February 25, 2006

[Testing] A Group of your Peers...

If you are now or ever have been a video game tester, there's now a virtual place you can go to hang out with your peers.

PlayThrough.net is a new site dedicated to video game quality assurance. If you have anything to share, or have any questions about game QA, go ahead and join in the discussion.

The site is small and just starting, but I figure if we make a visit or post between builds, we can help it grow.

Oh, and a bug. If you enter www. before the address, it doesn't work. While the ideal is to drop extraneous characters, users and browsers will both add the www. without a second thought.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been contemplating a design for such a community; however, I was still thinking of a good marketable domain name... I don't think "play through" communicates the appropriate message. After all, we do much more than playtesting.

Michael Russell said...

True, it's not the most accurate name, but most people outside of quality assurance think that is all that we do.

Hopefully, by searching for their misinformed opinion, they can be enlightened.

Anonymous said...

In case you're not aware, Michael, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) provides a Quality Assurance Special Interest Group (SIG) for industry QA professionals too.

Website:
www.igda.org/qa/

Forums:
www.igda.org/forums/

How exactly does Playthrough.net differentiate itself from established interactive entertainment communities such as the IGDA and ELSPA, and software quality resources such as StickyMinds.com and QAForums.com?

There are also sites such as XXGamers.com and ColdMilk.org that focus on the same subject. I don't see Playthrough.net taking off without some sort of unique advantage. A magazine-like constant barrage of testing knowledge from industry insiders might work though.

Michael Russell said...

To be honest, the only difference that I saw is that the community was created by a tester.

I got an E-mail from a reader saying, "Check it out," I did, liked what I saw, and plugged it.

I'll have to check out these others as well.