A video game tester is essentially tasked to play a video game, but that’s not all the job requires. As part of a quality control process in a video game’s development, a video game tester is asked to analyze video games – its defects and weaknesses, its strengths and marketability, and its overall impact on an average gamer. With video games still playing a huge part in many people’s lives, men and women and young and old alike, video game testing as a job has been regarded as a dream job.

However, video game testing is not all fun and games. Since it deals with the computer business, it is a highly technical job that requires expertise in computers, competence in logic and analysis, and patience to endure long hours. Video game testers, like other employees in other fields, are required to attend meetings wherein they point out the ups and downs of the game assigned to them to the game’s team of developers (composed of programmers, artists, video game designers, and producers) and to the entire board or management as well. Video game testers also have to deal with the pressure of deadlines and expectations, and they must also possess the proper work attitude and strategy to get ahead.

The sad truth is that it takes a while for video game testers to actually get ahead – that is, to become video game developers themselves.

See, video game testing is not really a dream job, but is a "stepping stone" used by most video game testers as a means to land other positions in higher places. When you’re playing a game all the time and you see it for all its flaws and beauty , you can’t help but think to yourself that, by golly, you can make your own video game, too. This is what usually happens to video game testers.

A video game tester today enters a game’s development process during the early stages, unlike in the past when video game testers weren’t hired until a game nears its completion. This means that video game testers nowadays often find themselves not playing games but fixing software. They hardly feel like playing a video game at all, what with all the version builds to identify, glitches to discover, bugs to find and report, and works to verify. Indeed, video game testing belies the easy and hassle-free connotation its term brings.

Since the kind of playing that video game testers do is nothing short of a mission – it’s grueling, nerve-wracking, and burn-out-inducing, the video game testing industry must do well to ensure that these hardworking and seriously gifted (if you can play for that long and still have brains that work well enough to allow you to do the other difficult tasks the job entails, you’ve got real skills, my friend) video testers get the break they deserve.