The QA Interview and New Beginnings
Namgung Ung stood out among the other applicants in a way that stuck in my memory. I scanned his resume, but I couldn’t recall his name—though his vast, violent gaming career was unforgettable.
“Specs or grades or experience? They barely covered a third of an A4 sheet, yet his list of game rankings and titles played ran to more than three pages.”
I buried that memory deep in the back of my mind. From classic games I hadn’t touched in ages, to titles I’d only heard about, to worldwide hits—I’d devoured them all, regardless of genre. A true black cat in the world of white cats.
“Normally people have at least one genre they love… but this guy had none.”
That was a huge advantage for the QA team. Without personal taste, he could actually judge games objectively.
Namgung Ung fidgeted, unable to keep his hands still, so I asked him directly.
“Did you know what QA actually does when you applied?”
“W-Well, I don’t know the details… Q-Quality control?”
“Too honest an answer can sometimes hurt your chances in an interview.”
“Huk…! S-Sorry! I’ll lie from now on!”
He slapped his forehead without thinking.
“What should we check for quality in a game development company?”
“The game… itself?”
“That’s right. The QA team ensures that the games we make have no bugs as games and align with our development goals.”
I scrolled through his list again.
“Dot Hero is on here. You know we made that game?”
“Y-Yes! I just started playing recently. After I saw it was made by PlayForge while filling out the form…”
“If I assume you’re already in the QA team, what kind of report would you write about this game?”
I was looking for someone who played games well and loved them, but that wasn’t the only thing. For the QA team, the ability to turn the feelings they get while playing into a written report was just as important.
“A-A report, you mean?”
“Exactly. Is it too sudden? Then I’ll give you a topic. Um… Namgung Ung, what do you think is the core fun of Dot Hero?”
He answered almost before I finished asking.
“Randomness.”
“Randomness? Explain it a little longer.”
“Well… I think most games make ‘player skill’ the core fun element. It’s about hit feedback, growth, clearing harder stages step by step—it requires control. But Dot Hero uses luck instead of skill. Even if you’re bad at controlling, you can still clear the game easily. It feels fun… or does it? Isn’t this the core?”
He glanced sideways, testing the waters.
I stared back, urging him to continue. Namgung Ung spoke again.
“I thought it might be poison, but once I played… balance… and stage difficulty tuning let players go ‘Oh, I just had bad luck’ instead of getting angry. It’s simple. Easy.”
“Casual.”
“C-Casual… so it won’t cause big problems?”
His vocabulary was rough, but the core idea came through clearly.
“Reports tend to ramble when I write them.”
But I also needed eyes that could see the heart of a game.
“So, any things you felt you wanted to improve while playing the game?”
The eyes of a user and those of a developer (or planner) are different. I try not to stray from the core fun I created, but there’s always a tiny gap.
“Um… it’s too perfect…”
“You can swear all you want; it won’t affect the interview. Go ahead.”
“It’s nothing really, but… there is one thing.”
“Small is fine.”
“I thought about adding a mode that maximizes randomness even more.”
“Randomness?”
“When I played, I felt… even though there’s a challenge mode, the difficulty wasn’t that high. It was just about farming score by clearing infinite stages. But if I made every growth card, item, and everything random from the start—without separating by difficulty—it would be hard and fun. For advanced players.”
“Interesting.”
Not bad at all.
Users might not notice, but Dot Hero had invisible guide lines to stop players from feeling bad. It hid useless growth cards and items based on the character. I was suggesting removing that transparent protection shield and throwing users into pure wildness.
“Ah! And what about letting players try unlocked characters randomly?”
“Dot Hero’s business model is selling characters, right? Removing that would cut our revenue.”
“Even if they try, won’t they make more money? Because of the gap between trying and not… ‘seeing is believing’—”
“Seeing is believing.”
“A-Ah! Sorry! I misunderstood…”
A perfectly reasonable suggestion.
In the big Dot Hero update I was preparing, I planned to add free rewards that unlock characters whenever a certain section of the challenge mode is cleared.
Players would try the character, get hooked, and try the challenge for free rewards. But the probability of unlocking all characters with challenge rewards was almost zero.
“At best, I’d give enough to unlock maybe six characters.”
Development wasn’t hard. I could use existing assets, and it was simple—perfect for gauging new hires’ skills.
It fit nicely into the update plan I was drafting.
“Namgung Ung, because of the nature of your job you might have to play the exact same section all day. Unlike the games you played before, you won’t just enjoy it—you’ll have to analyze from the user’s perspective while playing. It’ll be tougher than you think.”
“N-No, I’m fine. That’s my specialty. I can do it all day!”
“Alright. The interview result will be texted to you later. Good luck.”
“Thank you!”
Namgung Ung bowed and left.
Cha Ju-hee, sitting beside me, poked me with her elbow.
“Director, you’re hiring that guy?”
“Yeah. He has talent in QA… and seems to have good instincts for planning too.”
“I never thought there were companies that hire people who play games well besides pro gamers.”
“Well… it’s possible. QA teams are a bit special.”
“We need another hire for the QA team, right? So you’ll pick someone who plays games well next time too?”
“No.”
I was thinking of hiring someone who plays a lot but plays terribly.
I knew all too well what happens when you only hire top players in the QA team.
“QA Team Leader? What was the boss difficulty like?”
“Everyone said it was too easy. I get that you want to lower user fatigue, but isn’t it too easy?”
“Is it? We’ll need to balance the mechanics and patterns. Sorry.”
