There’s something about listening to a presentation on migrating to Symantec Endpoint Security with a back beat of synthpop that makes I.T. seem so much more glamorous.

I’ve never been so pumped to perform an upgrade!

Galvin P. Chow over at Metaphilm.com has written up an interesting piece comparing Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club to an adult Calvin, while his counterpart ‘Tyler Durden’ is the latest incarnation of his imaginary psychosis, Hobbes.

In the film Fight Club, the real name of the protagonist (Ed Norton’s character) is never revealed. Many believe the reason behind this anonymity is to give “Jack” more of an everyman quality. Do not be deceived. “Jack” is really Calvin from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. It’s true. Norton portrays the grown-up version of Calvin, while Brad Pitt plays his imaginary pal, Hobbes, reincarnated as Tyler Durden.

It was definitely a good read. You can check it out here.

There’s a big difference when you meet your clients as a game developer, and as an I.T. tech.

The latter only seems to warrant disdain.

I’ve decided to keep in my current thread of the underappreciated, often overlooked, positions that I am familiar with when it comes to game design. This week, I’m going to focus on that of the Quality Assurance employee, which can be broken down into several levels. In the capacity I’ve handled QA, it has resulted in a combination of play testing and software quality assurance.

What does this mean? Well, play testing is the version of Quality Assurance that most people get excited over. Glorified in such movies as ‘Grandma’s Boy’ (holy crap, they get cubicles?!) you tend to view this job as eight hours of playing video games, and getting PAID for it! The harsh reality is that the glitter and joy of this will wear off within the first week when you find yourself playing level 3-b for the hundred and forty-second time making sure that the A-B-A-A-Up-Down-Up-Down-R2+R1 combo doesn’t launch the player out of the level.

On the upside, if you can view the position as a job, and something to learn, then there’s definitely the possibility of improvement. With the amount of turnover that play testers experience, within a month you could be training new hires, and have moved onto level 4-a in your own testing. A large amount of people who join a company as play testers, don’t anticipate burning out but a conscious effort has to go into the job, as the repetition involved could soon have you wishing for a pneumatic hammer to the temple. If you don’t end up going to pneumatic hammer route, this can often be viewed as one of the gateways into the game development industry.

Now, it seems to be a leap to go from playing video games to making video game, but you will notice that you don’t have other industry insiders in your basement game room when ‘pwning’ on Xbox Live. At a game development studio, however, you may occasionally bump into one in line for the bathroom. As such, this is the perfect time to begin making your contacts (though standing at the urinal may not be the best place).

You may get the chance to work with programmers, developers, and even the games producers. If they want your opinions on the game, though it may cause some strife in the short-term, and terrify the hell out of you, it’s always best to be honest about any flaws or problems you’ve found in the game. While programmers may abhor the extra work-load, people will begin to notice your effort, and once a quality product is released everyone will be happier.

In addition to some key skills, such as patience, patience, and calloused thumbs, play testers develop a deeper understanding of the game than others may. In smaller companies (such as I’m familiar with) you can notice the difference between just fixing something, or programming and then fixing something. You gain a larger appreciation for the mechanics that go into creating something, and an even greater appreciation for how easy it is to break everything else while trying to make a mob not get stuck.

Of course, aside from the burnout, how can you screw up a job in play testing? It depends on how in depth the mechanics go. Introducing something entirely new into the game can tend to horribly break something else. If you happen to have the pleasure of being the developer, programmer, and QA department yourself, this tends to be less of an issue, as you can work out where the problem originated with debugging code, and a little imagination. In a larger environment where the developer creates and idea, a programmer programs it, and it’s up to you to work the kinks out, don’t be surprised when the blame falls on you for missing something that fifty players and an infinite amount of curiosity don’t.

Do you have any Quality Assurance, or play testing horror stories? Or were you one of the lucky ones?

Though I’ve been taking a bit of a break from the wild and wacky world of game development with the all too familiar story of ‘I need to eat’, I’ve stayed in the technical sector and thought it may be interesting to note some of the parallels. As I’ve spent most of my career doing the miscellaneous dredges that are never glorified in the ‘Be a Game Developer!’ recruitment posters, I thought it would be more fun to note those. Today, it’s going to be Customer Service.

In the past year or so I’ve developed some skills that are imperative, and often lacking, in quite a few developers. Let’s call these ‘social skills’. As I’ve worked on finishing up a degree or two, and settled myself into the I.T. Help Desk lifestyle, it has been brought to my attention that unless you are either a million dollar developer, or run your own independent game company, you can’t (as a rule) be a smartass to the customer. Social skills actually become an important part of the job as you find your lips glued to someone else’s ass for the majority of the time.

Let’s break this down with an example. We are going to look at exactly how important these skills are, no matter where you apply them.

Person A claims that Service B is Something C.

I.T. Sector:

The Client claims that their blade server is running slow.

Game Development:

The Player claims that their super rare +20 Orc-Raper is missing on the FluffyLoveKiss server.

Now, on the surface, these statements look quite different. However, upon slightly close inspection we can note two things:

1) They’re both probably lying.
2) You have to pretend they’re not.

This is where those aforementioned social skills come in. When working within customer service, the main goal is going to be the extraction of information. The difficult issue is getting this information without calling the user a liar.

In situation A some of the questions may look like this:

• What servers are you accessing that are having the problem?
• What users are experiencing this problem? Is it just you?
• When did the problem first present itself?

In situation B the questions will be similar, depending on the auditing your game has in place.

• Where was the item when you lost it? Vault? Bank?
• Are you missing any other items?
• —Internally you can check if this is a global problem…
• When did you last see the item?
• Did the item have any special attributes?

In both cases, while these questions allow you to gather more information, they more importantly allow you to exclude things. If the user says that their Orc-Raper was purple, and you know for a fact that the only purple Orc-Raper is on a different server, you can now determine that the user isn’t being truthful.

If all of the Orc-Rapers on the server are disappearing, and this isn’t an exclusive event, then the user may be telling the truth. Again, though, if the user is claiming theirs was purple, they may just be trying to exploit a bug for compensation.

All too often, non-issues can be escalated due to customer service’s inability, or unwillingness to delve deeper into an issue. A user may simply be having a problem with their internet service provider, but without the proper information time could be wasted ruling out DSN issues in an environment, instead of moving onto more important things.

Additionally, if a representative is unwilling to show an interest a user may sense spite, and if any accusations are made, will become extremely defensive preventing the representative helping them from differentiating the truth from the misconception, or sometimes the downright lies. Never underestimate the power of a pissed off user with a big guild.

Do you have any thoughts on the customer service end game development? Any horror stories you’d like to share?