Is it for Fun or for Money?

  First post by: www.itsbattery.com

Feel like you are ready for a Acer Laptop Battery career as a video game tester? You have been playing video games, both console and online, for several years now. You even own a high-end gaming rig with all the bells and whistles thrown in. What adds sweetness to the deal is you get paid $150 an hour to test video games. Imagine! You get to play your favorite video games at home and earn a lot of cash, too, right? Not necessarily. Before you go hopping around like Super Mario, let’s get the facts straight.


First, analyze the phrase “video game tester.” The word “player” is not there. Your job as a video game tester is to test the manufacturer’s product. You will not have the luxury and fun of playing video games at home like you used to. You will get paid, of course, and you may derive a “little” fun out of it, but it is way far from the fun and entertainment you are thinking of. The game manufacturers are not expecting you to be entertained. They’re expecting you to work.


Most game manufacturers emphasize only the fun and profit aspect of the job in their Laptop Battery advertisements. What they seldom mention is the work involved; the detailed job description and responsibility that every video game tester must know. It is understood that you will get paid to play video games but the term “play” is nowhere near the kind of work you will be involved in.


Your work is to find bugs and other discrepancies in the game and report them to the game manufacturer. In this way, they can fix the bugs and repair the flaws on time before the game’s release date. The work isn’t really grueling and laborious, but it can be rather boring. You will be assigned to a certain area of a video game and play it over and over again to look for glitches and bugs.

Apart from that, video game testers are required to make detailed reports about the bugs, flaws and other problems they come across with while playing. They are then to submit these reports to the game manufacturers so their programmers can address the problems before its release date. This means video game testers should be able to meet deadlines and submit comprehensible reports. Reports that are hard to decipher can only lead to missed deadlines which will make the developers unhappy.


Video game testers, contrary to what they are made to believe, don’t really Acer BTP-43D1 Battery make $150 an hour. However, if they work 5 days a week for 8 to 10 hours per day, they can take in anywhere from $500 to $1000 a week. It’s not exactly movie star pay but it’s a rather comfortable weekly salary just for playing games at home.


Before you scratch video game testing from your careers list, remember that all jobs have some kind of work involved. While most jobs require a college degree, video game testing does not. You can be a college or even a high school undergrad and still work as a beta game tester. All you need is a lot of gaming experience and the right work attitude.

Claims for unemployment hit an all time high in the United States. Recently the Labor Department announced that new claims hit a 16 year high.


Some economists warn of further layoffs in the coming months Acer TravelMate 220 Battery due to plant closures and the already battered construction industry facing further cutbacks. Even those seemingly unaffected by the current recession like retail, hotels, and restaurants are likely to begin layoffs in the near future.


New claims for unemployment rose from 515,000 to 542,000 in just one week. This is a much higher figure than even Wall Street economists expected. The Labor Department also reported that this is the most claims made since July of 1992, back when the country was emerging from the post “dot com bubble” recession.

After word of the jobless claims increase spread to Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average took a nose dive, dropping more than 444 points in just a few hours.


Legislators quickly approved a bill that would extend unemployment benefits throughout the holidays after hearing the report. President Acer BTP-58A1 Battery George W. Bush is expected to sign the bill, which will extend unemployment benefits for seven extra weeks.


In some states, where the unemployment rate is higher than six percent, unemployment benefits will allow an additional 13 weeks for a total of 20 extra weeks. The national average for unemployment benefits is about $300 a week.

Last June Congress approved a 13 week extension bringing the jobless benefits to about 26 weeks. Without these extensions most Americans drawing unemployment will have exhausted their benefits by the end of the year.


The US economy got worse last month as stocks, new construction, and consumeracer BTP-60A1 Battery expectation all dropped faster than anytime since 2001. Analysts expected a 0.6 percent drop in economic activity in October; however the real percentage was actually 0.8 percent.


It is now estimated that the economy will suffer a reduction of about 425,000 jobs over the next month, the previous estimate was about 325,000 jobs. Cutbacks in spending and a slump in the housing industry have attributed largely to the high rate of unemployment.


With the growing unemployment rate, it is expected that the economy will worsen still since laid off workers will more than Acer TravelMate 240 Series Battery likely fall behind on mortgage payments and credit card payments.


Jobless claims are considered by many economists to be a warning of how fast companies are laying of employees. Citigroup Inc., Union Pacific, and Boeing Co. are just a few of the bigger companies that are announcing layoffs this month.