Word: bugging
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Video-game abuse has become a career these days, a crucial part of the $11 billion video-game industry. Hanson is a quality-assurance tester, who plays through every conceivable video-game scenario, looking for bugs, or problems, in a program before they hit the real world. Testers report glitches--a character walking offscreen, for example--to their company's programming department, which repairs the game's computer code. Then the game goes back to the testing department for further scrutiny, and the cycle repeats, often for months, until the game is bug free. "Testers are a special breed," says...
Just one undetected bug in Golden Tee could cost the company as much as $100,000, the price of fixing the problem and sending an update from its headquarters in Arlington Heights, Ill., to game operators around the world. It's a frightening figure, Ditton says, when you consider the multitude of things that could go wrong with the programming, affecting everything from a game's 3-D images to its virtual sportscaster...
...Today's titles, however, are far too complicated, requiring a new kind of watchful eye. "Testers are a lot like the crash-test dummies of the industry," says Jason Della Roca, director of the International Game Developers Association, a professional society. First-year testers make about $32,000, while bug hunters with six or more years in the field earn about $53,000, according to Game Developer magazine...
Video-game makers go to great lengths to produce bug-free games...
...simple rule of thumb," says John Lasseter, Pixar's creative director and the auteur of its first hits, Toy Story, A Bug's Life and Toy Story II. "The more geometric a figure is, the easier it is to do with computer animation. The more organic something is, the harder it is. Everything about a human is organic. The audience looks in the mirror every day, so if you don't get it right, it's obvious to them." The solution: comically distort the subjects' features, make 'em cartoony. As Bird says, "You want them to be caricatured and believable...