Especially a decade or two ago, and probably to this day, many game developer companies had job positions for people to almost exclusively (in some cases perhaps even completely exclusively) do playtesting of their games being developed. In other words, you do nothing but play the game and find bugs.
Especially back in the day, perhaps even today to many, this sounded like the absolute dream job: You would get paid to do exactly what you love: Play video games. And, unlike eg. streamers or other online video content producers, you didn't need to be entertaining or anything like that, to gain an audience. Just play video games all day long, and get paid for it.
Of course the actual reality of the job was, and is, much harsher than that. If you want to ruin playing video games for yourself, then by all means apply for such a job.
The naive vision of the job is that you get to playtest the almost-finished game, and just report any bugs you stumble across. In reality, what you get to "play" is often very early alpha-versions of the game, which often lack most of their final graphics (geometry, texture, visual effects, etc), most of their final story, and so on. And "playing" means in this case grinding through test levels trying to find bugs in the engine, or any of its functionality, or in the level design. This is not normal casual gameplay, this is bugtesting. Your job is to grind through the levels (often incomplete alpha versions of the final levels) over and over and over, testing every corner, every mechanic, every tiny thing, over and over, to see if you can break it. And of course when you do find a bug or defect, no matter how minor, you have to write in detail where and how it happens, under which circumstances. And when the development team submits a bugfix, you'll need to test the same things again, to see if that bug has indeed been fixed, and whether the fix broke something else.
Some people would actually enjoy even this kind of work, but most wouldn't.
Especially back in the day, perhaps even today to many, this sounded like the absolute dream job: You would get paid to do exactly what you love: Play video games. And, unlike eg. streamers or other online video content producers, you didn't need to be entertaining or anything like that, to gain an audience. Just play video games all day long, and get paid for it.
Of course the actual reality of the job was, and is, much harsher than that. If you want to ruin playing video games for yourself, then by all means apply for such a job.
The naive vision of the job is that you get to playtest the almost-finished game, and just report any bugs you stumble across. In reality, what you get to "play" is often very early alpha-versions of the game, which often lack most of their final graphics (geometry, texture, visual effects, etc), most of their final story, and so on. And "playing" means in this case grinding through test levels trying to find bugs in the engine, or any of its functionality, or in the level design. This is not normal casual gameplay, this is bugtesting. Your job is to grind through the levels (often incomplete alpha versions of the final levels) over and over and over, testing every corner, every mechanic, every tiny thing, over and over, to see if you can break it. And of course when you do find a bug or defect, no matter how minor, you have to write in detail where and how it happens, under which circumstances. And when the development team submits a bugfix, you'll need to test the same things again, to see if that bug has indeed been fixed, and whether the fix broke something else.
Some people would actually enjoy even this kind of work, but most wouldn't.
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