In a time of some financial desperation, which admittedly looks like a cakewalk in hindsight, with the perspective brought on by the recent recession, I once spent several months as a game tester. 

Before I get into this tale, I should explain that I am not a gamer. I own an old PS2 and two games for it, which every once in a blue moon I actually play for mostly sentimental reasons. As a kid, when my brother and all the neighbor kids were playing Mario Bros., I simply sat and watched. I was the kid who tried the game once and couldn't get past the first bad guy and gave up.  Most of my experience with videogames is from watching other people play them. I have some serious gamer friends, and of course every guy that I've dated has exposed me to more videogames (wow, that word sounds quaint). 

So understand, if you please, that going to work as a game tester was very much a last resort.

For those of you who know nothing about videogames or how one goes about testing them, it turns out that knowledge of the product isn't necessarily important.  You need some, yes, but the main function of videogame testing is to try and break the game.  Therefore, it may be necessary to bumble around a bit and not whiz through the levels like superstar.

I can bumble. 

I was hired by a company I am not allowed to name.  Prior to the actual game testing, it was necessary that all new recruits spend several weeks learning to spot bugs and report them properly. This we did, although it took me a little longer than most because I found out I was powerfully allergic to the building we were working in and missed several days due to this.

The first bit of training involved playing an old (and buggy) version of a very popular and highly violent game which I will not name. It involved extremely scary and well-armed aliens jumping out at the player from unexpected, dark and creepy areas on the screen.  I hated this game. Yes, I know it is just a game, but it was really scary! I didn't find many bugs in it. I spent most of my time inching my character along dark corridors and nearly jumping out of my seat every time something attacked me.  It came to be that once I figured out how my weapons worked, I would empty my entire gun (and if possible I'm sure my character would also have emptied his bowels) every time I got attacked.  Did I mention I hated this game?

The only upside of it was that the other testers sitting near me found my behavior highly amusing.  I was one of those people who waves the controller erratically in response to excessive or surprising activity in the game. They also offered helpful suggestions for how to get through certain levels. I guess it was okay that I was being paid to do this.

After that, we moved on to more sophisticated training.  The games we played were less scary and violent, so I felt better.  Still, after several more weeks of training the company did not yet have an actual new game for us to actually test.  So they gave our group (about fifteen people) a very preliminary version of another popular game.  This was a combat type game set in what appeared to be World War II.  The object, I assume, was to kill a lot of people.  I preferred it to the previous game, because it was people shooting at me and the settings were mostly outdoors in daylight, as opposed to someplace dark with monsters.

However, this game was so preliminary (which is a nice way of saying buggier than a roach motel), the supervisors didn't even want us to bother reporting the bugs we found.  They just wanted us to fiddle around with it and keep fiddling around with it until they had something better for us to do. 

It sounds ungrateful to complain about being paid to sit on my butt playing a videogame, albeit a crappy one, all day long, but without any actual purpose to it, it did get very monotonous.  In fact, after a short while it got a bit demoralizing.  There was no point.  Most of the basic functions of the game didn't work.  The map was full of holes, which meant that your character could be running along and all of a sudden the screen would fill with the pixelated image of the sky and your character would be mysteriously suspended in it, at which point you often had to restart the game. 

I suspect many people deliberately fell into these holes purely to break up the monotony.  

Eventually, in our boredom, we got hold of some codes to get around the rules (such as they were) of the game. Most games in their preliminary stages have these, and I am told some finished games do as well.  For instance, by hooking up a keyboard and typing in a certain code, you could render your player invincible. 

I took advantage of this feature almost all the time.  The thing was so broken, it wasn't really keeping track of scores correctly anyway.  I have always been lousy at games that involve shooting. That is why I don't play them. I prefer games that involve pretty fantasy lands and elves, mages and goblins.  Anyway, my shooting was so lousy and I utterly lacked the competitive spirit that most of the guys seemed to have, that my character died about every thirty seconds.  Which was frustrating and dreadfully dull after a very short time. So I used what we called "God mode".  

I should explain here that many of the guys (I was the only girl in this group, by the way) took this game very seriously.  Much more seriously than any game should ever be taken, especially if it is malfunctioning on such a massive scale.  There was a sort of agreement among them not to use God mode.  I did not make that agreement.  I used God mode and spent the day hopping around the map like a bunny rabbit in fatigues, trying to figure out what objects I could stand on and which ones I would fall through.  I did not bother shooting at other players, as that did not interest me.  Other players did shoot at me, though, and they were not amused by the fact that I merely hopped away, impervious to their weapons.

Although this was a professional environment (technically, anyway) it was also an awful lot like a mens' locker room.  The guys got rather enthusiastic and their language could be quite colorful at times. The word "fag" flew around a lot.  I was not entirely comfortable with this group.  None of my friends from the previous training session were here and I mostly pretended I was invisible and that I wasn't offended by some of the language. 

"WHO'S USING GOD MODE??!!!!" one guy shouted eventually as I hopped jubilantly by him, miraculously resistant to his genades.  Naturally, I did not feel the need to confess.  Fortunately, a number of the other guys started laughing at his outburst, so he turned his wrath on them and I went unnoticed.

However, as the week progressed, tempers began to flare.  One day we decided to try and organize a team-oriented game within the game. I believe a flag was involved.  It sort of worked, although many of us couldn't get into that function.  Thus, one team had four players and the other had five. The team that was short kept imploring other people to join it, so finally one guy decided to give it a try. Through some glitch, however, the computer assigned him to the team that already had five people.  A fairly minor problem considering all the other stuff that was going wrong, but it was the last straw for one of the guys on the smaller team.

"Oh, fuck you, man!" he cried, and flung down his controller.  "That's it! I ain't playin' no more!"

The other guy tried to explain that it was a mistake, he had tried to join the smaller team but the computer wouldn't let him.  The first guy was hearing none of it. He was pissed. He kept saying:

"We're goin' outside. Right now! Come on!"

They did.  I don't think any serious blows were exchanged.  In fact, I suspect this may have been just another way to ease the boredom. Still...

Unfortunately, it was another whole week before any of us got transferred to a real project.  I was supremely glad to be out of there when that time came.

Once we had actual work to do on a brand new game that hadn't been released yet, everyone was much more tolerant.  In fact, as I recall the people I ended up on a project with were really cool.  Some of the nicest and most laid-back people I've ever worked with.  But by the time that job was over, I'd had more than enough of videogames for some time.