The game changer

Few connections are more valued by teenagers than those in the video game industry. So 17-year-old Robbie Sharp thought life had gotten significantly sweeter after hearing his 24-year-old brother Adam had become a quality assurance tester for one of the most popular video game publishers in the world. When Robbie isn’t asking his brother for advice and game tips, he and Adam’s friends are angling for the goods on titles that aren’t even in stores yet—games kept top-secret as they are reviewed and analyzed at the Electronic Arts North American Test Center on LSU’s South Campus on GSRI Road. Robbie’s brother has worked on about 10 advance titles since EA established its one-of-a-kind testing center in Baton Rouge a year ago. That is more than any other local tester, but he won’t say a word about any of them.

“You can’t,” Adam says. “You’re out the door if you do. I have to tell friends, ‘You know I can’t tell you.’ People ask me a lot more questions now: ‘What are the new features? What’s it like?’ And it’s funny, because a lot of times it’ll be a game I didn’t even work on. I’ll have no idea what they’re talking about.”

Sharp graduated from LSU in 2008 with a degree in political science, a field he says he enjoyed studying but one he was not motivated to pursue as a career. At an LSU job fair he met 28-year-old Daniel Jackson, the quality assurance project leader for the new EA testing center. Sharp had read about EA coming to Baton Rouge but never conceived of a future in video games. EA was one of the few companies hiring that day, so he submitted his résumé. A week later, Sharp was training to be an exterminator.

Mining early versions of blockbuster titles like Tiger Woods PGA Tour and John Madden Football for graphical glitches, technical hitches and legal issues is the name of the game for these testers. They call these problems bugs. A dry-erase board hangs like a scoreboard in the largest testing room at EA’s Baton Rouge headquarters. It indicates an up-to-the-minute tally of bugs found and reported. Sharp’s goal, essentially, is to break the game then tell the developers how he did it.

“Or sometimes the text isn’t right or something is not displayed correctly, something you could get sued for,” Sharp says. “Things like arena names, logos, sponsor names. Then there is the music licensing, credits sequences and spell checking.”

Sharp is not propped in front of his screen for 40 or more hours a week so he can win the game. He’s doing it so you can win it without pulling out your hair or grinding Cheetos into the carpet because the screen froze up with two seconds to go and your game-winning three in mid-air.

The common perception is that gamers have short attention spans. They play video games because they respond well to constantly shifting images. But to hear Sharp describe it, game testing is the opposite, a minutiae-filled task that calls for a tremendous amount of focus—that and legal pads for copious notes, online forms for official reports, team pep talks and yes, trips to the vending machines to carb up.

“Patience and passion are the keys,” says C.D. Wright, the quality assurance project manager and highest-ranking on-site EA official. “Everyone thinks it’s real simple to come in, play a game for 10 hours and tell someone what they think is wrong with it, but that’s not how we work at all. You have to have a creative mindset to think, ‘What’s the most outrageous thing I can do in the game that the developer didn’t think about?’ But you also need to be analytical and be organized enough to check these problems off your list. Adam’s done very well with marrying those two things. Every time he gets comfortable, we move him onto something else.”

Sharp was one of the first six testers hired at EA’s Baton Rouge facility, and now he is in a leadership role among dozens of co-workers. The teams can range from a single tester to 24 employees depending on the size of the game and the given deadline. Contract laborers make $7.50 an hour through Good People Employment Services, and full-time EA employees like Sharp make more. Hours are flexible—the center is open 9:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.—but each day Sharp logs reports of specific bugs and how they were found onto an online server, which game developers can access and use for reference as they reprogram the game. The developer then submits an updated version to EA for another round of testing, and this process is repeated until the game is bug-free. One recent title logged 15,000 bugs.

This back-and-forth editing process can last up to 11 months, Sharp says. Most upcoming games begin development one month before the title’s preceding iteration is released. The local EA offices and four testing rooms—the largest can host 80 employees and their Playstations, Xboxes and Wiis—are ground zero for a global video game empire. Started in 1982, EA has become an industry leader in the past decade. A recent deal with Hasbro opened the floodgates to non-sports games, too.

Hasbro could be crucial considering revenues for the video game industry have shrunk across the board since the economic downturn last fall. Still, EA took in $644 million in its first fiscal quarter of 2009, a drop The New York Times called a “better-than-expected” result. The multinational also notched four of the top 10 selling games in the United States and Europe for the same period. The Sims and its spin-offs, created by Episcopal High School graduate Will Wright, continue to be big sellers for EA.

The company cut 1,100 jobs worldwide in 2009, but the local testing center has yet to feel the crunch. It aims to employ more than 100 testers by next year. “We continued hiring throughout the year,” Jackson says. “Not a lot of companies can say that.”

As for Sharp, he doesn’t know where his career is headed, though he is glad to be a part of an industry with such impact. Seeing gamers lined up outside Best Buy waiting for the release of something he worked on for months is a real thrill.

“It takes persistence, because you can spend four months every day on the same game,” Sharp says. “You see it nine hours a day, and it becomes tedious, but if you have a passion for it, it’s not that hard. In the end you’re getting your name in the credits of a game, and it’s a sense of accomplishment when the game is released and the reviews are good.”