If a moderator could change the article URL to the Kotaku article, or a fixed Pastebin (http://pastebin.com/JHP8yCk4) that would be appreciated.
The missing section for reference:
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One of the cool things we did at CA were playtests. A lot of playtests! For nine months I literally played Halo 4 every day for money. We would grab the newest build and go into a closed room with 16 Xboxes and play various modes, checking code and, most importantly, monitoring host and client frames per second.
These playtests would always be a mixture of QA, developers, coders, producers and artists. It was not uncommon to see Max hang out and observe or even play.
Most of the sessions were fun, but there was also a nasty air of "nerd-dickdom" competitiveness. Controllers were slammed; F bombs were dropped; homosexual slurs were tossed about (and I know for a fact we had some gay workers in the studio). So yeah, it was grown-up nerds making a video game.
At this point in the article, some readers may be thinking, “Well what is the problem here? This sounds awesome!” Truth be told, it wasn’t, and it was because I was a contractor. It was like being Jon Snow or Theon Greyjoy under the Stark roof. Yes, people may talk to you, or relatively like you, but you are not accepted. The smiles, and jests and "bottle talk" always seemed phony, and the reason was because I was temp—in fact, my whole department was.
One of the reasons I took this job was because they sold me on the fact that, if I did well, and showed promise, that it would be a real possibility to get hired on full-time. I sure as hell did not accept it for the whopping pay rate of $11 an hour. So being older and a bit more experienced in the work world, I took the job by the horns and ran with it. I did everything I could to stand out. I asked a ton of questions about code, the debug, the game modes, everything. I talked to all the producers and developers and level designers I could to ensure we were on the same page and also so they would know my name.
Once, I worked an entire weekend on a voluntary basis. Halo 4 primary developer 343 wanted to cut our signature mode: Dominion. At that time, it was broken as hell and really unbalanced. The concept was outstanding, but there were a crap load of balancing issues. 343 was always tinkering with kits and available weapons, so the devs were having a hard time balancing ordnance drops.
We worked all weekend while coders would cook up frankenbuilds, and even Max stayed for the majority of the sessions. After long playtests he would take us in the kitchen and personally ask everyone in the group their thoughts. I felt like I was a part of something special.
Syndicating here because Hacker News's submit system does not like Gawker Network links.
I did search through the archives to see if there were any recent kotaku.com submissions and couldn't find any.
The description of the reason for working the extra weekend, I think reflects well on your motivation. I'm not a games company, but I have hired developers and testers : if I saw this bullet point on a testers CV, that would stand out.
So instead of feeling taken advantage of, which you were at $11 an hour.. put a more positive vibe on this and see it as a path from tester to whatever is next.
Maybe your passion is some aspect of developing games, or developing better automated test tools? Is there some open source thing you can work on, that will give you a lot more leverage when the next gig comes around?
Somehow get your CV to stand out from the mass of guys who will work for 11/hr and into the more professional 50/hr skill-set bracket. Maybe that's not happening right now in games, maybe take those skills and put them to use in another industry that is happy to pay better. Or stay in games but specialize and become killer and own your particular niche.
Wear this experience as a Medal of Honor [pun, ouch] that you worked on Halo4.. how many people get to do that? It is money in the bank when gaining street cred with any young person, even your own kids later.
I would rework this story.. put a more positive slant on it, its a great blog post, shows character, yadda yadda. Squeeze a bit of mileage out of the pain and glory you went thru.
I love reading these war stories and postmortems on Gamasutra, you have an audience.