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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

> One guy had one bad experience as a game tester (most kids' dream job)

I have a friend who was a game tester. It's not just a kid's job. If you ever see someone who is good at being a game tester do his thing, you will find out that they are very skilled and many have a wealth of experience in terms of where to look for bugs.

EDIT: Now my friend has moved out of the game industry and into corporate life. The pay is better and the job is more secure.

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I think Irregardless meant that this is a job that a lot of people dream about having when they are children. Landing such a job as an adult would serve to realize that dream. This makes it pretty devastating if the job turns out to be a disaster.

Right, also trying to reinforce the fact that we're talking about actual gameplay testing and not something code related (a lot of people might assume the latter since this is on HN).

I'm sure testing games is far more demanding and tedious than kids imagine it to be.

> One guy had one bad experience as a game tester (most kids' dream job)

You might want to rephrase this then, your original wording comes off in a condescending "playing games? for money? he should be glad to have a job!" sort of tone to me.

An underappreciated point is there is a vast difference between creating something vs breaking it. Playing to win is one thing; playing to see if you can fall out of the universe in an obscure corner of a map, or trying every conceivable combination of actions in hundreds of situations, is a very different experience.

"I'm sure testing games is far more demanding and tedious than kids imagine it to be."

Everything is more demanding and tedious than kids imagine it to be. :-)

i think that also puts a lot of unrealistic expectations on the job that probably get squashed at some point: i'm guessing they consist mostly of the amount of time spent doing QA related "busy work" (bug tracking, tickets, logging, etc ) compared to time spent playing video games

Yeah, I watched Grandma's Boy too.

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