by John Ryan

Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Playtesting Game Narratives series, curated by SFWA’s Game Writing Committee.

When you hear about narrative in video games, positions such as writers and narrative designers might be the first roles you’ll think of. What people don’t think about is one of the most important roles in the game studio: Quality Assurance, or QA.

I want to talk about what QA does in a video game studio and how this overlooked discipline is an unsung hero of game development. While QA helps multiple departments in a studio, I’m going to focus on narrative for this article and on how game writers can best work with QA.

So how do QA and storytelling work together in a game studio?

This really depends on the studio. If you have a narrative-focused studio, then you’ll likely have some QA personnel (either internal or third party) that will be devoted to spotting narrative issues during their play passes. This isn’t always the case though. There’s a good chance your studio or your team will just have a general QA pool at their disposal. However, with proper context and communication, you can have these generalists help spot narrative issues in your game.

What QA Looks For in a Narrative Pass

From my experience, QA looks for plot inconsistencies, discrepancies in character voice, odd leaps in plot logic or dialogue, and/or missing dialogue (which is also an audio issue, but it’s something that narrative needs to be aware of). Also, spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

Eagle-eyed testers will also be familiar with your game’s proper nouns: titles, naming conventions, weapon names, and locations. When I was working on Guild Wars 2, both QA and the editing team would double-check map names and even look up if a Charr name in-game matched the rules for naming a Charr character. No detail was too small.

QA doesn’t look for the following during its narrative play pass: level design issues (like traversal issues), missing art assets (hey, where’s the painting I’m supposed to steal?), missing ambient audio or effects, missing character animations, or absent visual effects (like an explosion going off). QA will notice these issues and file bugs to the appropriate teams, however.

A Word of Context for Writers

QA isn’t there to be your servant. It will not be at your beck and call at all times. Depending on the stage of development, QA might be slammed with other requests from other departments. QA has a job to do for the whole studio, not just you in the narrative department.

Whether the studio is narrative-focused or not, the narrative team is responsible for briefing QA on what it should be looking for before it does its play passes. This helps narrative as well as QA. Narrative will get specific feedback about what QA finds, while QA can narrow the scope of its review.

How to Get the Most Out of QA

Be proactive about this. Engage with QA from the start. If you don’t have a dedicated narrative QA team, then give QA detailed guidelines about what your team is looking for and the best way to send feedback to the writers. This is an ever-evolving process, so be ready to constantly communicate new targets to the QA team when necessary.

Speaking of, also tell the QA team about already identified problems. This saves QA from writing bugs it doesn’t need to and saves you the headache of getting multiple bugs for the same issue. And trust me, duplicate bugs are an aggravation you don’t need. I have lost count of all the times I’ve seen developers (dumbass younger me included) seethe with contempt and send QA a bitter note saying (paraphrasing): “Stop sending me this, you moron.”

You want to get ahead of this mindset. You need to see QA as more than a bunch of nitpicking elves who send you bugs that eat at your creative confidence. You need to see all the hard and thankless work QA does in the shadows. Be kind. Why?

The Unsung Heroes

Because QA is often the punching bag of the studio—the most grueling work with low pay and little prestige. Think of it this way: when QA does their job, it isn’t noticed. Compare that to when you have great dialogue, engaging audio, awesome vistas, or kick-ass cut scenes. All those devs can take a bow. Players never see the hard work QA has done to flag all the issues. However, when something blows up or breaks a game, everyone points their fire at QA: “Why wasn’t this obvious bug spotted?”

I’ve also seen QA framed as the pit where talent comes from, not where talent is. At ArenaNet, QA was at one time our farm league, where testers worked their asses off to be noticed and then “promoted” into design, art, audio, programming, or writing. QA was a stepping stone, not seen as a valid career path. As you can imagine, it gave the impression that QA was a place you wanted to cycle out of as fast as possible. The pay sucked and the respect wasn’t there. The older I get, the more I see this as unfair.

QA isn’t disposable. It’s a team vital to making a functioning, immersive game. Give QA the respect it deserves. When you work with them, be clear about what you want them to look for. Be clear about how you want them to give you feedback. And be clear that you appreciate their hard work.

After all, QA is there to help save you from yourself. Honor that.

John Ryan is a veteran game writer/narrative designer who has worked on franchises including Fable, Horizon, Marvel’s Iron Man, Guild Wars, Destiny, Forza, and Lily’s Garden. He’s brought stories to life across multiple genres and platforms, including VR and XR. He is currently working on two unannounced projects but is always looking for the next adventure. He currently lives near Seattle with his wife, two cats, and a growing backlog of games on his Steam account. You can read more about him and his work at his site: johnryanwrites.com.