Letters to the Editor

sEx

Granted I only have one day of testing experience, it was a 14 hour day. It sounds to me like the experience at Nintendo and Microsoft are understandably ideal compared to other places. Working for a third party company, you can be expected to pull 50-70 hour weeks frequently, and with a 6 month contracted that won't be renewed unless you put in every hour that's asked of you. Not taking the overtime can be considered to be taking vacation time. You're in a dark room for 10-16 hour days with temperatures that are either freezing or boiling hot depending on when the cooling systems kick in, and replaying the same level of a game 15-20 times a day. As somebody who could happily play video games for entertainment every day until I die, I'd say doing QA/Testing is poison for being able to enjoy games. There's too much of a good thing, and then there's too much of a not-so-good, unpolished and stressful thing.

- dgrassa

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In response to "Fragging in the (Un)Lucky Country" from The Escapist Forum: Talk to any career counsellor and they will tell you : If you want to be happy in life find something you're good at, something you enjoy doing, and that's what you should do for a job.

Tell them that what you enjoy and are good at is gaming, and they'll laugh in your face.

As an Aussie I do hope that professional e-sport does catch on down here, but sadly we do lag way behind the rest of the world in many online avenues. I lived in the US for 3 years and I could get a decent broadband connection for half of what I pay down here, and it wasn't metered the way most companies do down here, sharing a house with my wife who is also a gaming nut, and having to watch our usage to make sure we don't go over our cap for the month is rather annoying.

People do tend to overlook the benefits of serious competitive gaming. The organisation skills and leadership skills that it can teach go far beyond the stereotypical "pizza-faced, pasty-faced 98lb weakling" and actually help people with skills in other realms of life. The example cited by the writer is just one case where a gamer, has taken the skills they've learned through their gaming interactions and used it to move on to another career, one considered more "socially acceptable."

For now, the rest of us keep plugging away at our daily 9 to 5's, come home, eat dinner with the family, play with my son (who is 2) and enjoy my gaming hobby after he heads to bed, then spend what time we can on the weekend, cloistered behind our monitors, hidden away like society says we should.

- seule