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

If the main qualification for this job is a love of games, there will never be a shortage of readily available workers.

"Most of the girls who come through have enough intelligence, so that they're the ones who get other jobs quickly or move up," Theuret says. "Stuck in the tester position are the other guys. It's just the difference between the gals and the guys."

Being stuck in the low end of QA also means you remain much more subject to the product boom-and-bust cycle. After a game ships, people lose their jobs. That's just how it is.

One night, Morales gives me a tour of the Surreal office. A bottle of Maker's Mark sits atop her desk. Shoemaker is there, too, with his QA team. It's 11 p.m. He's tired, but radiating a diffuse glow. Another staffer is on a scooter, breezing around the office. None of them are complaining about getting home.

"Because I've been in this industry so long, I've seen so many people come and go. It is very cold, and it is very hard," says Morales. "But at the end of the day, you end up having this executive who's got all of these purse strings in his pocket, saying, 'I secured this amount of money for this project. And with this amount of money, I'm going to give this much to all of the different departments.' And what really sucks is that QA is always the first thing to go. Always. It is hard, and it is sad...at the end of the day, all you can say is, 'You're getting laid off. Just look at this like it's a little vacation.'"

kstarr@seattleweekly.com

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