A few years back I remember reading an article about game testing that was written by a tester. I don't remember a whole lot of specific details, but the gist of the article was that its not a fun job. Not a fun job at all.

All I know is that Bruce Lee is the best lee. Or Lee actual.

Won't most games testing be automated by bots these days. Like warcraft leveling bots.
Something which always on DRM harms for the public when they need to test if a competitive game mechanics are working properly.

Are you asking what a game tester is?

One of the things a game tester does, is to check for spelling mistakes, and make sure people can understand the language.

Here Fairfox, have this. All your questions will be answered, I promise.

https://youtu.be/HspZ-u7Q6kg

It's probably the most boring job in the world, repeating over and over the same bits, checking every little bit from spelling of words, through each quest possibility, through graphical glitch, through engine failure. I suppose it is fun to break a game sometimes, but ultimately it will likely burn you out very quickly. It's a thankless task as well, one of those that is only brought up when it does not work. Today's sees gamers being used as testers, pre release alpha being sent out for pre-order or backers, funny situation really in which the company wins big time (free testing, early money, no real need to ever produce anything) and the customer feels this is beneficial.

I feel sorry for testers, being a dev (not a games dev), because they're basically employed to piss off everyone.

Devs are always given a task that cannot be completed in time, I don't think I've ever encountered a project that over estimated the development cost. This means that time allocated for testing is always eaten into by the devs. This means that when the project overruns (every project overruns) it's the testers that are on the critical path (i.e. preventing the release), so the project manager is always annoyed with the testers, because they're in the way of his/her milestones.

The testers then have to turn round to the developers and say "this isn't ready", the developers will always argue "nobody would actually do that, it's an entirely unrealistic test case" (this is invariably untrue), and thus be pissed off with the testers for creating work for them dealing with esoteric edge cases.

Then the project reaches a crunch point, the testers are pushed to compromise on quality (i.e. ignore bugs / faults), but still expected to sign off. Then a bug gets found in the released version, and the testers are blamed for it.

Nightcrawler called it a thankless task, I think that's understating it.

When Ron Gilbert wrote a blog post about the budget in Thimbleweed Park, he included a section about testers. He distinguishes between paid testers and unpaid beta testers, with each role having different objectives.

It's a very interesting read: https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/budget1

First they'd write out the test cases, possibly something along the lines of:

1) When the game is launched, the intro video should play
2) If clicking X, Y and Z key during the intro video, the video is skipped
3) When the intro video finishes, the menu should show
4) Moving the mouse over the menu items should highlight the specific menu item
5) Moving the mouse away from the menu item should unhighlight it
etc etc and so on.

Things that can be automatically scripted to be checked are automatically scripted to be checked, and things that cannot be automatically scripted to be checked, are then checked manually.
Bugs and unexpected behaviours are then logged and prioritised to be addressed by the developers.

FTFY

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You know, I was about to say something about how repeatedly playing a broken game every day and writing down all the bugs you encounter sounds like a really bad job, but then there's Early Access and people doing it for free so meh.

Ignore the forgettable webcomic. The articles are what is interesting :

http://trenchescomic.com/tales/post/9810

"Tales from the Trenches" is a long, mostly damning, collection of testimonies from videogame testers. Gives an idea of the job itself and its conditions. It's a fun, yet quite terrifying read.

I saw a documentary on this once. I think it was called "Grandma's Boy..."

I HIGHLY recomend checking it out ;)