Some students can’t wait to get home after class and spend the afternoon mashing buttons on games like “Madden” and “NCAA Football 2010,” but 80 local students get to test the newest games before they hit the shelves.The Electronic Arts Sports North American Testing Center, which opened in 2008 right off campus on GSRI Avenue, offers testing work to about 160 people, said Patrick Lamont, project specialist at the location.”We’re expecting to hire about another 300 game testers,” Lamont said. “And at least 50 percent of our testers are local college students.”Some of the games being tested now include “Madden Football 2011,” “NCAA Football 2011” and “Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2011,” Lamont said.”The lineup that we’re testing heavily now are the games that come out in June, July and August,” Lamont said. “‘Tiger Woods’ comes out on Father’s Day [June 20, 2010], and ‘NCAA’ comes out in July in time for college kickoff.”Game testers are required to search for and report bugs they find in the games currently in development, Lamont said. A typical day at EA consists of free testing and assigned tasks.”A tester’s day is 33 percent ad hoc or creative testing, where the whole day is open to them,” Lamont said. “Thirty-three percent is assigned tasks. Then the rest would be to check if the bugs that were claimed to be fixed were really fixed — we call that regression testing.”Jordan Goynes, a University alumnus who has been working at the testing center for nearly a year and has moved to full-time employment since graduating last December, said the assigned tasks can get a bit tedious.”You’re not just looking at the surface,” Goynes said. “We have to make sure if you’re playing through a season, the information will load up. There’s a bigger story behind all the visual things that you see.”One of the misconceptions about the job is that the testers aren’t doing serious work, Goynes said.”People think we come here and play video games all day — that is not true,” Goynes said. “I am playing the games that you don’t want to play, the things you have no interest in doing in the game.”But testers said they still enjoy the relaxed environment of the job.”They’re pretty flexible — I’ve worked as little as 18 hours a week before,” Goynes said. “If you need to change or swap your shift, they’re very understandable about people who are in school.”The testing center, known as EA Sports Baton Rouge, is the only one of its kind in the United States, according to Roger Pynn, spokesman for EA Sports.”While we do some testing in Orlando and at the other locations around North America, what we did was to establish the center there with partnership with LSU and consolidate our [testing] function,” Pynn said. “We’re very pleased with the work that’s being done there.”While the site serves only as a testing center now, Lamont said he could see it expanding in the next few years.”The next two to three years could be lucrative for us in how we grow,” Lamont said. “We may be able to grow into a full development studio [for games].”____Contact Ben Bourgeois at [email protected]