GAMES

In July 2005, I was offered a job as a functionality QA Technician at Rare. I'd been barely scraping by as a freelance journalist (writing about games, books and films) for the best part of a year, and despite vehement warnings from friends working in testing already ("you'll be treated like crap, the pay's dreadful, the hours are draconian, the work's mind-numbingly repetetive"), I took the job. The warnings were pretty accurate, but to my surprise I found that I really enjoyed the job and that I was pretty damn good at it. Almost immediately I found out what crunch can be like: we were working on Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero, both Xbox 360 launch titles, and I'd been there about three weeks before the nine-to-five, five-days-a-week schedule changed. I worked nine a.m. to midnight, six days a week (the days rotated so that sometimes you got a day off at the weekend). It was tiring, but still fun. Because of the long hours (and the fact that we were on zero hour contracts, turnover was very high, and by the time I left at the end of March 2006, I had about the most experience there.

After Rare, I moved to London to work at 2K, and found a completely different QA world. A professional world. I went from being the most experienced person to being the least. 2K were expanding their UK QA department, and I started work in the same fortnight as seven other people, all of whom had more experience than me. They also had certification experience, so I had lots to learn, and quickly. I loved working at 2K. They were a fantastic bunch of people and I made some very good friends there. I also found that it was a job where the warnings my friends had given me didn't apply as much. And, as I said, they looked at QA as a professional role, not just something that students could do during their summer break. As a consequence of this, they treated the staff as responsible professionals: something I hadn't had much experience of at Rare. Actually being trusted to be able to complete a task without supervision, being trusted to manage your own bugs... Basically being trusted to do your job. It was fantastic. Still very busy, of course, as QA always is: there were eight QA Technicians and two QA Leads, and we'd often have five or six titles in testing at once. That meant that there were several stretches of time where I was the only person working on a specific title. It was a brilliant time though, and I learned an incredible amount.

From 2K, I went back to Rare, in August 2007. I loved working at 2K, but I'd been living away from my fiancee for a year and a half (which I hated), and our wedding was getting ever closer. September 2008 was only a year away and we hadn't organised anything about the wedding. I knew Rare were ramping up QA numbers again, looking for someone with TCR and Lot Check experience and I'd been told in a roundabout way that there would be Lead work for me after a few weeks. And I like to think there would have been, but in December 2007, a bunch of things happened at once (projects being cancelled or shelved for a while) and two thirds of the testers (me amongst them) weren't needed 'at the moment'. I waited as long as I could for the 'moment' to pass, but no work meant no wages, and in January, when I got a phone call, I decided to move on from Rare again. My second stint at Rare was short, but still valuable. I worked on a Nintendo DS game (the only platform I didn't have experience of from 2K) and I was asked to mentor new employees. I showed them how to use bug databases, how to write a bug, how to narrow down repro steps and so on. Essentially, I taught them how to be a QA Technician, and I was in charge of assigning them work (from a list of things that needed doing), monitoring the bugs they entered and making sure they did their regression properly. Essentially I was their lead, although I didn't get the pay or the credit for doing it. I'd have liked the credit, but I found it incredibly rewarding and I'd have loved to continue doing it.

The January phone call was from Free Radical Design, who were working on the (at the time) exciting new IP Haze. That project's finished now, scoring dreadfully in reviews (I think the reviews were too harsh on the game, personally. If Prey got an average of 7, Haze deserved the same. The press thought differently though.) I'm still at FRD now, working on an unannounced game, doing functionality testing. There's been murmurings of Lead work, but to be honest I don't think it's likely: there are four leads already and two managers who also do testing, so I can't see why they'd need another Lead.

So that's where I am now. As for where I want to be in the future, I'd like to eventually move into games design and writing. It's a contentious subject, but I think that games narratives are at a 'picture book' level, rather than a 'novel' or 'short story' level at the moment. I think that games have the potential to tell incredible narratives, but it needs to be done by integrating more technical design (such as level design, sound design, gameplay mechanics and so on) into the narrative. By and large, the way it seems to work at the moment (I may be wrong, and if so, yell at me. I'm always interested in learning) is that games writing is almost an afterthought. It feels like designers come up with a rough idea of game type, art, mechanics and level design first, graft a story on to it after that, and if there's a professional writer involved at all, they're brought in much later in order to produce a spec script. It seems like a backwards way of doing things to me, and it's one that I'm sure will change to a more sophisticated integration of narrative and writing in the development process. I really want to be a part of that.

At the moment though, my immediate ambition is to move into Lead QA. As I mentioned before, the Lead-like stuff I've done is the stuff I've found the most rewarding. I've got the experience and the ability to do it. I'm certain I'd do it extremely well. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of QA Lead work going about at the moment. Certainly not in the Midlands (I'm based in Leicester, and with it being so close to my wedding at the time of writing this, I'm not willing to relocate just yet). I really can't imagine that any QA Manager is going to see this page and think 'hmm. I need a QA Lead, and Michael sounds like just the chap'. Just in case though, please do get in touch.

In optimistic support of that, here are a couple of links to other online details of my life in the games industry:
My Giant Bomb profile page (which is still very empty, though I'm waiting for my changes to take effect which will flesh it out a bit) is here.
My Mobygames page - listing some (though by no means all) of the games I've worked on - is here.
My LinkedIn profile - a sort of online CV - is here.

WRITING

I love writing. It sounds horribly New Age hippy spiritualist of me, but there's a deep feeling of joy I get whenever I write.

I've always written in an idle sort of way. Scribbled down stories, dreadful (dreadful) poems, character bios, world settings, ideas for screenplays, comic scripts and what have you. I only ever did it when the mood took me though, and that meant that as much as I loved it, most of the stuff I started didn't get finished and the stuff that did never made it past a first draft.

I'd always assumed that success in writing would just arrive somehow, without me having to actually put much time into it, and to be honest it wasn't something I was actively pursuing in any case. That's changed now though. I've realised that I want to be published, so I've moved writing from a sort of hobby to a second (albeit unpaid) career. I'm a member of a couple of writing circles now, and I'm putting a lot of time into critiquing and writing. I read just about everything - historical novels, fantasy, sci-fi, magical realism (or whatever it's currently called), horror, crime, comedy, factual books. Anything I like the sound of and isn't so badly written I can't get past the first page. I'm intending to write the same way: I don't want to be stuck in a genre. At the moment though, much of my writing seems to hover around the magical realism area. I'm currently working on the first drafts of four magical realism short stories, redrafting two magical realism stories and two soft sci-fi stories, and I'm midway through a young teen horror novel and a linked collection of fantasy short stories. I'm not the world's most prolific writer - it takes me a while to finish stories as I tend to redraft lots as I'm writing - but I'm having an incredibly enjoyable time doing it. I don't have any stories in submission at the moment (though one or two are very nearly ready). See the Fiction page for more details as and when there are any.