Testing Video Games Can't Possibly Be Harder Than an Afternoon With Xbox, Right?

"It's literally like the 'shape-up' that they used to do at the dock," says Marcus Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech). He's referring to an early-20th-century way of hiring longshore workers and deckhands. "You go there, and you kind of hang around, and they say, 'All right, we need five guys to help unload this ship—you, you, you, you, and you. The rest of you come back tomorrow.' It's not any different." Courtney, a former Microsoft employee, has been working on organizing groups like video game testers for almost a decade.

"A lot of people just don't show up for their shifts," admits Volt's Theuret, who says that this shortage of consistent workers is why the Bullpen, designed to fill empty shifts on the fly, exists at all. It helps identify those who really want to get ahead—like Theuret, who says he signed up on the Bullpen sheet almost daily for a year before being promoted to a full-time position as a lead.

Matt Bors

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More About

• Adam Theuret
• Microsoft Xbox 360
• Tommy Brosman
• Video Games
• Soccer

I leave at 7:35 a.m. The bus ride home takes two and a half hours.

If the main qualification for this job is a love of games, there will never be a shortage of readily available workers. "It's every stoner's dream in the Northwest to play video games for a living," jokes Sean Day, 36, who's worked as a tester for Volt and Nintendo, and currently works as an apartment manager. "And I should know—I've tried it three times."

Other industries have scads of workers making minimum wage, but video games inspire a special sort of madness. Addiction has been linked to deaths, like the 2005 rash in which 10 South Koreans died from blood clots caused by prolonged playing sessions. Last month, delegates at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association considered including video game addiction in the upcoming revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but decided the idea needed further study.

"I think the [video game] industry in general, they want addicts," says Dr. Hilarie Cash, founder of Redmond's Internet/Computer Addiction Services. "It is to their economic benefit to have people really hooked on their games. That there happens to be a pool of addicts out there who will work for peanuts, like methadone treatment, is to their advantage," she says.

"A lot of the guys I've worked with are testers," Cash says of her clients. "If they have any job at all, that's the only job they seek...and can keep."

The thrill of victory is universal to competition, but it's also universal to addiction. Video games hit these sweet spots using psychological principles of intermittent reinforcement, of keeping you on your toes awaiting the payoff.

"Video games, for those people who get hooked, is elevating dopamine in the brain, and then your body adjusts to the overly produced levels of dopamine. That's the same way all addictions work," says Cash. Video games also tap into our desire to adopt a new persona, to be transported elsewhere now, to have a "redo" button for our actions, and to offer the feeling of interaction while ultimately being in control of the situation.

That all-encompassing sense of control, I realize while being turned away at 7:35 a.m., does not happen in real life.

The next day, I show up early and make my shift on time. At 7:20 a.m. the fluorescent-lighted cafeteria, adorned with only the mandatory minimum-wage and OSHA postings, is already full. The crowd numbers well over 50; most are young, white men. The T-shirt on one reads: "Your skill in Reading has increased by one point" (the first of countless references to seeing the world through points and levels). Soft drinks are free, but juice and bottled water cost 25 cents. (Red Bull, which I'd hoped to see served in IV form, is $2.)

One table is occupied with a group playing Magic: The Gathering, a card-based game that requires a 20-sided die and, evidently, the ability to make voices in the high-pitched style of Monty Python. Magic is an RPG, or role-playing game, and the guys in the cafeteria morph into elves and trolls and other sorts of fire-breathing characters. One of the participants is Adam Theuret, whose signature look includes yellow racing shades and paint-splattered black cargo pants.

Theuret doesn't even have to be here. He says he retired three years ago, the day after his 22nd birthday, when he sold a few of his high-end engineering patents (which include a mechanism for motors to store their kinetic heat after being shut off, allowing them to restart immediately in subzero conditions). Not long into his retirement, he was spending nearly $1,000 daily on gadgets just to keep his boredom at bay. After a nearby cousin asked him for a ride to Volt, Theuret—himself a lifelong avid gamer—stuck around to try it out. And he's been here since.

"I played games every day anyway," Theuret says.

About 20 of us are brought into an office, called a "lab," for which we're each given keycards. Each workspace consists of a desk and chair with a small flat-screen TV, an Xbox 360 console, and a controller. Everything—everything—is numbered. I sit down; it's the first time I've played an Xbox 360 in my life. We're barked instructions on what profile to sign up under, how to log on, and what movie to download. Although I'm slower than the other testers, I'm fine once I realize that everyone's eyes are locked to their own screen. We're assigned to test a new feature on the Xbox 360—another part of the ADD-inducing spring update that will allow the console to download movies while you're playing games.