Alright, so the experts are telling us that we’re in this big bad economy, and the recession and everyone is going to lose their job and go to hell after they burn alive.  Part of that is true, many people are definitely losing their jobs because of the economy, but a fewer select group is also losing their job due to excessive video game playing.

Is this you? Do you have soar thumbs and fingers?  Did the blisters in your fingers, make you to handicapped to do your job as a telemarketer? Pushing buttons can be tough with them blisters.  And after you asked for some unemployment money they wouldn’t give it to you and fired you instead? Sounds like a nightmare?

Wrong! this is the best thing that could of happened to you because you hated that job anyway.  Now you can work at a job as beta tester of video games that you will be hating a lot less.  You can test video games for a living, just plug and play.  You won’t know when you’re working and when you’re playing, you’ll work overtime and get paid more without knowing it.  These are some of the benefits of getting beta testing jobs.  In your face economy!

So what will you be doing as a game tester?  Well you will be doing all kinds of game testing.  Here are some of they cool testing words some people like to use:  localization testing, soak testing, and adhoc testing.

1. localization is supposed to be about fixing up and checking on the game’s commentary and the way the langugage is put together and if the translation was done right and all that nonsense.

2.soak testing is something pretty weird is when you just pause the game or run the game and leave it pretty much alone and see if something happens by itself. (paranormal activity)

3. And adhoc testing is when you run like a crazy man on crack inside the video game and try to break it and mess it up just by playing.  Yes, this is what gets you paid my friend.

On to what else you need:  Serious game tester edge, a kind of morbid curiousity that is just begging to be satisfied by playing a video game again and again, and again.  You may have long assignments and you will need some type of motivation to keep you going, otherwise you will fail and you’ll never meet your father and fight him with a light saber. yeah that’s right.

So to get them beta testing jobs be sure to start as soon as possibly and get some experience under your belt, so you can build up to more and more profitable assignments.  Remember, big game developing companies don’t want to be horribly embarrased by thrashy video games that freeze everytime you pause them and that’s why they need you, if you want it.

You can get a great guide for beta testing jobs here.

Okay so its clear that you don’t have to go to college to become a beta game tester, So what is this funny business talking about Grades and A’s?  Well this is just some plain game tester language that would make you think they were speaking in code if you didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.  

Grade A bugs are the glitches that some game testers encounter when they are going through the game testing phase of developing a video game.  Not only are these bugs icky, they actually happen to freeze the game while you play on your pc or game console.  Basically they crash the game, and they actually give the programmers something to do for the night.  They’ll have to look at line upon line of endless code to try and see what went wrong.

In fact, this is why the person who found the bug would have to report it in a very detailed fashion, like he just had it incrypted and burned into his memory with the precision of finding a needle in a haystack, because that’s just how it feels to be a confused programmer that is told there’s a bug and he can’t find sh** in the code.  If you put yourself in his shoes you’ll see what  a pain that could be.  So always do whatever you can to help out the programming bro.

Companies in the video game industry can have several of these grades to have a systematic way of reporting bugs.  As stated earlier Grade A could be the serious bugs, where Grade D could be a minor gameplay triviality that a game tester thinks is a little sketchy or could be better.  The grading really is just a control for a company and they decide how many grades to have and what they represent.

But don’t worry, its not an entire nightmare working with video games.  Your hard work definitely gets compensated when you get your paycheck, even if its not the biggest in the world, it makes you feel good inside if you just got a paycheck from nintendo or any other such company that you like.

Game Testers can earn from 20 to 25 thousands per year in their introductory periods.  They usually begin as partimers and eventually move into the full time positions, where the salary then increases.  Salary also increases if they move up in the food chain. So after some full time employment grind they may also move up into supervisor testing postions, or travel across departments such as information technology, marketing, or production.  So with some time and persistance this is definitely doable. 

So being a game tester is like a video game in itself.  Except the rules are more having to do with finding bugs and glitchtes in games.  And everytime you go into work you want to break your high score.  You want to find even more glitches than last week or last month or last year if you’ve been at it that long.  Because everytime you find one you get this little feeling inside of your chest, like a little warm pressure of joy.  And you experience that with the rest of your team.

And once the programmer gets that bug fixed by rewriting code or by using a so called patch, the game is given to the game tester again, who will once more continue playing it until his fingers fall of or he finishes his thing.  So that’s all for this post, if this video game tester thing appeals to you visit this test gamer page on how to get the best position as a beta game tester in the best way possible.

Anyway,  The beta gaming testers are more often assigned to work at home where they will safely and accurately test the assigned games they are given.  If you were to get a game tester job and you are 16 or 17 beta testing is probably what you would be doing, which is not that bad.  On the other hand, being a quality assurance game tester usually requires that you go in to the “gaming headquarters” of the video game testing company and go test video games under the supervision of superior game tester bosses. 

You usually work in small groups where a project leader emerges and distributes the current tasks that must be done.  You may begin to work on finding a specific bug or glitch for a certain game and you all work together to find it, or you can also be assigned different sections of the game or even different games.  If you are given independent assigments like they give you when you’re a beta tester, they may give you several games to test out where they want you to find a specific glitch or to test out your current abilities.  Out of those few games that they give you not all of the games may have glitches, so don’t Kill yourself because you weren’t unable to find a glitch (you are still a worthy person of existance) 

They may do that to test you or maybe they don’t know wheter or not the game had a glitch or not.  So the lesson for the day is that Glitch detection is actually a skill that you will develop and grow throughout your career (or job or whatever) as a video game tester.  And this is more than just knowing when the screen is frozen and when its not, you will learn to tell the difference of when you are stuck or ran into a glitch error and when you are totally lost just because you suck at that game (right….its not you its the graphics- they’re so confusing..uhu).  Anyway, if you really get all geeky about it you may learn to call different glitches by different names and start to categorize them.  By the way, you know you have been testing too many video games when you use these names on your pet fish or friends (assuming they exist). 

So what else do you need?  well, if you’re working from home you’re obviously going to need a computer.  Not just if you’re testing pc games, but just in general to stay in contact with yor project manager or whoever is in charge of you.  So you should be good as long as you have basic computer skills (which undoubtedly you awesomely absolutely probably have). 

Also, i don’t want to scare you or anything, but you’re going to have to do some weird things….they call it experimentation; now i’m not talking about girl on girl kissing or anything crazy that britney spears would do (you don’t have to shave your head to be a game tester), I’m merely talking about experimentation inside the video game.  Things you would normally not do while playing xbox with your friends (common, we all have at least one…..right?). Things like holding the joysticks in different directions, holding more than one button at a time, running your character into a wall (actually you probably do that anyways), or unplugging your controllers just to see if the game will freeze on you.  And with that, if you still have desires to become a video game tester make sure you read this game tester page.