity, but for each wonderboy that becomes a steady force, others cannot handle the responsibility of working with a team.

But for most who make good, success comes from taking the jobs available at a game studio, starting as an intern, QA tester, or (heaven help them) as tech support. And from there, they begin the task of learning the real skills of their craft by watching the teams around them.

In one of these positions, an observant worker can see the many difficulties in the rough path a game takes towards completion. And nothing exposes a learner to
more of these mistakes than working in Quality Assurance as a tester. Testers see every mistake made and corrected, uncover every flaw found and fixed, and
log more hours on a game than any other human would ever consider. And, at every step, a clever tester learns about how to create game art, program functional code, and write gripping stories.

There’s simply no better apprenticing.

Okay, that’s a damned lie. Most people are only interested in working in QA as a way to get their foot in the door of the games industry.

But more on that in another post.

Regardless of your reasons for working as a tester, there are some important skills that you must develop to provide quality quality assurance. And they aren’t all what one might expect.

First, the big misconception about working in QA: people outside the games industry think it’s just “playing games all day”. This is sort of like describing gardening as “playing in the grass all day”. Sure, it’ll help if you enjoy that, but it’s definitely underselling the work that’s done.

A Quality Assurance tester is given an early build of a game and then told to find ways to break it. When we find problems, ranging from “here’s a typo” to “this wall doesn’t look right” to “doing things in this complex, obscure order makes this other thing act incorrectly”, then we write detailed descriptions of the problem, how we caused it, and how it can be caused again. If we’re really good - and I am - then we include information pertinent to how it may be fixed (debugging info, dump logs, etc).

A brief disclaimer: technically, this is more accurately known as “Quality Control”, with “Quality Assurance” referring to creation of effective production methods. And yet, it’s still generally called “QA” at many studios. I blame the fact that “QA” is a much catchier acronym than “QC,” and now we’re stuck with it. It’s just as well: if we were called “Quality Testing”, then we’d be forever stuck with people calling us “cuties.”

Regardless, it relies on a strange mix of skills. A good QA tester needs:

Gaming Familiarity - You don’t need to be a game virtuoso, but you need to be able to interact with the game all day, every day, for months. You should be able to play at least as well as the average player, just so you can get your work done and explore the game properly. But try not to play too much better than average all the time - otherwise, you won’t be checking the game thoroughly and realistically.

Observation - Not every bug is as obvious as a crash. Sometimes, a bug will go unnoticed by testers for months, just because no one thought to look at the monster from behind, or no one really read the captions of the conversational dialogue all that closely. In a section that every tester had seen, I found a misuse of “loath” instead of “loathe“. It’s probably the most nitpicking of bugs I’ve found, but it’s still a mistake that can be corrected for a better final product. The devil may not be in the details, but the bugs often are.

Clear, Tactful Communication - You need to be able to clearly express exactly what the problem is and how to recreate it, all while maintaining a certain amount of tact. Remember, you’re talking about how you broke something they’ve been working on for months, and people can get testy. Sadly, the downside of the gaming industry’s loose attitude is the occasional risk of unprofessional egos, so know how to tread lightly when critiquing.

Creativity - Anyone can test for the obvious things, but the bigger and more open the game you’re testing, the more you need to be ready to try crazy shit and see if that works. You need to be able to play a game in a hundred different ways, because there are ten million users out there who want to play the game their way, and they will complain if it doesn’t work.

Development Familiarity - The more familiar you are with the fundamentals of the programming, art, and design sides of the particular game you’re working with, the more specific your bug analysis can be, and the quicker your bugs can be fixed. You can’t be patronizing in your analysis, since they sure as hell know their side better than you, but knowing what clues are useful and what’s chaff makes a big difference.

And, of course, none of these skills will help a tester stand out unless they’re paired with the most important QA skill:

Perseverance - You will be working on the same game every hour, every day, every week, for months. Even the most complex and deepest games will become routine to you. You will hear the same dialogue, complete the same missions, and face the same monsters until they invade your dreams. If you can’t find a way to keep yourself interested, fresh, and energetic, your excitement at working in the games industry will burn out and wither after a few short weeks.

And if you burn out because you lack perseverance, all of your other skills will be useless.

But then again, that can be said of most worthwhile tasks in life, can’t it?

Still, I’m back now, and I’ve had plenty of ideas percolating. So let’s get right back to it!

This seems like the right time to admit a certain bias in viewpoint. I’m a tester, and I’m proud of it.

It’s easy to understand the general disdain towards testers. Their job is to go through the game and find everyone else’s problems. After pulling a grueling 80+ hour week, no one is going to react well to being told they left a critical bug in the latest build. And yet, the tester’s job requires they do exactly that, compiling hundreds of problems – large, small, and miniscule – that have slipped by programmers, artists, and designers on all levels. People outside of the industry think testing is like playing games all day, but it’s much more like being a proofreading editor. Except without the respect.

To make matters worse, testers are often the least known members of a game development team. Many developers contract out their QA work to companies they may never have met, and even the developers with in-house testers don’t tend to be on a first-name basis with more than half of them at any given time. It can be especially hard to keep up to date as a project nears the end of its development cycle, because that’s when a QA department tends to shore up its forces by hiring handfuls of temps to handle the workload. And many of these temporary testers are college or high-school gamers full of ambition and attitude, but all-too-often lacking in other little areas like professionalism or tact.

Life in a game house’s offices may be rowdy and informal, but it’s teatime with the queen compared to the joking in a crowded room full of unruly QA temps. And when you’ve got a dozen new kids pointing out your mistakes with the attitude that they could do better, it’s no wonder the collective group is almost-affectionately known “miscreants”. At best.

Still, the testing process is an undeniable step in the development of a game, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who’s played a poorly-tested game. From the constant minor bugs found in the later stages of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance to game-stoppers like the recent Bubble Bobble Bug, releasing a game with insufficient testing is like sending off a drunken email to your girlfriend without proof-reading it in the morning. Maybe it just had a few typos, and you didn’t insult her too much, but you’ll definitely be hearing about every little mistake… if she bothers to respond to you ever again.

Close communication between testers and the rest of the team can make a huge difference in the efficiency of the testing, and there’s a suite of skills that dedicated testers should develop to improve this communication, as well as the respect they receive from the other developers in their company. Of course, even the most professional QA tester will still be seen as one of the lowest positions in the game development world. But there are worse things than being seen as one of the miscreants.

They could be as disrespected as tech-support.