The Games Game

Working On Patience (August 2007)

Hey listen,

It took me weeks to finally break in, and all I could get was a job as a QA tester. Well, I've been slaving away in QA for weeks, and I can tell you it ain't all it's cracked up to be. Man, they got me slaving over this one level of this one game for eight hours every day, and it's so boring. Not only that, but whenever I tell them the game ought to be a different genre or have a different UI, they just tell me "shut up and do your job."

And this database they use! It's got all these fields for stuff that don't even apply to the game we're doing. It doesn't have options for responses I'd want to enter. Everything I flag as High priority and Urgent, the producer changes to Low priority and Suggestion, or says Need More Info - or he just kills it with a Will Not Fix or Works As Desired. What a bean-counting pencil-pusher that guy is.

I could be a better producer than this guy, but they're all conspiring to hold me down. I try to go up to the production area to chat it up with the people up there but they keep telling me "get back down to QA where you belong" and "get back down to work," stuff like that.

I could design games better, too. But every time I try to tell'em my ideas, they just say "that's interesting" or they say "that'd never sell." They don't even give me a chance! The lead tester keeps nagging me about spelling, swear words, grammer, and "frivolous bugs." He gives me grief if I'm ten minutes late in the morning, for crying out loud. I could go on, but I know your a busy man.

This Gruntled

Dear This,

Did you have a question for me? Because it seems to me like you were doing nothing but... Hmm. What word to use. I've gotten a lot of grief for using the word "whining." People tell me I should use the word "venting" instead.

Why not call what it is? "Complaining." "Kvetching." And yes, "whining." The politically correct would say that "venting" sounds so much less judgmental. So what? My judgment is that no matter what you call it, it's not only futile, it's detrimental. It's detrimental to you to engage in it, and if you verbalize it to those around you, it's detrimental to morale. Complaining/kvetching/venting/whining almost never effects a change for the better.

So I prefer the word "whining" because it's the most pejorative term for what I view to be a damaging practice. There's shock value in it, and that's appropriate.

Rather than whine about everything, why don't you try a different attitude. Sure, that database may not be perfect (multi-purpose databases aren't always ideal for each application), and maybe the management style of those above you could use some improvement (I said maybe). And it's too bad you and your QA mates were brought in too late to impact the design decisions. But there's a lot you can learn. When you see a problem, you can be creative and find a subversive way to effect change - sometimes if you make it seem like someone else's idea, they'll act to make a policy improvement.

And it takes years (not weeks) to move up in the industry. Oh - and you were lucky to get that job after just a few weeks of jobhunting. And develop a sense of humor, will ya? Geez.