You might not think it but Role Play games can contribute a lot to teach you how to improve testing skills.
First contact
I first started playing roleplaying games when I was about 8 years old. As a young boy it was amazing to be able to take part in the stories that otherwise only played out on the pages of books, or in movies, without me being able to influence or affect the story or the main character’s actions. In the roleplaying games, I was one of the main characters, I was part of the story. One of the games I have spent the most time with, is the ever so famous Dungeons and Dragons. and it’s been with me in different versions to this day. Even though I rarely get to play anymore, I still consider myself a roleplayer.
Order in the universe
For those not familiar with roleplaying games, it’s basically a bunch of people sitting around and telling a story together. The players take the roles of the story’s main characters. The world, and all other people in it is controlled by a gamemaster or dungeonmaster. The gamemaster is sort of the engine of the story and for help, he or she can rely on rules systems (like Dungeons & Dragons), which provides rules for character creations, different kinds of actions and a world setting. To resolve different situations they commonly roll oddly shaped dice.
To go where no one…
Totally different from my entering into the roleplaying hobby was my entering into my testing career. Like so many others I just sort of ended up in testing by a fluke. Having no idea of what testing actually meant, and an employer who had no real interest in testing, I had to rely on what I already knew. This became especially clear to me when it turned out that my employer wanted quite advanced manual testing, done fast. To handle the situation I relaxed and went with the flow. I solved each problem and adapted to each situation as they came up. My preferred way of solving them, were to look at what I already knew. I found some useable skills in my background as an IT technician and teacher. However, the skills that helped me the most, I found in my background in roleplaying. As some of you might have figured out, roleplaying tends to form a curious mindset and really sharpens the ability to look at things from different angles. These skills became handy for me as I grew into my testing role. The curiosity and ability to learn fast, also became very handy during an internship where I had to learn a quite complicated software quickly to become a productive member of the test team.
The continuum
The more comfortable I got in my new career as a tester, the more skills I broke out from my roleplayers toolkit and, in some cases, adapted slightly for my testing toolkit. The ability to learn things fast, organize and process large amounts of text came to good use in testing, and if any of you are familiar with the amount of rules to learn, and books to read in roleplaying systems in general, and Dungeons and Dragons in particular, you know that there can be a lot to read, process and learn, so this was a great training ground. Also, the roleplaying hobby has fostered many capable project managers and the training ground for organizing and planning skills are plentiful in the hobby. I also got to use my communications and writing skills. Even if the writing skills often associated with roleplaying is more on the fictional side, you still learn to write well, and most importantly, to communicate through writing. The rest is just a question of adapting. When it comes to communication, you get that for free since the roleplaying hobby is all about communicating. The game is played by sitting around a table, speaking, or maybe more correctly, telling a story together. All this, I’ve found useful in testing. After a while I also found good use for the fictional part of roleplaying. I discovered personas and scenario testing. These tools seemed more or less custom made for roleplayers since a scenario test can be more or less like a miniature roleplaying session, and as for personas, if you have spent the better part of your life making up characters, writing their background stories and coming up with their different traits and quirks, writing a persona, or even a micro persona is not all that different.
Handy tools
Roleplaying is full of game mechanics and rules. There is almost an endless amount of lists, charts and various methods of getting a result from these lists or charts. Spending hours and hours reading and learning these rules and studying these lists and charts often proves to be time well spent. In my current job I often have to sift through quite large amounts of data, and it’s not uncommon that the testing demands that I look at data from several sources. To have had the opportunity to train this data processing, has proven to be an invaluable experience.
X marks the spot
So where does all this lead? Should all of you start playing roleplaying games after this? I would not mind, it’s a great and very stimulating hobby. However, I don’t think that will actually happen. I do hope that you take this with you in some way. Maybe some of you take a class in improv theater, where you explore the same way of looking at things from different angles? Maybe some of you take a creative writing course to practice research, character writing and storytelling? Some of you might even start creating your own games, be it board games, card games or whatnot, to explore and/or invent new game mechanics that might prove useful in testing? Perhaps some of you will be in a position where you are hiring new testers and one of them happens to have something roleplaying related on their CV. In that case it might be interesting to start talking about that from a testing context during interviews. Of course there is no guarantee that they are, or will make excellent testers. but you might find that they, because of the roleplaying training ground, have skills that you need. Skills that might not be on any diploma.
Hopefully, all of you brings something with you after reading this.
