We’re all told at some point in our lives not to take our work home with us. It’s good general advice, meant to keep our professional and home lives from becoming entangled. However, if you put any kind of passion or thought into what you do for a living, whether you flip burgers or craft nanomachines, you’re bound to think about your job when you’re off the clock.

This is precisely why many game journalists have a hard time taking off their critic hats when they get home.  They’re often exposed to the same kinds of products in their leisure time that they work with all day, so it’s natural that they would begin thinking about them in a professional mindset while lounging in the living room. It takes a certain level of experience and a particular mental attitude to enjoy something from your professional life in your off time without going insane.

However, having both critiqued games and been involved in game development, I can say that game journalists have it easy. Even for a quality-assurance tester like myself, with only four months of experience, it’s very difficult to look at the games I play in my own time without letting my training interfere with them.

Eye of the Tester

During my first contract, I developed what I refer to as “Tester’s Eye,” or TE for short. It’s a condition all dedicated testers contract. The symptoms of TE are as follows:

• Hypersensitivity to glitches, bugs, and errors in a game
• An irrational need to seek out the causes of these glitches once discovered, in order to duplicate and catalogue them
• An uncanny ability to predict where glitches are most likely to occur
• Knowledge of what goes on behind the curtain of game development.

Generally speaking, most of these symptoms can be controlled or ignored. I can accept that every single game in the world, from your favorite indie darling to the biggest AAA release, has at least a dozen things wrong with it. And I can mostly curb my ability to track down those bugs once I discover them in my free time. I learned a long time ago that things like memory leaks happen, and single freak occurrences with astronomically low reproduction rates are almost impossible to pin down, even if you spend a week looking for nothing else. I can check the instinct to hunt them down in the interest of waning sanity.

The real downer, though, stems from knowing where problem areas will arise in games and in having a bit more insight than the average gamer into how games are made. Those are things you can’t unlearn, and they’re difficult to turn off, even when you’re sitting on a couch.

Paying Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

Game development isn’t an exact science. Many studios have become really good at it, but there still isn’t one hard-and-fast way to make video games. Computers -- and games by extension -- function via math and rules, which are hard and fast. But when you introduce those rules into a game world, that’s where problems arise.

Take a cover-based third-person shooter like Gears of War or Vanquish. Both games have a mechanic whereby the player can vault over a piece of cover, provided there's space on the other side. If there isn’t enough space, or the area to be occupied isn’t zoned as a place a player can go, the vault isn’t allowed to happen.

But sometimes, programmers and designers make mistakes, and you’ll come across terrain that hasn’t been zoned properly or terrain that breaks a rule by containing two properties at once. This is where seams and clipping occur, and both Gears and Vanquish have spots that fall into these categories. That’s why Quality Assurance teams exists: to find those mistakes and make the development team aware of them.

Once you know why these things occur, and you can predict them to some degree, some of the mystique goes away. You know that that vista over the horizon is someplace you’ll never go, because it’s just a background texture. You realize quickly that, aside from special circumstances, your character will have a limited amount of ways to interact with the game world. And in the worst cases, the curtain lifts fully, and you come to the depressing realization that games are just a collection of math and assets.

When you reach that point, the immersion has long since left the building. This happens to some gamers who choose to play games that are unbelievably rife with bugs, but for a tester, it takes a lot less to force that awareness. Now, all you’re looking at is an executable program, with predefined actions and reactions. That can be a hard thing to shake.