Quality Assured: What It’s Really Like To Test Games For A Living
There's an old commercial for Westwood College that's become something of a running joke in the video game world. Two young men sit at a couch, hammering away at PlayStation controllers. A woman walks in. “Hey guys, finish testing that game yet?” she asks. “I've got another one I need designed.”
“We just finished level three and need to tighten up the graphics a little bit,” says one of the men. Then he turns to his friend, smiling like he just won the lottery. “Hey, I can't believe we got jobs doing this.”
“I know,” the other guy says. “And my mom said I would never get anywhere with these games.”
For a very long time, that's how people have imagined the life of a video game tester, not as 9-to-5 job but as the fantasy of teenagers everywhere. Who wouldn't want to sit on a comfy couch and play games all day, taking the occasional break to tighten up the graphics on level three?
Reality is a little different. Video game quality assurance (QA), as testing is called, is often perceived as “playing games for a living” but might better be described as breaking them. It's a low-paying, occasionally rewarding, often frustrating job that has both more and less to do with the quality of today's games than you might expect.
A professional QA tester doesn't just sit by the television, crack a Mountain Dew, and saunter through level 5 of the latest shooter; he or she spends 14 straight hours running into different walls to see if they're all solid. Proper video-game testing is more akin to abstract puzzle-solving than it is to getting a top score in Donkey Kong , despite what you may have seen in college commercials like Westwood's. “It takes a very specific attitude and outlook to really be good in the QA world,” a veteran game tester told me. “It goes beyond a passion for video games, and definitely beyond the notion that you get to play video games for a living.”
Game testers are, by nature, underappreciated; they are only noticed when something goes wrong. QA veterans say the job is stressful, tedious, and often seen as a doorway to other parts of game development rather than a viable career path. Often, testers work on temporary contracts or for outsourcing companies that don't let them communicate directly with a game's developers. And when a game is particularly buggy or broken—as many recent releases have been—it's customary for observers to blame QA. They are the safeguards, after all—the final wall between a programmer's mistakes and a customer's money. It's in the name: Quality Assurance. They're supposed to assure quality.
But when a big game ships broken, is QA really to blame? How could testers possibly not find some of the bugs that show up in the games we play? Why do so many servers break all the time? Just what do QA people do all day, anyway?
Over the past few months I've had extensive conversations with several dozen current and former QA testers—many of whom spoke anonymously in order to protect their careers—in an attempt to explore the world of video game testing and try to explain what it's really like to play games for a living. Some said they hated working in QA; others said they couldn't imagine doing anything else. Almost all agreed on one thing: not a lot of people understand how QA actually works.
For as long as there have been video games, there have been bugs. Some are relatively harmless and have even attained mythological status, like Pokémon ’s enigmatic Missingno . Others are seared into video game history, like Minus World, an unbeatable Super Mario Bros. level that you can only access by glitching into a wall. Many bugs have been discovered, abused, and enjoyed by the assiduous speedrunning community —how else would you beat Ocarina of Time in 17 minutes?
Those are the friendly bugs, though. Most video game glitches are irritating at best and game-breaking at worst, which is why every game goes through quality assurance, an extensive testing process implemented to ensure that everything's working properly. The term “QA” draws from the world of products—microwaves, cars, assembly lines—and in many ways video game testing is no different. A tester's job is to poke, prod, and play the hell out of a game until all the kinks are gone, like a factory-worker smoothing out the latest toy.
There's no game industry standard when it comes to QA procedure—every game is different and every company has its own process—but a tester typically spends months playing builds of the same game over and over again in all sorts of different ways. The more bugs a tester finds, the higher his or her perceived value to the company. This is one hell of a challenge, of course: video games are complicated sets of interlocking systems that require careful, meticulous bug-testing, which can involve testing the same level repeatedly with slight variations—using a new character, wielding a different weapon, following an alternate pathway—and recording everything that happens.
Take Grand Theft Auto V , for example. On Rockstar's giant open-world game, QA testers had to divide and conquer. “You would have individual testers assigned certain missions, or tasks, mini games etc.,” said one person who helped test the game. “Normally starting with the big stuff and working down. So doing story missions in order, then heists, then side missions and random characters until you moved on to testing the strip club and prostitutes.”
Sometimes, that tester said, they'd also have to devote tons of time to granular parts of the game, like when Rockstar's designers asked a group of QA staff to test everything players could do with the game's automated taxi service. They quickly found that taking a taxi to a new mission would trigger the mission without properly disposing of the cab, leading to some amusing moments as a taxi drove around and tried to back up during cut-scenes.
“I think working on a project like that is made a lot better by the small moments where something truly stupid happens,” the tester said. “Talking pigs randomly standing up like a person and walking away, randomly being shot out of the sky in a plane by an ambient pedestrian whose physics had fired him into space. Trevor pulling his trousers down then never animating to pull them back up and spending the rest of the entire game with his trousers around his ankles. Franklin's dog used to instantly die if he touched water... he'd just fall into a pool and sink to the bottom like a rock as soon as his paws got wet.”
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