In the second of a four-part series, Shadegrown Games founder Matthew Burns remembers trying to score his first job in the game industry as a tester. Read the first part of his experiences of the dark arts of quality assurance here.

Since the QA (quality assurance, as it was officially known, and sometimes spoken in full and enunciated for comically ironic effect) department was an endocrine component of one of the largest publishers in the industry, many dozens of games came heaving through, in widely varying states of digestibility and nutritional content. Individual development studios often have their own, smaller, test group who are composed of much more technically capable people and who work directly with programmers to debug code, but testing as practised where I was employed was a less skilled and more brute-force endeavour. Because of the temporary nature of the job, the relative ease with which it could be performed and its convenient location in Los Angeles, QA work attracted not only aspirants to the videogame industry but to the entertainment world in general, a sort of information age version of waiting tables. Sometimes it seemed like everyone there had a headshot or a band or both, and the problem with getting too friendly with your fellow testers was that you would suddenly find yourself invited to see their show or watch their stand-up routine at the local club. It would seem impolitic to decline, and especially so if the person asking you to show up in support of his efforts happened to be your boss.

Many of the people with whom I was buddy also had film scripts lurking about at home, and I read several, imagining the next one might be some Earth-shattering discovery. While I was never struck in that exact way, I did reflect on the capricious nature of the movie business, since compared to Hollywood’s actual output I saw no real reason any of those scripts couldn’t have been made. The work had a seasonal element too, as the vast majority of big-budget games ship timed for Christmas shopping (placed on store shelves any time between Labor Day and Thanksgiving), meaning that a large group of temps would get hired starting in the late spring and summarily laid off in the fall. This schedule tied in fairly neatly with the school year, so students from the nearby city college and trade art school also found their way into the basement seeking summer jobs more palatable than the usual offerings.

The most memorable characters of the place were, for lack of a better way to describe them, the kind of people that you might fancifully imagine playing videogames for a living. One dungeon occupant requested several days off, and when asked why, explained he was headed to wait in line for the first of the Star Wars prequels, which was opening a week from then. Another sent an e-mail at seven o’clock in the morning: “Dude, I’m too baked to come into work today!” There was Pie Guy, who brought an entire pie with him every day; he would start in on it in the morning and work at it until the end of the day, his only nourishment, parrying our incredulous reactions to his appalling diet with claims to its perfect reasonableness. Chain Mail Guy had a toolbox with him at all times, and, at any free moment, would set himself up in the break room and painstakingly bend pieces of wire into rings with a pair of pliers one at a time in order to make a sheet of chain mail for some costuming purpose. Water Pouring Kid was doing poorly in a multiplayer match and taking some trash talk from a motor-mouthed opponent; in a fit of what we geeks like call “nerd rage,” he ran to the break room, filled a cup full of water, brought it back to the testing area and dumped it on his foe’s head.

Much of the rest of the company, composed as it was of professionals doing real jobs, like inventory management or accounts receivable, duly feared this horde of man-children in the basement, and often did their best to try to ignore us. But it was difficult to pretend we did not exist, especially during events that were meant to include the whole company. What should have been perfectly ordinary corporate ice cream days, for example, had become so unpleasantly mobbed by throngs of wallet chain-jangling youngsters rushing upstairs at the appointed time and using up all the whipped cream and otherwise befouling the vapidly genteel atmosphere that the organisers were forced to introduce a staggered system, whereby everyone except QA enjoyed their ice cream at a certain time, with the testers invited to scoop up the liquidy dregs from the bottoms of the tubs an hour later.

Then there were the women. At any one time you could count the number in the department on a single hand. They endured the steady bombardment of furtive and not so furtive glances, and sometimes even tolerated the intense competition– the desperate kind that only occurs in such telescopically limited environs– that often broke out around them. Compounding this was the gamer predilection for any girl who shows a sliver of interest in videogames, a disappointingly common manifestation of the timeworn adolescent male fantasy of the female with an attractive body but a mind exactly like his. As with all unhealthy distortions, this one ran both ways: one young woman there dispassionately told me about her plan to “use her breasts” to move up the ranks, which she proceeded to do fairly successfully.

Any advantage was important to capitalise upon, because there were only a handful of openings for permanent positions every year, and that, combined with the scrabbling, status-conscious state of mind that often seems to permeate all of southern California, gave the place a perversely competitive streak. As soon as a tester was elevated once above base rank-and-file level, he suddenly became hypersensitive about his position in relation to the rest, and a seemingly innocuous instruction like, “Hey, could you be the point man on running through Quick Battle mode?” could suddenly turn into some kind of divine mandate to seize and jealously guard that tiny piece of virtual territory from trespassers. This attitude had also led to an almost militarily vertical organisation. Groups of five or more usually had a sort of squad leader who often tried to visibly demonstrate management abilities (“Okay everyone, reboot your computers”), in the hopes of accelerating his rise.

Continued in Part Three...

Matthew S. Burns is a writer and videogame designer. Prior to going independent, he was a producer at Bungie where he worked on the Halo franchise. More of his writing can be found at www.magicalwasteland.com.