Here we’re going to investigate a role that will most certainly interest the geeks amongst us – myself included – games tester. What could be cooler than sitting playing games everyday, and then getting a salary for it? To me, and I’m sure to many others, it seems like a dream come true. As a person who is currently searchin for New careers to take on, I decided to do some research into games testing as a career choice, to see if it’s something genuinely worth looking at along with my other Career ideas. I thought I ought to share the information I dug up on this job, to help anyone else thinking about what Careers they would like to do, to help provide some helpful insight and possibly aid you in making a decision.
First of all, becoming a games tester isn’t just exclusively playing games to check if they are enjoyable or if people will like them. Your job is to play the game and try to handle as many scenarios as feasible in the levels, and create reports on any bugs you find. This means working through the levels in a painstaking manner – a manner which some people might not have the persistence for. You need an extremely good eye for detail, and loads of patience, and also the ability to write down into words the problems you discover, and how they were created. These reports are looked at by the programmers, who will then have to go back through the coding and find out what specific line of code is creating the bug, so the more exhaustive and accurate your report, the easier it is for them to finish their job. So, you will be expected to have a good standard of English for this role. You of course should be good at games – you are needed to be able to complete and finish the levels. Also, as you have to play through the levels thoroughly, it’s not just a case of going through the levels as fast as possible – you have to see what happens when you search every nook and cranny, and try and recreate as many scenarios as possible that could be encountered by people playing the game through normally. It’s no good releasing a game where the character can plummet through the floor if they step along a path in a certain way!
The starting wage for a games tester is a meagre ?12,000, though this does rise to about ?18,000 for a games tester with plenty experience. Head games testers can negotiate greater wages again. If it’s amongst your Career ideas as something you want to really consider, you are going to have to begin at the bottom and work your way up. However, the same can be said for nearly all Careers, so if you think it is something you wish to do, I would encourage getting started as soon as possible, in order to start acquiring experience. To me, it undoubtedly looks like one of the more interesting New careers I have looked at, and, while it sounds like it could be tough playing through games over and over and over again (could get a little tedious!) I think being amongst the first people to play highly anticipated games, and then new games which might be surprise hits, makes it a very interesting career choice.