I once had a job testing video games...

I'm starting another new direction with this blog that no one reads since you're all on My Space.

By the way, I thought about going with a My Space page when I started this blog over a year ago and I was struck by something, that it looked like crap. My Space pages look like some beginning web designer who only had a budget of $50 and one day to design a page. The pages are just plain ugly. Very ugly. I thought that there is no way I'd get any traffic on a page that looks this crappy, but I guess I was wrong. Oh well...

In 1999, my wife and I moved to California. She got a job at a local newspaper. I couldn't find much for work save for my immediate job when I walked into the local Pizza Hut, told them I had over 8 years experience and then proceeded to make 3 pizzas to their regular cook's one pizza. You could say I nailed the interview (which there wasn't one).

I had told my boss that I didn't come to California to work at Pizza Hut, so he was aware that I was planning on leaving.

One night, I stumbled across an ad that read, "Do you like to play sports video games?"

I read it. It was for doing quality assurance on video games. All I needed was a resume and a list of every game that I can ever remember playing. The resume I had. The list of games I had to make.

It took a while, but I managed to get my list of compiled. Scanning my memory from Pong until that time, I came up with an extremely long list of games. Surprisingly, I got an interview with the agency filling the job. I then nailed the job interview at a well-known video game company.

It was an interesting interview.

There were questions like:
"What makes a quality game?"
"Do you like playing games?"
"What do you like in a game?"
"What's the worse game you've ever played?"
"Have you ever spotted a bug in a game?"
"How would you go about testing a game?"

I had never tested a video game before, but I managed to cite some examples in which I thought a game sucked and why. I also managed to come up with some examples on some bugs that I had seen in some games.

They nodded and murmured to each other, "That's a bug."

I was excited as hell when they offered me the job. It was very unexpected. I was making barely six dollars an hour at Pizza Hut and now I'd be making twice that amount (almost). Looking back at that, it wasn't much to live on, but it was a decent amount and more than I had ever been paid before.

I told my wife that I got offered the job. Her response: "Oh Lord!"

I told my brother, Joe, that I got offered the job with the line: "Prepare for me to suddenly become the coolest uncle your boys have."

He said that their reaction to the news of my new job was that they were "very impressed."

Thus we enter the first stage of getting a job testing video games: Excitement.

You see, just like the five stages of dying, there are stages that one goes through when getting a job testing video games.

The five stages of dying are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

I would say the stages of getting a job testing video games are: Excitement, Disappointment, Depression, Self Pity and Acceptance.

People look at me odd when I used to tell them that getting a job as a video game tester was like dying. It's because you go through several stages when you work this job.

The day I started, I was a little nervous because I had to suddenly commute to and from San Francisco. Besides that, I had never worked at a testing job before and I had no idea what was expected of me. I imagined that I would be sitting around playing the game and making notes on what I thought was wrong. As a matter of fact, that is mainly what I ended up doing.

I chose a really ass backwards method of commuting to work. Instead of driving down the insane Interstate 80 west to San Francisco, which is the most direct route, I ended up taking a much longer way. I wanted to take the subway, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, to San Francisco, but there wasn't a line in the east bay where I lived, so I drove about 40 minutes from Vacaville to Concord to get on a train. From there, it was a 50 minute train ride to downtown San Francisco. From the station, it was a 20 minute walk straight south to get to South of Market, where the company was located. If you do the math, it's about an hour and 50 minutes each way! That alone depressed me.

So I'm in stage one: Excitement and it's pretty exciting so far. The building has a fantastic view of the city from where we work. The people are friendly. It's a very loose atmosphere.

The first week, they check out a system to me and give me a game to get familiar with. I start testing with a guy named Johnny. He was pretty cool and had done some testing for the company before, so he let me in on what to look for in the games. We each had a TV, a VCR and a game system, but that first week, I was testing with Johnny. We were playing a basketball game together. He was usually the Lakers. I was usually the Kings. We'd play and he'd take some notes on what he thought looked wrong. I learned to do some of the same.

