The Tester: Reality Shows, Reality, and Level-Three Graphical Looseness

I work as a game tester. It's a job that doesn't come with a lot of extracurricular demands, but this is one of them: commenting on Sony's new reality show, The Tester.

Firstly, I have nothing to complain about. I am, in the world of game testing, uniquely fortunate. There's no other word for it.

Lucky, actually. That would be another word for it. Really, the English language is full of synonyms, I don't know why I even said that. So I'm lucky.

I work at a little place called Telltale Games. I say that without irony; it's really rather small. It's not Sony, and for me that's a good thing. I, and a handful of other testers, sit within spitting distance of designers, programmers, and 3D modelers, in an office space that possesses no real sense of hierarchy - at least, not so much as to be oppressive. In a larger company, not only would I not be seated within spitting distance of any non-testers, I would be professionally compelled to refer to it as "getting-spit-on distance," in acknowledgment of my status.

It helps immensely that Telltale is an episodic games company. THE episodic games company, really. Others have tried, and they have been poisoned. Uh, metaphorically. By market forces. Testing games gets tedious, yes, but in a monthly release schedule, the point at which the game gets tedious is followed pretty quickly by the point at which the game gets shipped.

But even at its best, testing's just a job. A weirdly fetishized job, yes, but maybe that's not so different from any reality show prize. Singing can be a lot of fun. Singing for a living? It is, I'm guessing, just a job. Some reality shows offer relationships, but relationships are not prizes. They're relationships, and if you won them on a reality show they are probably really quite bad relationships. There's at least some honesty in giving out money as a prize, because we all know what money does: it makes you happy forever if you have enough of it.

But I'm not going to say that The Tester is a bad idea. The internet has already tensed around the announcement, holding the show tight within a sphincter of reality. The Tester's target audience is savvy; they will not miss the blogs and the blurbs that are, even now, poised to strike down the Tester each time it lies sweetly about the humble profession of game testing. Ultimately, viewers will know more about the industry than they did before The Tester was aired.

Yes, I am an optimist. Maybe that's the real reason I like my job.