Does anybody still want to be game tester ???
*www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/gamespotting/032303/2.html
The Lowly Life of a Game Tester
I'm going to be perfectly honest with all of you. Going into this, my first attempt at the fearsome task that is GameSpotting, I had not the slightest idea what to write about. Seeing as how this is my first week here and, thus, my opportunity to introduce myself to the GameSpot loyal, I felt I had to come up with something relevant and yet at the same time descriptive of my personality. And so I eventually settled upon a subject that has some actual relevance to me and I think to many of you as well. This week I'll be discussing a job that many gamers out there have either tried their hands at or at least thought about in their lives. No, not stripping--I'm talking about quality assurance, or as it's better known, game testing.
I was a handsome man once...before game testing.
You see, before coming to GameSpot, I had worked a number of different journeyman-type freelance writing jobs to make ends meet. Last year, when all that sort of work began to dry up due to a less-than-stellar economy, I started to seek out some fashion of "real" work. I wanted to stay within the game industry, but it seemed less and less likely that I'd get any sort of media job, as people were being laid off and sites were shutting down at a record pace. Finally, when all hope seemed lost, a friend of mine told me about a job opening where he worked as a game tester. Naturally, being about as close to broke as I'd ever been, I jumped on the opportunity, applied, and was hired immediately. My life as a game tester had officially begun. Little did I know what I was in for.
Game testers are, by nature, temps. Testers are brought in for the length of a game's development cycle, used, abused, and eventually sent back into the wild. Your job as a tester is exactly how it sounds. You're plopped down in front of a TV screen or computer monitor, given a build of an unfinished game, and told to break it. Every time you do break it, you enter it into a database, thus letting the programmers know about it. You continue to do this in a lather, rinse, and repeat-like fashion until a new build of the game comes around, and you have to break it all over again. This can go on for weeks, months, or even years, depending on the allotted production timeline. Sounds superexciting, right?
The key theme in game testing is monotony. Generally speaking, your job is to test the same game over and over again. You don't get to mess around with a variety of different games, as most companies don't have more than one or two projects in the development stage at once. On top of all of that, since games do have release dates, required hours have a sneaky way of piling up on you. Twelve-to-fourteen-hour workdays are not uncommon during crunch time, and while you may get overtime for your efforts, it's little comfort. One day you may wake up, as I did, and like a ton of bricks, you will be hit with the realization that you've just spent somewhere around 70 hours of your week in front of a TV screen trying to track down an elusive crash bug that may or may not actually exist, and the clarity of what your life has become will be staggering.
I spent about nine months working as a tester, and in that time, I went through about as many bouts of depression as one man can go through without jumping in front of a bus. I love video games more than most anything else on this planet, and this job was actually making me hate games. I couldn't look at, touch, or even think about a video game for nearly two months after my test job ended. But I can't be the norm, right? There have to be people out there who like being game testers, right? Right?!? Indeed, there are many gamers out there who thrive on jobs like game testing. The trouble is, many of them thrive so well and so long working test jobs that their lives simply pass them by. Confused? Allow me to explain.
Chances are if you're the kind of person looking for a job in quality assurance, you're also the kind of person who would ideally like to be designing games for a living. And therein lies the trap. With all the overnight success stories and tales of bottom-tiered employees coming out of left field with the next big RPG, many gamers delude themselves into thinking that testing is a quick shortcut into game production. I can't even count how many guys in my test department spent their days talking about their own lofty goals and how one day they're going to "make it." And these aren't just 20-something kids I'm talking about either; a lot of these guys were hovering around 30 or older and have been bouncing from game company to game company for more years than they'd care to admit. These are guys with wives, children, car payments, the whole nine yards, and there they sit, still testing games after all these years, making the same crappy hourly wage and still hoping for their shot at that lucrative production job. You would think that this kind of delusion would be reserved for wannabe actors and rock stars, but even the game industry has its stories of defeat.
Do not take this as an out-and-out roasting of game testers and game testing as a whole. Testing is an absolutely necessary evil, and without it, games would simply never get finished. It's a thankless job without a lot of upside, and you have to appreciate the hard work these guys do. In the end, this story has been only the sum of one man's experiences. If you want to pursue a job in quality assurance, go for it. Just make sure you understand what you're getting yourself into lest you wake up one day 10 years from now, still testing games, wondering where your life went.
if u have some tutorialz, that wud b gr8
Also if it has been already discussed please do direct me toward that thread 