“Haha. What? It’s our job. Please leave it to us from now on!”
After I accepted the QA team’s feedback that the difficulty was too low and rebalanced the boss, the users screamed.
“What the hell? This is supposed to be something I clear!”
“Hahahaha! Jo Yihan said no one who doesn’t spend money on the game should even think of beating the boss! Ah~ What’s the point of living~”
“Jo Yihan, you said this is a light boss you can play casually in a show-off game, right? If this is light, then the final story boss you threw so much tantrum about must be insanely hard!”
I shed tears of blood fixing it.
The QA team needed top players, average players, and terrible players in equal measure to give proper balanced evaluation.
“I’ll take care of the average player for a while.”
So I was looking for the terrible player.
A person who played a lot but had a cursed body that never followed their hands…
“I’ve been waiting for applicants like you.”
“N-Nyeong?”
I meant the exact kind of person Ha Bo-yeong was.
“You’ve played an incredible number of games?”
“Y-Yeah! Because it’s fun!”
“In the special section you wrote you like games but don’t play well… how bad are you really?”
“I know I’m bad at games, so I practiced hard! Even so, in PVP games I get scolded every day and in PVE it takes over fifty hours even when others clear it in thirty…”
“Can I even pass if I’m bad at games?”
I had never met an applicant who asked such a direct question right in front of the interviewers.
“That will be told to you in a text after the interview. Ha Bo-yeong applicant. If you pass the QA team, you’ll have to write a lot of reports. Can you write at all?”
“W-Write? What kind of writing?”
“Game reviews, ideas for updates or fixes—anything. Even if it’s just writing down everything you feel while playing the game.”
“Then I should be able to do it! My tongue is a bit short, so I can’t speak well, but I’m confident in writing!”
“Hmm.”
I wondered what she couldn’t say out loud, but her major was ‘Library and Information Science.’
I didn’t know exactly what the department did, but just looking at it, they read an enormous amount of writing for four years. And it was from a prestigious university.
“Can I ask why you applied to our company? Your grades suggest you probably didn’t meet our standards.”
“I wanted to get a job using my major… not because of the writing, because games are more fun!”
“But work isn’t supposed to be fun, right?”
“Even so, games are fun, so it balances out, right?”
Not entirely wrong.
I found coding tedious and hard, but making games was so enjoyable that I was doing this job.
“I understand. Thank you for your hard work. The pass or fail will be texted to you.”
“Thank you!”
“Yes. You may go.”
Ha Bo-yeong bowed ninety degrees and left. She was three years older than me, but she felt like a little sister.
“Should I hire her?”
“Why? Don’t like her?”
“Not that. She just seemed fragile… like she’d struggle with office life. Could she handle overtime or your aggressive, violent, and sneaky orders as director?”
“I know exactly what Cha Ju-hee thinks of me.”
“O-Oh no! I was just imagining that she might not like it! A delusion! A feeling!”
And I realized Cha Ju-hee still lacked social experience.
‘She didn’t feel anything from her eyes.’
Even her confident question asking if she could make the interviewer reject her showed how bright and pure her eyes were.
“Let’s go with her.”
Finally, the long interview was over.
*
Hello, applicant Namgung Ung.
I am Jo Yihan, the overall director and CEO of PlayForge Studio.
I sincerely congratulate you on passing the final round for the junior position in the QA team.
Please check the email I sent for detailed salary and onboarding information. If you have any questions, please reply. Thank you.
A few days later, Namgung Ung received the text while still in his underwear and rushed out to the living room.
“Mom! I got in!!”
“What? Where?!”
“It’s not that big a company, but it’s an amazing one! A company that makes games! And because I play so many and play well, they hired me!”
“No way! They said even garbage has its uses! I’ve been boiling with rage every day watching you play games in your room, and you’re hiring a company that hires people for playing games well?”
“M-Mom?”
“Good. Now that you’re employed, get out of the house a bit!”
And just like that, he was kicked out of the house.
Fortunately, the job application benefits included housing support, so he managed to fix it.
New house, new company, new life.
To him, PlayForge was more than just a job—it was salvation.
‘I will repay the debt of my life to PlayForge.’
He vowed to return the favor of being hired and waited eagerly for his first day.
“Hello! I’m Namgung Ung, the new employee!”
“Hee~ Hello. I’m a new employee too. Name’s Ha Bo-yeong. Nice to meet you!”
“Y-Yes! Nice to meet you!”
The female coworkers in the QA team were okay.
‘Cute… Is there a company rule against office romance? Ah, what do I do? She seems to like me.’
He was lost in strange delusions and waited for the team to be assigned, only to learn there was no separate team leader—Jo Yihan was taking care of it all.
‘The CEO and owner, Director Jo Yihan… is my direct superior?!’
It was like having a golden rope among countless company lines. His ambition to stand out, repay the favor, and get promoted burned fiercely, but…
“From now on, please start working. There’s a template I made arbitrarily, so use that.”
“D-Director? Until when…?”
“Of course today!”
After reaching 100,000 points in Dot Hero, write a report.
Review the Chaos Mode I’m developing and write a report.
Compile opinions on depth-four difficulty balancing for ACD and write a report.
And so on.
There was simply too much work.
“Ah. You can finish the reports by tomorrow. I give a lot of work, but I’m a reasonable person too. Two days should be enough, right?”
On his first day at work, Namgung Ung left at midnight.
He spent all day playing games, but he wasn’t particularly happy about it.