Skills and Abilities
There are many skills and abilities that you may need to start a career as a video game tester, but, the most fundamental will be experience playing video games. You should know the most popular video game genres, know what makes good video games, and understand the basics of video games. Knowing video games, however, is just the beginning.
It may surprise you, but you will need strong writing and communication skills. The ability to write in a clear, concise, and effective manner will help you describe the glitches you found and how you found them. Your clear writing will give developers a clear path to solving the problem and creating fixes. You don’t have to be a poetic, flamboyant author; you need to be a clear, concise, and detailed communicator.
As a video game tester, you also need to understand basic troubleshooting. Although, you don’t have to solve specific problems with the game, you have to recreate, often dozens of times, the specific sequence of actions that led to the failure. Finding bugs can be easy, but recreating the steps to reproduce the result can be a daunting task.
Personality traits
First of all, a good tester is very attentive to detail. Game skill is good, but you’ll need to go further to detect glitches that are so small that the average player won’t even notice them. A good tester should be able to identify these small details and point them out to the developer. You can be sure that your attention to detail will be tested at the interview for this job.
You will also need to be very patient, because sometimes you will have to go through the same level over and over again, trying to perform every possible action and interact with every possible computer character, going through every possible action to make sure they are functioning properly.
A good beta tester should also be able to be a team player. And being able to do everything on time will be a great asset to you.
What kind of education is required to become a game tester
Although, there are no educational requirements or specific video game school, there are several paths you can take to increase your chances of getting a job as a video game tester. Game testers are usually educated in either game design or something related to videography, computer science, or other areas related to software.
Each of these paths covers how software and coding come together to create technology such as video games, Web sites and online applications. You’ll also learn why some software behaves the way it does and how developing applications from scratch happens. Your education may also be technical, or it may include knowledge of theoretical and artistic concepts such as color composition, image balance, texture, or user behavior.