FIFA 13 was one of the Wii U launch titles, which made it one of the first EA games to go through Nintendo’s certification process for a brand new console. The GamePad integration was substantial — touch-screen shooting, free kick aiming through the controller’s gyroscope, live tactical substitutions. Testing that at launch meant working with hardware and SDK documentation that were still pretty fresh off the press.
Back in the day, before studios started shipping bugs as features, I worked through the full certification process on the other side of the screen — testing games for Electronic Arts. Certification & compliance, which sounds dry but basically means being the last line of defense before a game hits the shelves: making sure it doesn’t crash, doesn’t cheat the rating system, and does exactly what it says on the box in every region it’s going to land in.
It wasn’t glamorous work, but it gave me something most designers never get: a really intimate understanding of how games break, and why. Every bug report I filed was a small lesson in the gap between intention and execution — which, turns out, is pretty much what design is about too.
