October 16, 2006 - An Interesting Interview with a Game Tester

From the Washington Post, here's an interesting interview with a Game Tester.

Article published Oct 15, 2006
Game tester spends hours playing the same levels

By MIKE MUSGROVE
The Washington Post

Timothy McCracken, an amiable guy who works for Firaxis Games in Hunt Valley, Md., has what is either a gamer’s dream job or the classic “be careful what you wish for” sort of gig.

He’s a bug hunter. All day long, he plays computer games that are under development, constantly on the prowl for glitches. His business card identifies him as the company’s “chief deficiency inspector.”

Is it fun? Yes. Well, yes, sort of. It’s also a bit maddening.

“Imagine playing the first level of Mario nonstop for four hours,” he told me during a visit to Firaxis. “You have to jump on that block 400 times to see if it breaks on 401.”

McCracken doesn’t play a game so much as he works through every possible scenario that a player might try. When he’s done, he’ll do the same thing on a computer with a slightly different configuration.

And so on.

In the company’s podcast, McCracken has, jokingly, compared the job to the scene in “A Clockwork Orange” where the main character is strapped to a chair with his eyes forced open and made to watch an endless stream of movies.

Last month, McCracken was still testing the company’s latest title, a simulation game called “Sid Meier’s Railroads,” which was scheduled to hit the shelves for the holiday season.

That’s when most games are sold, especially the family-friendly sort of titles in which Firaxis specializes.

It’s just a fact of life that all games and other software have bugs. It’s McCracken’s responsibility to limit those bugs to as few as possible and hope that the remaining glitches will be the ones that few people ever experience or notice.

Some game companies have spotty reputations for putting out buggy titles; Firaxis doesn’t.

During the course of testing and polishing the railroad simulator over the last year, the team has identified about 1,800 bugs. The three-person Firaxis team also had the help of 150 fans who got early versions of the game and submitted their feedback.

In one early bug, trains would take off and launch into space. In another, smoke blew backward.

Bug hunting and killing is a process that continues until just before a master disk containing the final code is printed and shipped to the manufacturer. As the programmers fix software problems, a new internal release of the game is posted on the company’s servers nearly every hour.

The job of finding problems, as it turns out, doesn’t make you popular inside a game company. Colleagues have been known to close their office doors and shutters when McCracken comes around. They know he’s there because he has found a glitch that needs to be addressed. Tempers flare. Toy weapons – toys and video games are everywhere at Firaxis – have been brandished.

It goes with the territory, he says with a shrug.

“We make the programmers’ life a living hell,” he said. “We’re destroying their baby. Our goal is to be the worst critic they ever had.” If the bug testers had their way and spent the time to make it perfect, a game might not ever get released, he admits.

The office where McCracken and his bug-testing team works – better known as “The Pit” – is littered with games and computer equipment.

Over in a corner, a few computer systems are running the “Railroads” game 24 hours a day – if there is a crash or if the automated programs notice any strange behavior, the bug guys and the game’s programming team get an e-mail alert.

On this day, McCracken is wearing shorts and a pirate-themed T-shirt from a goth festival, his hair tied back in a long ponytail. Once an English major at Towson State University, he clearly loves his job, though he hopes to eventually get out of “quality assurance” and into game design.

It could happen, especially at this company.

Even though the industry is starting to see an influx of recent college grads armed with video-game-design degrees, “QA” is still a traditional entry point into the business. That’s how the president and the head producer at Firaxis started their careers.

McCracken is looking forward to the holiday game releases – because that’s when the games and systems come out that he and his fellow bug testers are looking forward to playing on their own: “Neverwinter Nights,” “Bully” and “Guitar Hero 2,” among others.

“We don’t have lives,” he said.