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Without bug testers, most of our favorite games would be unplayable. They find the little errors which would otherwise prevent us from beating a level, or using a powerful spell properly, or even understanding what a king is requesting. It seems, however, that most gamers (and reviewers) far overestimate the power that testers possess. I've often read, "Didn't anybody bugtest this?" or "Why didn't the testers tell (company) that the game wasn't fun?" I'm here to explain the world of bug testing so that at least you, the reader, will never have these thoughts again.
There are two different kinds of testing environments: those of an American developer, where the testers and the design team are housed in the same building, and those of a localization company, where the developer is in Japan (because the game is from there) and the testers are here in America. Since most RPGamers are playing games from Japan, I will be discussing the localization tester's life. The examples presented may obviously have the odd case to disprove them--but I've never experienced it.
In order to understand the tester, one must first understand the localization process. Text files are sent to the American company, often in random order, and often without qualifiers of who is saying what. Plot characters are spelled out, but NPCs are rarely even given a "girl" or "dog" note to distinguish them from one another. The Japanese developer signed over the rights to their game in hopes of a quick turnaround and tasty royalty checks--so they expect the localization process to take as little as three weeks. Thus, with such short time budgets and so little help as far as translation goes, many times we're lucky that the townsperson dialogue even makes sense. The translations are then sent back to Japan, where the original developer (or their B-string programmers) put it into the game.
The testers then come in, having never seen the game before, and are told to play through it as quickly as possible, while doing everything possible to mess it up. Their prime directive, in this sort of situation, is to read the text--every line of it--and find every single error. Because the game already exists in Japan, testing for programming errors is less of a concern, but still must be reported if found (after all, game crash bugs tend to be bad). Each bug is written up in a report, and then submitted to a supervisor. The bugs are then translated and sent back to Japan. That's right, the American company often doesn't have the power to change things, and must leave it to the developer's discretion. Depending on the developer and the project, this may be a very trying process. Sometimes the developer is easy to work with, and will change everything in a timely manner. Other times, they will refuse to make necessary changes (like altering a color palette so the "Ice Sword" isn't red), or begrudgingly fix things while breaking others (randomly shuffling location names on the map). Whether it's for pride or just communication differences, Japanese developers rarely make the bug testing process a smooth one.
So after this first cycle is completed, a new version of the game arrives, and the process is repeated. Not only must testers search for any new bugs, or ones they missed, but also check to make sure all the old ones (sometimes 300+) have been fixed. The quality of your game depends not just on a tester's attention to detail, but also their willingness to check details of the same dialogue box ten times. For many projects, this is the first time the testers may have had a chance to play the game without a debug mode (to 'cheat' through the game quickly), or check for actual programming bugs instead of simple text errors. Of course, since this is the second cycle, the testers are seemingly blamed when problems crop up--for not finding them in the first place. Your average tester has to be pretty thick skinned, as after days of being ignored by the staff, they're then blamed for the game not being perfect. For the same reason, it's even harder to convince the Japanese developer to fix any new bugs.
Speaking of testers being ignored--they are. Even if they did think the game sucked, or had a fundamental gameplay flaw, their concerns would never be heard, so they don't speak up. The company has already spent money on acquiring the game, and the Japanese developer wants their royalty check--nothing will be changed, no matter how much it ruins the game. Whatever "Even if," you might think of, the answer is still no. Testers are nothing to the rest of the company, and are usually treated as such.
The blame for finding new bugs is especially frustrating when one considers how hard it is to achieve some of these programming errors. In any other job, a guy could be proud for discovering that if you jumped off cliff A at the right angle, with the DeathAxe equipped, that you would fall through the floor and a monster from the Swamp would appear out of nowhere and dance. If you're a game tester, however, you're almost afraid to report such a bug--because you know that you'll get scowled at, and then have to aid in convincing Japan that, yes, it IS a problem.
The third cycle is usually the final one, and the testers are asked to play through the entire game without debug--as the consumer will (hopefully) shortly. The catch is, they usually have about two days to do this, because everyone wants the game out the door. Keep in mind that this doesn't mean beating the game as quickly as possible. In FF6, for example, this would mean playing through the game, getting every character, and every relic, betting everything at the Coliseum, and tracking down every monster on the Veldt.
After weeks of hard work, and finding out that the bugs they were proud of finding and fixing were left "as is" and remain in the game because they aren't important enough, the game is finally released. What thanks do the testers receive for their time and effort? More often than not, they're told not to worry about coming in but they'll be contacted when another project is available. That's right--game testers don't even get job security. Testers essentially do their best to fix a game quickly, thus putting themselves out of work that much faster.
Things are, of course, better in larger companies with more money. Nintendo and Konami no doubt have programmers on staff to implement fixes directly into the game, eliminating the reluctance and week-long wait times which are par for the Japanese developer course. However, testers are still testers--the most thankless job on the planet. Testers assume a boring and repetitive task, which ensures they will hate the game and never play it again, for a job they receive no thanks for (some Japanese developers refuse to add American staff to the credit scroll), yet will be blamed for in reviews if there are errors--even errors they found but were then ignored.
For those readers who still fall back to the argument that it can't be so bad, the testers are playing a video game and getting paid, after all...here is a standard example of the work involved: let's say every monster in the game is assigned a color (I don't know why, elemental weakness or something) out of 8 total colors. The testers find a bug that all the "blue" monsters show up as blue, but are listed as "violet." You might think it's as easy as writing in that "violet" should be changed to "blue" in a text file, and everything is fine. However, the developer will most likely request that every single monster in the game be listed, with their appropriate color listings. Why? No reason other than the developer trying to give you a long arduous task in hopes that you leave the bug unfixed. If the tester is really lucky, they may even have to take a screenshot of every monster in the game. Think fetch quests are annoying when they're in the game? Try doing one for a living.
So, the next time you play a game and you are given the choice "Off course," remember that it used to be spelled "coarse" and the text box thought a girl was talking. The next time you talk to someone on AIM and they say they're a tester, don't insist that that's the COOLEST job ever. Lastly, remember that if you see the same tester's name in game after game, the only reason he keeps coming back is to ensure that you get to play a game without bugs--because he sure as hell isn't enjoying himself.
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