How to be a tester and have people know who you are without it being because they hate you

Congratulations, you’re now in The Games Industry! Sort of. For a bit, at any rate. If you’re lucky the studio which has employed you may have multiple projects on the go so that when the game you’re working on is complete you won’t instantly be laid off.

It is important to use this time to build up a network of friends and slowly worm your way into the design team, where permanent contracts exist along with the chance that you might actually enjoy aspects of your job. This is not going to happen unless people know who on Earth you actually are.

Here are some simple rules to follow to help achieve this aim:

1. Have a memorable name

The thing you have to remember is that artists and programmers are going to be receiving a lot of bug report e-mails. They already loathe getting e-mails from you, so the last thing you want to do is combine a bug which involves them doing loads of work with something else that pisses them off.

So do not for the love of God sign your e-mails / reports / etc with an utterly hateful signature like, “Bob Smith – the Master of Disaster”, or “Jack Jones: The Testinator”.

No, it’s better just to have an amusingly bizarre name, like Peter Penishead. If you do not have a name like this, blame your parents.

2. Don’t be annoying

Yes – we all know that what you really want to be is a designer/artist/programmer and not a tester. But bug reports are not the place to show the World how good you would be in these roles. So less of the, “the main character should be wearing denim trousers instead of leather” or, “the grass should be more green” type bug reports please. And bugs that you find are not automatically more important than the others. So if you find yourself only ever submitting A-class bugs, it might be time to give yourself a slap before someone else does.

3. Don’t be creepy

Imagine for a moment you’re a programmer or an artist. Now imagine that you’re in the office having a chat to a co-worker. Now imagine that out of the corner of your eye you can see a completely generic person who’s unremarkable in every single conceivable way staring at you. Now imagine this figure starts popping up all over the place, possibly following you. It’s starting to get a little creepy, isn’t it?

Now, the fact is that you, the tester, aren’t completely generic but simply appear that way to the dev team because there are literally hundreds of you buggers. If you want to stand out, have no torso or two heads instead. If you have a torso and the conventional number of heads, blame your parents.

4. Be friends with the QA Manager

This is a much more realistic goal. Forget design, art, or programming for the time being. By all means practise all that stuff in your spare time (ahahahahaha!) and if you waddle over to an artist or designer clutching some work and looking adorable, chances are they’ll happily give you some feedback and blurt out some advice significantly more useful than this blog.

But the QA Manager is your target. The team knows who the QA Manager is, for a start, since he/she is one of them. A bit of sucking up here could mean the difference between being kept around for the next project and not. Plus, no matter how many heads you have or how mundane your name is, if you’re around for long enough eventually people are going to remember you.