Reading Memory in Grue

We have to talk about how to access memory so we can read values from it. And to do that I have to talk a little about a Z-Machine area of memory called the header. With that, I’ll show you some helper methods you’ll want to have in place. Then we’ll deep dive into the memory considerations and, finally, we’ll come up for air by showing how to represent some of the Z-Machine memory in Grue.

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Bits and Bytes in Grue

In this post, we’re going to start down the path of implementing the basics of a Z-Machine. Crucial to this start, however, is making sure it’s understood how the Z-Machine actually works in terms of taking in zcode to execute and what, exactly, is executing. Spoiler alert: it’s 0’s and 1’s all the way down.

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Creating Explanations: The Ethos of Testing

A couple of years ago I talked about what I considered to be the basis of testing. I very confidently asserted things. Maybe I sounded like an authority. Maybe I sounded like I was presenting a consensus. But did I really talk about the basis or just a basis? And shouldn’t an ethos have been part of that basis?

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The Economics, Value and Service of Testing

Among the many debates testers have, one of those is whether it makes sense to write tests down. Sometimes this is framed, simplistically, as just writing down “test cases” and, even more simplistically, as a bit of orthodoxy around how you don’t write tests, you perform tests. So let’s dig into this idea a little bit because I think this seemingly simple starting point for discussion leads into some interesting ideas about what the title of this post indicates.

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Exploring, Bug Chaining and Causal Models

Here I’ll go back to a game I talked about previously and show some interesting game bugs, all of which came out of exploration and where the finding of one bug guided exploration to finding others, which led to some causal mapping. Of course, the idea of “bug chaining” and “causal mapping” is certainly valid in any context, not just games. But games can certainly make it a bit more fun!

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The Emic and Etic in Testing

There’s an interesting cultural effect happening within the broader testing community. I’ve written about this before, where my thesis, if such it can be called, has been that a broad swath of testers are using ill-formed arguments and counter-productive narratives in an attempt to shift the thinking of an industry that they perceive devalues testers above all else. This has led to a needlessly combative approach to many discussions. In this post I want to approach this through a couple of parallel lenses: that of game studies, linguistics, and anthropology. That will lead us to insider (emic) and outsider (etic) polarities. It’s those polarities that I believe many testers are not adequately shifting between.

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A History of Automated Testing

What I want to show in this post is a history where “teaching” and “tutoring” became linked with “testing” which became linked with “programmed instruction” which became linked with “automatic teaching” and thus “automatic testing.” The goal is to show the origins of the idea of “automating testing” in a broad context. Fair warning: this is going to be a bit of a deep dive.

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The Breadth of the Game Testing Specialty

I’ve posted quite a bit on game testing here, from being exploratory with Star Wars: The Old Republic, to bumping the lamp with Grand Theft Auto V, to ludonarrative in Elden Ring. I’ve also shown how comparative performance testing is done with games like Horizon Zero Dawn. These articles offered a bit of depth. What I want to do here is show the breadth of game testing and some of the dynamics involved since it’s quite a specialized sub-discipline within testing.

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