Video Games… a tool of fun and enjoyment for people of all age, size and shape, for all women, men and children. Video games have been around since the 1970’s. Since then, video games have evolved from its simple and basic beginnings to what it looks today. When it comes to playing video games, only one thing is guaranteed. Video games can deliver a kind of experience that is both exhilarating and of pure enjoyment.
Consumers may choose from a wide variety of games from the following categories: survival horror, sports, adventure, sci-fi, role-playing, and vehicle-stimulation games. Most video games offer different levels for a specific expertise, beginning from the Easy Stage up to the Expert Stage.
But before anyone can enjoy playing a certain video game, there are several processes that a specific game has to go through. And one of these processes is the “quality check” stage. This particular stage is very crucial as to make sure that a video game is free from any glitches or any bugs before they can be sold to the market.
The video game industry is ready to offer big salaries for those people who will perform these quality checks. And the task of performing these quality checks fall on the hands of video game testers.
Before anything else, it is important to keep in mind that being a video game tester is not a 100% all-fun job. Video game testers are those people responsible for finding and reporting any glitches or bugs encountered in a video game that is yet to be introduced in the market.
Simply playing a video game is not the same as being a video game tester. It is a common and popular misconception that the job pays great and only minimal work is required. As to the confessions and testimonies of long-time video game testers, the job is 70-80% playing the game and the rest is devoted to preparing the paperwork. For a video game tester, it is their job to look for the littlest problem encountered while playing the game. It may sound easy, but it is not. It is one thing to see the problem and another matter to have that problem specifically well-written and reported. Some glitches may only require a report that is made up from a few sentences. But there are bugs or problems that may need a lot more than a couple of paragraphs to clearly make a report out of it.
To make the job a little more complicated, playing and finding bugs, is not all there is in a video game tester’s daily tasks. Most video game testers find themselves having to perform repetitive tasks. Some problems may require a tester to play a specific portion of the game or a specific level for several straight hours. This is done up to the time when the problem is finally fixed and the tester totally burned-out from having to do the same thing over and over again.
Being a video game tester is not truly a 100% dream job. It may pay well, that is, for those professional video game testers. But at most times, this job is accepted by most people to serve as their stepping stone in the video game industry. Some stick to their jobs with the hope that someday, they can learn everything there is to know how a video game works. Some people choose to be a video game tester so that in the future they have enough information and knowledge based on their working experience, to create and start a video game company of their own.
But then, everything in life depends on a case-to-case basis. Some people may choose to have a career as a professional video game tester even if they know what they have to do everyday. They may not see the task as very tedious and boring and unchallenging. They look at it from a different perspective. Thus, there are people who have made a successful career in the video game industry. And they owe their success and inspiration from being a video game tester.
