QA tester has always been one of the best paths for being a game designer with no programming or artistic skills. Then again, "Game Designer" positions arent exactly brutally common. That, and your odds of actually pulling it off are closer to zero then any other number.

From a programming perspective, I wouldnt bother. Alot of the time, the "foot in the door" position being advertised is often for tool development. Those positions they will often take someone with less game programming experience and can be a good starting point. That said, its a shame, as good tools are very important.

Let me preface this by saying that my company is probably atypical in how open and egalitarian it is, given its size. That said, I can think of more than ten people who have moved on to seats in game systems, content, sound, and even one person to the core tech team(!). Most of them are still here. So it's absolutely possible to find a QA job that will help you progress in the industry. You have to be careful though; there are plenty of "kleenex tester" contract positions that come with zero chance of advancement, zero respect, and only modest opportunities to make contacts and learn professional gamedev methodology.

Since I've had an excellent vantage of the opposite scenario, where QA has an almost silly level of upward-mobility (as in, stop taking all our good hires, @#$@#$ devs!), let me list out some desirable traits for you to look for.

1) QA has access to source control

Obviously, you can learn a lot from browsing a AAA project's source tree. Maybe not quite as much as you'd hope; documentation and code comments are bound to be scarcer than you'd like, and no one's going to have time to help you. Even more importantly though, this is a sign that the company is open to exploring internal talent. Also, it creates an avenue where self-motivated employees can practice asset creation and integration with the game (on their local machine sandboxes of course!).

2) You can work with developers, face to face.

Hiring sucks. It's maybe slightly more fun than looking for a job, but only if you have a good HR department to help you filter candidates. If you're the lead designer and you're looking to fill a non-senior position, the choice between sifting through a piles of resumes and phone interviews, or cherry-picking QA tester Bill, who gets along great with the team, is really passionate about doing design, has already learned the principle level-building tool under his own initiative, and could start right away with minimal ramp-up, is not an especially difficult one. Obviously this means QA has to be in the same building as development :-)

3) The QA department is taken seriously

It is an excellent sign if development needs QA's permission for checkin to the project's bug-fix branch. It's an even better sign if the QA Director has the power to roll back checkins that got stealthed in (actually, my company may be unique in this respect :D). If the devs are compelled to take QA seriously, they'll be more inclined to take you seriously should you interview with them.


Also remember that there are many levels of QA internally. Traditionally, Game QA refers to cheap off-the-street labor, whose primary function is to bang on the game from a strict black-box end-user standpoint. More and more though, there's a need in the industry for people with rigorous traditional Software QA skills, people who can do white-box testing, write unit tests, build stress-testing frameworks, or do code reviews. These are individuals who think of QA as a career, and there is not a ton of difference between them and their developer counterparts. I even know one person who gave up development in faver of QA!

Hopefully, that gives some perspective. In case you were wondering, I'm a QA Engineer, and I'm not planning on moving over the fence any time soon, though I fancy I'd like to try development at some point. There's still a ton of stuff for me to learn where I am!