Me: “Sir, there are about ten-billion transistors in a PS5.”Ĭaller: *Pause* “Very steady hands, then!” Me: “You’re asking our retail store to make the chips required to run a PS5?”Ĭaller: “I did this s*** in high school! All you need is a soldering iron and a steady hand.” Me: “Yeah, I read about that, but sadly, the chipsets that the PS5 runs on can only come from there so-”Ĭaller: “We should be able to make them here! Can’t you make them at your store?” Ignoring the fact that Taiwan isn’t communist, I try to reason with him. Disgusting! I hear we get all our chips from Taiwan! Taiwan! This is America, and we shouldn’t be getting our stuff from communist countries!” Whenever we get them in, they sell out very fast, and due to supply issues-”Ĭaller: “Yeah, I saw that on the news. I get a lot of calls asking when they’ll be in stock, but one stands out more than the others. The PlayStation 5 has recently come out, and due to supply issues, it is almost impossible to get one. Maybe from now on, they’ll think twice before automatically assigning work based on an outdated stereotype! As a bloodthirsty uterus-bearer, I couldn’t have been happier. I continued to be a focus tester for the next two years, and they never again asked me to provide feedback about babies. I dragged that game through the toughest trenches of gameplay and soon broke their physics engine by filling a room with corpses. There was some sputtering and an awkward, vague excuse about a mistake happening “somewhere.”Ībout a month later, I was called back to playtest another game. Why did the idiots who are processing those only look at my gender and not my preferences?” The only answer I got to any of those was a horrified stare. Me: “Well, would it be possible to somehow pit the babies against each other in gladiatorial combat? If I give my baby a sword, can he learn to dismember the flesh of his enemies? Is my baby large enough to wield a submachine gun?” Then would it be possible to neglect the babies to the point of inducing a psychotic break?” Me: “Would it be possible to starve the babies?” The staff clearly expected an easy session where all the young ladies had zero knowledge or intention to actually test the game’s ability to function under stress.Īfter about twenty minutes of listening to fluff noise, I decided to ask a few questions of my own. The more I listened, the more irritated I got. They kept asking questions like, “Do we get to dress them up?”, “How do we feed them?”, and, “Do they talk?” The focus group could have involved elementary school kids happily, assuming kids that age wanted to pretend to be a very watered-down version of a mommy.Īnd for some reason, the other girls were eating it up. It was the most G-rated, brainless, idiotic pile of nonsense I’ve ever had the displeasure of interacting with. I happen to have a uterus, so I was put into a group with six or seven other young ladies and told to provide feedback on a new browser-based Flash game about caring for virtual babies. It turned out that the only part of my application the company actually looked at was my gender. What kind of game would I get to see? Would it have guns? Swords? Epic space battles? Pretty soon, I got my first call to come in for a group. You know, the fun stuff that is not meant for anything below M-Rated. My preferred style of gameplay involves as much violence, destruction, and slaughter as possible, so I selected every genre where it was theoretically possible to cause carnage: shooters, real-time strategy, fighting games, etc. When you signed up with these guys, they gave you an application with a questionnaire asking what sorts of games you were interested in playtesting for them. The idea was to test the boundaries of the game to see if you could find flaws and/or crash the game, as well as provide feedback on the gameplay. I spent a little over two years volunteering as a focus group tester for a very large gaming company.
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