So I'm in the middle of the Excitement stage when I suddenly started to feel a little different. I started to wonder if I had made the right decision or if I had settled because I came to the Bay Area with dreams of being a web programmer, but I ended up testing games. I decided to stick with it, but it wasn't long before I entered the second stage: Disappointment.

I started to get a little disappointed. I was disappointed with myself for working there. I was disappointed with the job because I soon realized that playing games all day long ceases to be fun several hours into the first day. When you start exploring the games and generally doing things that aren't fun like checking statistics, misspellings, player animations, etc, it starts to get tedious fast.

I think that I didn't feel that I belonged there. I was surrounded by dozens of younger guys who all seemed to know each other all ready. They would laugh and joke amongst each other while I was quiet. Being a Nebraska guy around California kids can be a little intimidating. I think I expected to find people that I related to. I didn't at first.

Worse yet, I shared a cube with Rod. Now Rod was a cool enough guy, but like me, he seemed to be disappointed with himself for working at the company. Rod told me that he too had moved to the Bay Area with his wife. She found a good job, but he was having trouble finding a job doing 3D modeling. He had hoped that working a job testing video games would be a way to network to do other things, but it was only after he took the job that most of the games came programmed from Japan while a few were programmed in the states, but not at our building, so he started to sink into the third stage: Depression.

When I started, he was playing a game in which a guy goes around blowing zombies up with various weapons. You blow your way through the game until you get to the end of the level. Then a new level starts with the same thing. You shoot zombies, collect power ups and fight the end guy. Between levels you were treated to some extremely bad voice acting in the cut scenes as the mastermind behind the bringing the dead to life shouts, "Ha Ha Ha! Yooou Foooolllsss!!!"

Rod would mimic all of the dialogue because he knew it all by heart. He could literally finish the game in an hour. Watching Rod test the video game over and over was bad enough. He would sit there all stoic, finish the game and then simulate himself blowing his head off with an invisible gun. He'd finish the game, give a big long sigh and then start the game up all over again. That's all he did all day for a few weeks that I sat next to him. To make matters worse, the game was practically finished. He had written up a few bugs in it that wouldn't be fixed and he couldn't find anything else. It was usually after he had finished the game twice that he'd get up and take a long and extended break.

As funny and sad as it was to see Rod go through the Depression stage, it was shortly after the basketball game was released that Rod quit. I liked Rod and talked to him a bit when I was testing. To make matters worse than him leaving, I was assigned the very same game that he was assigned!

I liked the game at first, but soon after getting good at the game and then beating it after an hour or two; I started to sink into the Depression stage myself. Like Rod, I started memorizing the horrible game dialogue and knew every twice and turn in the game after only a few days. It was not fun at all.

As if Depression wasn't enough, I started to sink into the next stage: Self-Pity. Actually the Depression and Self-Pity stages go hand in hand.

I suppose I should have looked on the bright side of things, but I couldn't when I was staring into the face of a soul-crushing arcade port that was not meant for playing eight hours a day.

It was then that I started to question my employment at the company. I started to feel guilty because I felt that I was abusing them for getting paid to work there. There I was, with a college degree and two years of graduate school in hand and the best that I could do was getting a job testing video games. I would think, "What kind of loser am I that this is my stopping point in California?"

I was commuting 3 hours and 30 minutes roundtrip per day for pete's sake! I had to shell out 8 dollars a day in tolls and train tickets to get to work, let alone the gas money it took to get to the train station.

I don't think that everyone that gets a job in the video game industry testing games is like this. The fact that I was homesick for my home state coupled with the long commutes made me super depressed and feeling sorry for myself. Everything was not living up to my expectations.

I finally settled into the last stage: Acceptance.

It was two months in when I finally accepted my job status. I was a temp and there were rumblings that they were going to get rid of the temps. There were 28 of us and they decided to get rid of half of us. I made the cut because I worked hard, did what I was told and didn't complain about it. I was literally the last person to make the cut list. It was after this reprieve that things started to pick up for me.

I'm probably being whiny about this, but I think the fact that so much change was happening so fast in my life was what caused these mixed feelings about becoming a video game tester. I live for stability, but the move, the commute, the job search and the newness of the situation magnified the feelings.