What are you up to this weekend? Playing video games? Do you wonder if maybe you should turn that hobby into a full-time job? Wonder no more, because this week, that’s exactly what we’ll be investigating!
The job: Video game tester
You might like this job if: You like video games. It helps if you’re good at them (since that increases your chances of getting hired).
The good: You get to play video games! And get paid for it! And not just any video games, but ones that haven’t been released yet. Plus, there’s a movie about people who do that for a living (though it wasn’t very good). But you get paid to play video games!
The bad: Besides carpal tunnel and eye strain, you won’t be testing finished video games. And you’ll be working more as a debugger than a player, going through to find problem areas, glitches and errors. You probably will end up never playing a game, except for work. It’s kind of like when you were a kid and said you could never get sick of pizza, and then after a month of eating just pizza, you couldn’t even look at a pizza or think the word “pizza” without getting sick.
Not to mention that you might end up testing hardware by doing things like seeing how many button presses it takes to break a controller. Sounds fun, right? Well, don’t forget that you have to write up a report detailing everything you’ve done down to the most minute detail.
Summary: Good in theory, bad in execution. Kind of like the first time you tried rocket-jumping in Halo. Stick to playing games for fun, not profit.
Rating: Three golden coins out of five.
Some parts of this week’s post shamelessly ripped off this article from Cracked.com
