Jason W. Bay - Land a Job as a Video Game Tester

www.GameIndustryCareerGuide.com

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Are you passionate about video games? Have you wondered how you could turn your skill with games into a career as a game tester? If so, youre not alone. At my game career website, I get hundreds of questions from people that want to become game testers. Do these sound like you?

Im 18 and just need a job as a game tester, but I have no idea where to start.
Alex

I spend so much time and dedication playing games, I feel I should get paid! Please send me some guidelines to help me get started on this path.
April

How would I find a stepping stone for becoming a game play tester? Where I can give my first professional attempt to test a video game or project?
Nehamiah

I cant find a single Game QA/Test job.
What should I do?
Dylan

Ive wanted to test video games for some time now but I dont know where to start or what to look for to get into the career.
Anthony

I truly do have a passion for games, just have no idea where to truly start at. Any advice will do me some good.
Randy

If you could help me out, it could change my life .
Colten

For people like Dylan, April and Colten starting out with no experience, its hard to get a job for one major reason: They dont know the basics. So when they interview for a job, the company knows right away that they dont know what theyre talking about because they dont.

To make things worse, a lot of people want to become game testers, so theres major competition for each and every game-testing job in your city. When you apply to a testing job, your application will be just one in a stack of hundreds. How can you stand out?

Do you think you could get a job as a Video Game Tester if only you had the right job knowledge, knew how to build your skills, had help finding and applying for jobs, knew how to ace your interviews, and knew exactly how to succeed once you were hired?

Then youre in luck: I wrote this book for you!

This book will teach you the essentials of game testing, and help you stand out from the crowd so you can get the best job possible. Ill get you up to speed on the tools and techniques of professional game testing, so youll be able to talk the talk in the job interview. Ill teach you how to write a great resume, where to find the best jobs, and how to apply. And when you land your first testing job, youll hit the ground running because youre armed with the information in this book.

Ive spent more than 15 years in the video game industry. I started as a tester and eventually became the head of a large game studio, so I know exactly what hiring managers are looking for in a job applicant.

And right now, my one and only goal is to help you land your first job as a Video Game Tester.

Your time is now. You can do this. Lets get started!

Sometimes, people have the wrong idea about game testing. They think its the same as getting paid to play games. Hopefully you already know thats a bunch of crap something like 60% of people play games every day, so if you could actually get paid to do that, dont you think just about everybody would be doing it?

The fires of this myth are fanned by the Internet, which we all know can be crawling with scammers. (Except for that foreign prince, who should be depositing $10 million into my bank account any day now. He seems totally legit.)

There are dozens of websites claiming they can get you a job making money doing what you already do all day - playing video games! That is, if youll just pay them $49.95 to reveal the secret. Some of them have testimonial videos that sound very convincing, while others have discussion forums full of people enthusiastically claiming that they were skeptical at first, but they took a chance and, OMG, it really works!

Do those websites make your spider-sense tingle? I hope so. Because those arent game testing companies theyre scammers. So please dont give those jerks any of your hard-earned cash.

Okay then, if video game testing isnt getting paid to play games, then what is it, exactly?

Lets start by busting a common myth: testers do not just sit around and play games all day. Game testing is real-world work. And, like any job, sometimes its fun but sometimes its a stressful grind. Youll be playing games that are under construction, well before theyre finished, so theyll be buggy and missing content most of the time. At the early stages, they wont even be playable in any real sense.

One of my tester friends describes his job like this: I nitpick and bug the heck out of games in development with the intent to make them better. I think thats a great description, because it places all the focus on one primary goal: improving the game.

In general, testers play the latest under-construction version (called a build) of the game, and then report anything that looks bad or doesnt work right (called a bug or defect). Thats why its called quality assurance youre making sure that the game is high quality.

On any given day as a QA Tester, you might do things such as:

• Play the build, looking for defects

• When you find a defect, figure out how to make it happen predictably

• Type up a bug report (a description of the defect, along with steps to reproduce it) into special software called a bug tracker or issue database

• Submit the report to the game development team (dev team, in testing lingo) so they can fix the problem

• The programmer that receives your report might ask for more information to help find and fix the issue

Dont worry Ill explain every one of these steps in depth later on. For now, just keep in mind that testers try to find problems in a game, and then report the problems to the dev team to be fixed.

The game testers job is important because theyre the front line of defense to make sure the game is awesome when its released to players. If they dont do their jobs well, it can lead to millions of disappointed fans when the game ships with bugs, crashes, or (even worse) loses all of their progress. If thats ever happened to you in a game, then you know how frustrating it is.

When a games quality assurance team does their job well, the game can turn out to be a fun and bug-free experience for players.

According to Wikipedia, Quality Assurance (QA) testing is the process in which professional testers look for and report specific software bugs to be fixed by the development team. Thats very different from playtesting, which is the process by which a game designer tests a new game for bugs and design flaws before bringing it to market.

The key here is that QA testers are mostly looking for bugs, while playtesters are mostly looking for design flaws.

Playtesters are usually needed most at the end of the game development process, when the game is almost finished. But QA testers are needed by every game studio, for every game thats being made, from start to finish. And thats why its a good job to have: As long as people are making games, there will always be demand for good game testers. (Thats where you come in.)