Friday
Feb122010
In the Dungeon
As “reality” television show The Tester prepares to make its dramatic PlayStation Network debut, I offer a personal story of entering the game industry through the ranks of Quality Assurance on Edge Online. It is sectioned into four parts.
- Part One. The call; the journey.
- Part Two. The people.
- Part Three. The atmosphere.
- Part Four. The meaning, or lack thereof.
Please enjoy.
in 
Writings Elsewhere | February 12, 2010
Writings Elsewhere | February 12, 2010
Reader Comments (11)
But now I'm about to start a 1 year game design program at VFS. This will hopefully help me create the portfolio I need to get a real job.
Maybe I should post this on Edge where it might actually help someone...
Your experience at EAM is unfortunate, but not uncommon. I believe most of the large publishers and even the console manufacturers do the 15-month contract, 3-month unemployment shuffle. As a general rule, these aren't the places where you will get hired as a designer: you are competing against 80-100 other people, many of them with more experience than you, and likely with stronger ties to the permanent QA pit staff (the QA leads).
Since these places hire huge numbers of QA people, however, they are your best step into a job that you can put on your resume as Industry Experience. Once you have Industry Experience, you have a much higher chance of getting hired for QA at a smaller studio. If you've done a good job at a place like EA, made a good impression, and soaked up as much knowledge as you can, you are instantly a much more attractive candidate at a dev house. Likely you will get another QA job, but hopefully it will be at a company where you can actually talk to the dev team about the bugs you find, and so forth (which will not always be the case. There's a thick membrane between QA and Dev at a lot of studios). In an environment like this, it's easier to get noticed, and competition, while equally or more fierce, is easier because there are less people competing, with a higher chance of people actually remembering your name.
Nowadays, however, QA isn't the only way to get into the industry, not by a long shot. You can take courses in game design/programming/art, you can make your own games with Flash, Game Maker, Unity, or any number of other tools, or learn Obj C and make games for the iPhone. There's a number of relatively well-known folks who have never worked at a large dev house who are still relatively well-known and respected for the games they have created. And none of these possible avenues is exclusive of the others. You can study game design and be tinkering around in Unity or Flash, or you can be working QA during the day and working on your first Indie game at night. Eventually, with enough time and work, something will pan out for you. Keep working hard, meeting and talking to people in the industry, and making what games you can.
Anyway, this testimonial does remind me that I should write a post about "breaking through" via QA just to frame some people's expectations. It's not how I went about things, but I do tend to see an awful lot of hopeful assumptions being made about the job. Mostly how it's the perfect gateway to just about any position in the industry, and it really isn't.
Plus, such a post would allow for plenty of anecdotes about funny bugs! Here's one of my all time favourites from a third-party studio:
The game we were working on had various collectibles, each one worth a static amount of money. Towards the end of the project, we got a bug -- well, more like a dissertation -- detailing the economical unlikeliness of such a system. You see, in a free market, values constantly fluctuate, and supply and demand plays a key role in the price of goods. In such an environment, the monetary worth of our collectibles couldn't realistically stay the same as they were perpetually flooding the market. To fix the bug, the value of the goods should constantly go down until a scarcity threshold is reached.
Half our team wasn't sure if it was a joke or a serious stab at getting attention from a former business grad, but I thought it was hilarious.
What I find most interesting about the show is that one of the female contestants was already on another reality show, vying to be on some competitive gaming team. She's an "expert" or whatever in a couple of genres, including music games. Her involvement seems weird to me, considering when I look at applications for game designer jobs it isn't uncommon to see "professional-level play" counted as a major boon to your application.
The truth might be more boring than the seeming absurdity of the show's concept would have us believe: these people want to be on television.
This article brought a lot of bitterness and resentment from my time in QA back to the surface...
University and video game design school tuition is as expensive as ever; the barrier to entry to the industry had better be high! Although I sometimes wish I got in on the ground floor during the "good ol' days", I'm also grateful to see the games industry mature to a point where not any joe with a high score can just walk in off the street.
And Michel: it looks like we'll be bumping into each other at the VFS soon enough!
I can say, from first-hand experience, that developers are still willing to take a good QA person and move them into more advanced rolls. A company I used to work for transitioned their QA guys into designer and programmer positions.
Even beyond QA, sometimes any job in a studio is enough. I know an artist who started out as the receptionist. He took the job purely so he could get to know the people in the studio and be close at hand when next they needed a junior artist, and that worked out brilliantly for him.
QA isn't guaranteed access to your dream job in the industry, and it isn't even always the best way into the industry, but it is one method that has worked and continues to work for many people.