Martin J Baker

Video Game Tester. The job title alone conjures up images in most people of the perfect job where people sit in a room (that looks just like their living room), eating junk food, and bad-mouthing people over Xbox LIVE all day (alternatively, the facebook ads would lead you to believe that all game testers are twenty-something females). In reality that's the life of someone who actually does play video games all day which, despite what people may say to me when I tell them what I do for a living, is not the life of an actual video game tester. What it really entails is hours and hours of loading, playing (often for a very short amount of time, depending how far along the development cycle the game you're testing is) and crashing, loading the game up again and trying to reproduce the bug so that a series of concise steps and a general bug report can be written.

While that may sound a little tedious, all that is balanced out with the fact that you'll be given the opportunity to help shape the games of the future. If you're working on a game early enough in the development you may even be able to suggest a feature that will make it into the game. You never know, the opportunity is there though. If you're reaching for that first difficulty step onto the ladder that is the games industry, you would do well to read on.

Click here to read the rest of my article at GamersNexus.com

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Games. Ever since the dawn of time people have played games, sometimes as a form of competition, sometimes as a display of dominance, or sometimes just to simply pass the time. What happens if you don't enjoy the game you're playing, though? Do you continue anyway, hoping that something will "just click?"

Maybe you should stop playing altogether and find something else to do?

Or... you could be cool. You could just stick two fingers up to the authorities, tell them you're not glued to the predetermined ruleset of their game, and that you're going to make your own game from within the overarching constraints of theirs. That's how we got Rugby League, that's how we got Pool, it's even, to use a more modern analogy, how we got Counter-Strike (Half Life Mod), Team Fortress (Quake Mod), Defense of the Ancients (Warcraft III / StarCraft Mod), and many others.

So where's the fun in that?

Click here to read the rest of my article at GamersNexus.com