After some recent expansion last year by Sega UK, The Guardian games blog opened their comments as a mini-form for games testers to comment and talk about their experiences working in games testing. There were quite a few responses with varying degrees of satisfaction, with many complaints about mis-management, lack of respect and generally low-wages, however, many speak about the great experiences they had working with testing, experiencing project environments and moving up within the ranks of the industry.

Quotes and link after the jump…

Read more of “Testing experiences from the front-lines of games QA“

I had been looking for this for quite awhile, but finally just found the URL to link to. Jokesters UK-Resistance took a swipe at an ad looking for games testers to “play games all day long!!” (presumably from EA) and decided to have a little fun with it. They created a short list of reasons NOT to take this position, which touched wider-ranging problems that most games testers end up coming away with after experiencing the industry. It’s all in good fun folks, honestly…

[Don't be a games tester!]

The crazy Texans who run Phenix Rising and the Armadillo Podcast (an iTunes favorite of ours) conducted a short interview with celebrity games producer Richard “Lord British” Garriot, covering his penchant for haunted houses and talking about his upcoming MMOFPS for NCsoft, Tabula Rasa. Richard is probably most well-known for creating Ultima, the epic and influential RPG as well as for sometimes getting up on stage during performances of Riverdance.

[Interview with Richard Garriot | Richard Garriot @ Wikipedia]

activeCollab is an extremely powerful and open-source project management and collaboration tool, providing the lightweight or indie game developer with free and extremely powerful project management, defect tracking, collaboration, and communication tools to aid in their development process. Requiring PHP5 and MySQL, activeCollab is a web-based alternative which is easy to install and extremely easy to use, with no limitation on the number of projects (per-project permissions), clients or team members. Currently in an alpha-state, activeCollab is already looking to be a solid solution for small studios looking to support open-source software for their project needs.

activeCollab

Quite possibly one of the best gaming magazines out there (subject to some discussion), Edge Magazine recently took a look inside quality assurance in the games industry. Definitely one of the most in-depth reports into QA, Edge ponders whether it’s worth getting in to QA in it’s current state within the industry. That being a position that often times lacks any form of respect from team-members in other departments, features low wages, and is not always the springboard into game design or programming like many seem to think it is. With the current financial difficulties many publishers and studios are experiencing and the overall lack of true commitment to a trained, respected and well-paid QA department around the industry, I tend to ask myself, is it all still worth it?

A Bug’s Life @ Edge Magazine

Gamasutra has recently published an excellent beginners article from Mark Mencher, founder of GameRecruiter.com and formerly of Microprose, 3DO and Spectrum Halobyte. In it, he introduces the role of games producer and covers quite a bit of what is needed to actually gain the position of games producer and the qualities needed to be an effective games producer / project manager.

So you want to be a producer @ Gamasutra | GameRecruiter.com

Tom Sloper is a legend within the industry and gives out amazing advice to those interested in any parts of the games industry. He also is a champion of games quality assurance and is more than happy to give advice to those in need of it. In lesson 5 of his giant on-going industry site, Sloper introduce aspiring designers and testers to the world of games testing.

Testers - The unsung heros of games @ Sloperama

During the world cup, several publishers and hotels worked together to help keep the players from getting too bored around Germany while sitting in their hotel rooms. An interesting story that came out of that is the Kempinski Hotel Falkenstein and Atari teaming up to offer the Brazilian team five Xbox 360 debug kits and pre-release copies of Test Drive Unlimited for them to play around with in-between World Cup matches. No doubt they provided valuable feedback to Atari.

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Back in 1999, Nick Ferguson wrote an article entitled, “Everything you wanted to know about being a game tester” for Loony Games, a blog which was at one point connected to Blues News. In the article, Nick addresses the usual misconceptions of being a games tester, from the usual “you play games all day” to people thinking game testing is a springboard into the industry. Overall it’s a quick 3 page article on game testing, with some good information for future game testers which still ring true today in 2006.

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A few years ago, super hip community blog and reviews site Millionaire Playboy posted a short interview with Vivendi Universal game test Jen Johnson, discussing her career and experience at Fox and Vivendi. A bio-piece, the interview asks Jen the basics, such as how she got into the industry, her hobbies, some of her favorite games, whether being a game tester is the dream job that everyone thinks it is, and her experiences on testing games such as No One Lives Forever 2 on PC and MAC and Buffy the Vampire Slayer for Xbox.

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