To see a video on the new EA Games testing center, click here.
Besides a few models of teeth left behind in old lockers and bare cabinets, it’s hard to tell the Electronic Arts North American Test Center’s building used to be the University’s dental school. Since opening Sept. 8 on LSU’s South Campus, the building has transformed into EA’s one-of-a-kind video game testing facility, complete with a nearly 40-person staff and plenty of new games to test.Daniel Jackson, quality assurance project lead, said students or individuals affiliated with the University make up half the staff, and EA is aiming to have about 300 full- or part-time testers in 2009. The center is currently accepting applications through hiregoodpeople.com. Starting pay for game testers is $7.50 an hour.”This will give you hands-on experience with a lot of the aspects of gaming,” Jackson said. “An artist touches just one part of the game … where as a [quality assurance] tester sees the entire game.”Testers are currently looking for bugs in upcoming titles, including NCAA Football 2010, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010 and Madden NFL 2010 for the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable. Jackson said the center is using these consoles because they are easy to set up and manage. The center will eventually incorporate more consoles for testing, and non-sport games will also be incorporated.”One of the big things we are trying to emphasize is that we are not doing just sports,” Jackson said. Equipped with a PC, video game console and note pad, each tester looks for bugs in games — areas where the game crashes, spelling errors in loading menus and credits and graphic inconsistencies. Jackson said testers use the Internet to make sure information in the game is correct — like player and stadium names, school colors and mascots for sports titles.Once a tester finds a bug, they write down its type on a note pad and will enter the information into a database after playing the same section several times to make sure the bug is correctly identified. The information can then be viewed by EA developers in the Orlando studio — the primary facility to which the Baton Rouge center reports.”They’re the ones that ultimately make the final decisions on how the game is made … what the game looks like,” Jackson said. “We just do our best to tell them what’s wrong, helping them to fix it.”Charlie D’Agostino, executive director of the Louisiana Business and Technology Center at LSU South Campus, said EA’s location in Baton Rouge is a “huge success.””Having the flagship of EA in Baton Rouge and affiliated with LSU will certainly attract other electronic companies to grow the entertainment industry in Louisiana,” D’Agostino said.Though EA has development centers internationally, the South Campus location is the only center dedicated solely to testing in North America. Adam Sharp, University alumus, is a full-time game tester at the center. He has been working there for about a month and a half and was first attracted to the job because of his love for video games and EA’s international reputation.”It’s a fun environment,” Sharp said. “It’s a real team environment. It’s good to have good people to work with, and I’m happy to wake up in the morning and come to work.”Sharp was an experienced gamer before working at the center. Jackson said that while it is helpful when individuals know a lot about video games, they only need to know how to use a controller to be a game tester. Jackson said he likes teams of testers when some know video games well and others don’t.”Some of our best testers have actually been people who know nothing about games,” Jackson said. Jackson started his career with EA as a game tester at the development center in Orlando and has been a quality assurance project lead for four years. “I worked on Madden [NFL 2009] last year,” Jackson said. “To know that somebody sat in line at a GameStop or a Best Buy from midnight until whenever the store opened to go buy a game that I worked on is kind of cool.”—-Contact Kyle Bove at [email protected]