5 ms·

Hold on, how do these people get to the role of a designer in the first place? Where do they come from?

BSousa 14y ago
For some reason, testing graduates a lot of designers. What I found in various game companies is that game designers usually graduate from other positions in the company and rarely hired as designers from the start.
- saraid216 14y ago
  > For some reason, testing graduates a lot of designers. I have been wondering for a while how transparently bad game designers must be to produce well... a lot of what we see. This actually explains a lot. Testers are not designers. :( Testers can be wonderful user advocates, if they make that effort, but... designers they are not. If anything, they're antithetical to design at their best.
  - endianswap 14y ago
    Good testers are hard to find, and what's even harder to find are good testers who want to remain testers. The pay is terrible, the benefits are usually non-existent, and they're quite often placed socially at a lower level than the other game developers. Finding someone who is good at testing and doesn't want to be a programmer or a designer is nigh impossible in the games industry. Even if they don't want to be a designer/engineer, they want to advance their career which leaves them with the option of managing other testers, which as we all know, leaves no time to actually exercise their testing skills. Until testing is treated like a real career, with architect-style career growth options, it will continue this way. Instead, testers spend a lot of their time growing their connections, internally and externally to the studio, hoping that a junior level designer/engineer position will open up. Because there are so many testers, it's quite cutthroat, so spending time at work "showing off" or playing politics is almost a necessity here for career advancement.
papsosouid 14y ago
QA is basically a lottery for designer jobs. You get a job doing QA (which is a terrible job) in the hopes that you will be one of the 0.1% who get chosen to become a designer. This makes no sense at all, but that is how it works.

For some reason, testing graduates a lot of designers. What I found in various game companies is that game designers usually graduate from other positions in the company and rarely hired as designers from the start.

saraid216 14y ago
> For some reason, testing graduates a lot of designers. I have been wondering for a while how transparently bad game designers must be to produce well... a lot of what we see. This actually explains a lot. Testers are not designers. :( Testers can be wonderful user advocates, if they make that effort, but... designers they are not. If anything, they're antithetical to design at their best.
- endianswap 14y ago
  Good testers are hard to find, and what's even harder to find are good testers who want to remain testers. The pay is terrible, the benefits are usually non-existent, and they're quite often placed socially at a lower level than the other game developers. Finding someone who is good at testing and doesn't want to be a programmer or a designer is nigh impossible in the games industry. Even if they don't want to be a designer/engineer, they want to advance their career which leaves them with the option of managing other testers, which as we all know, leaves no time to actually exercise their testing skills. Until testing is treated like a real career, with architect-style career growth options, it will continue this way. Instead, testers spend a lot of their time growing their connections, internally and externally to the studio, hoping that a junior level designer/engineer position will open up. Because there are so many testers, it's quite cutthroat, so spending time at work "showing off" or playing politics is almost a necessity here for career advancement.

papsosouid 14y ago

QA is basically a lottery for designer jobs. You get a job doing QA (which is a terrible job) in the hopes that you will be one of the 0.1% who get chosen to become a designer. This makes no sense at all, but that is how it works.