Pharah, one of Overwatch’s heroes, has an emote where she says, “Rocket Jump? It sounds dangerous.’ Almost thirty years before Farah said that in Quake, some players discovered that firing a missile into the ground could damage them, but also give them a jump boost, allowing them to reach higher ground and thus have a combat advantage.
Using the word “bug” is almost the same as prompting your interlocutor, inviting words like “stomp,” “crush” or “fight” to fill in the blanks. But bugs are an integral part of gaming culture and the social networks that games build around themselves. The ability to shoot a rocket into the ground to jump higher has now become a staple of many first-person shooters, and the popularity of this bug has allowed Blizzard to subtly wink at those players who know they’re experienced, endearing them to a character that otherwise has little time to develop. .
In the field of quality assurance, bugs are defects of greater or lesser severity that can negatively affect the intended user experience or perhaps even prevent them from exploring the product. In extreme cases, such as security flaws, bugs can even have long-lasting detrimental effects on players’ lives. Countless hours of hard work, effort, and creativity go into minimizing the chance that a user might encounter these bugs, and countless people should be commended for their work to maximize the user experience.
But in the field of video games, there should be room to celebrate mistakes. They’ve been integral to the development of the field, either through genre-defining glitches or through glitch art and a niche subculture of fan-made fiction that explores the horror that occurs when a favorite childhood video game is brought to a horrific end. level. Not to mention the culture of speedrunning and the competitive and cunning purposeful exploitation of bugs, sometimes for the greater good. Sometimes bugs are the main “collectible” in the game. You might think of Easter eggs in that way, but Easter eggs are done on purpose. The developer knows they are there, and like the rest of the game, they are a means of communication between them and the players. But when the players find a bug, it belongs to the players for a moment. They offer them a window to appropriate a piece of the game, rally around it, and share it with their friends and communities. If easter eggs and intended mechanics are the means by which the designers and developers communicate with players, then bugs are the means by which the game communicates with them. And it is at this bare interface between the game and the player that art, relationships, and culture can develop.
As participants in the video game industry, we are indebted to these temporal points of disconnection between the created, intended experience and the inner workings of the software. Moreover, we should thank those people who work to ensure that we can see mistakes in such a positive way, because without them, memorable failures would not be cultural, but destructive. Quality assurance work requires a lot from professionals, especially in the field of video games. It takes persistence to make sure that every part of a video game is not only functional, but also visually and aurally accurate across different hardware spec configurations. It requires creativity in trying to achieve objectives in ways not only unanticipated by the designers, but even implausible for the task at hand. Analytical skills are required to determine the location of the defect, its conditions, and the effects it may have if a player encounters it. It requires QA professionals to repeatedly assume the roles of potential players, even as the game’s complexity leaves room for myriad player characters to fill its space. These calls are answered with hard work and investment of time.
Modern video games strive for complexity, unexpected gameplay, and replayability, all packaged and enhanced by flawless and enjoyable graphics and sound design. Each of these goals involves increased financial investment and increased requirements for the producers of these games. Iterative cycles are getting tighter, risks are higher, and the demand for quick response is tougher. In this environment, the responsibility to empower game developers to achieve their goals must also increase. As games grow in scale and depth, quality assurance professionals will continue to require persistence, creativity, analytical skills, and empathy, so they need to be given the space to do so. AI-driven QA tools can help do this by shortening the cycle of running a large number of tests, diversifying the use cases they can analyze and act on, narrowing the space of possibilities where a failure could have occurred, providing a quick understanding of how to interact with a game that could be counter-intuitive, and which allows for an overview of the defect’s impact on the experience as a whole.
Game design has always balanced player freedom with the designed experience, which naturally puts pressure on testing requirements. The increased freedom of the player increases the pressure due to the exponential increase in the possibilities of actions, as well as their successive combinations, which are sometimes impossible to fully analyze. For example, a few years ago I played Alan Wake. I got to a point in the game where I had nothing good in terms of both health and ammo. In this miserable state, I passed the autosave checkpoint right before the fight. In my state, the fight was impossible to win. I got stuck in an autosave respawn loop that I couldn’t get out of and could no longer progress through the game. I left the game and haven’t been back since, nor have I played any of the Alan Wake sequels. This is partly because of the bitter aftertaste left over from the experience and because I feel like I missed too much of the story and I would be lost. Preserving my experience would mean in this case that the unlikely sequences of behavior I engaged in at the same skill level I had (which caused me to lose so much HP and ammo) would have to be done by the tester, at that particular checkpoint in the game. This tester had to do the same for each checkpoint at each skill variation and action sequence. The conditions that led to my scenario would take a tester an inordinate amount of time to find, if at all. But for me, that was my entire gaming experience. However, parsing such large amounts of data takes an entire day for AI. Such tools can empower testers to detect and detect cases that have a 0.01% chance of occurring but affect 100% of the player experience.
So then we are left with errors? Do you thank them, or do you thank them? I think this is actually the wrong question. It takes space and time to be creative, to understand the potential of these mistakes, and to honor the players and game makers who play in the space of the encounter between human and software. We will never be able to eliminate all bugs. Players will find them and make them their own. But if quality assurance professionals don’t have the tools to reduce the presence of devastating errors, we risk missing out on the players who might find the next rocket leap.
About the author
Dr Miruna Vozaru is a PhD in Game Analytics who has worked in the industry as a researcher, lecturer, level designer and level analyst. She is currently a testing specialist modl.ai where she is responsible for a wide range of the company’s quality assurance needs, including game engine plugins, platforms, games and artificial intelligence agents.