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?

Reading Psychochild’s recent blog post titled “Why games will still matter” he touched on the subject of the use of avatars. Brian claims that people “…tend to ignore the avatars while chatting because they aren’t important.” I’m going to disagree slightly with him on this point.

Being a bit younger than Brian, most of my online gaming and interaction is centered around the time of graphical MMOs as opposed to text based MUDs. In this context, I actually find myself, in games at least, searching for another person’s avatar, and focusing on that while having a conversation. Using City of Heroes as an example, I would widely ignore the chat box and instead read the bubbles attributed to the character speaking. This was just more comfortable for me.

As games progress more and more into the 3D realm I’ve noticed the use of visual emotes coming into play. Users will bow at each other, wave, dance, sit while waiting, or read the newspaper while AFK. With each new round of online games that comes out, the options for ‘emoting’ become more and more vast. Falling back a bit into earlier games, in Meridian 59 the use of simple emotes has always been an important part of conveying messages to other players.

This of course relies on the assumption that the communication is happening in-game, and Brian made several points about normal chat spaces. While I’ve only had limited experience with 3D virtual chat spaces (mainly Worlds Chat back when they consisted of a space station portal which led to some other less populated 3D areas, I think that as communication technology expands, and video chat becomes more the norm, those wanting to maintain their anonymity will come up with digital avatars for discussion. With the social networking of online, having a visual to focus on helps to personify the other person. Even with games like Meridian 59, I can spot a person based on what they look like, occasionally, without even seeing their name.

As for Brian’s question of:

Is there really a business model that makes sense for the avatar service providers?

I’m going to reply by asking, isn’t this essentially what Second Life is?

Well, I suppose if I actually have a blog, I should write in it. =) One of the topics that has recently caught my attention in the MMO world is that of the ‘community’. If we take a trip back ten years, to the world of the text-MUD and when Meridian 59 was first coming about, there’s a major difference that could be noted in the overall style of multi-user games. This, of course, is how the dynamics of the ‘community’ aspect has been altered as games get larger and more impersonal.

One of the major factors that drew me to Meridian 59 back in my golden years, aside from being the first of its kind that I’d played, was the other people. After joining with a couple friends it didn’t take me too long to branch off and make new acquaintances, people who I looked forward to seeing on a daily basis. These same people, when they left caused a feeling of disappointment. This was odd, primarily, because I had no idea who these people were. It was a certain creepy magic that I loved.
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Hello to those who know me, and hello to those who don’t. My name is Mike Emmons, and I’m the QA Manager for Near Death Studios, Inc. Of course, like most titles, QA Manager is more honorary than anything. I’m what Brian calls ‘the company bitch’. We’re really usefull if you don’t already have one. =)

I’ve been working for NDS for a bit over two years, and generally run the day to day operations. So, with a little coaxing from Brian, I’ve finally decided to set up a blog where i can talk about all things, wether they be part of the Game Designing world, or just to complain about my boss. =) Hopefully, I’ll be able to write up something that will make people think, but don’t hold your breath for too long.  If I break out my full potential, there’s a chance I might suck up all of Brian’s bandwidth. =)