Playing videogames earns more than points

Allison Byrum, a 26-year-old librarian from Brooklyn, found a part-time gig recently on Craigslist.

She reported for work on a Friday afternoon. She sat in front of a computer screen and began playing Lucky Strike Lanes, an internet bowling game, in the company of Brad MacDonald, a senior art director for Large Animal Games. “Aiming the ball is a little difficult,” Byrum, blushing a bit, said to Mac-Donald, who began filling a notepad with many of her comments, concerns and critiques. Forty-five minutes later, the gig was up. Byrum exited MacDonald’s office and was rewarded with $25 in cash for her efforts. “This was fun,” she said, “and I could use the money.”

For the past 16 months, more than 200 people have navigated their way into the Midtown offices of Large Animal Games and been paid $25 to work 45-minute sessions as video-game testers.

It is the job of every tester to provide feedback after playing three social networking games that are currently running in 75 countries that use Facebook and MySpace: Lucky Strike Lanes; Bumper Stars, which is a combination of pinball and billiards; and Bananagrams, a word game similar to Scrabble.

Wade Tinney, the company’s chief executive, has put together teams to gather data from people like Byrum and use it to enhance their products. The company has 11 other games on Facebook and MySpace. “As a developer of a particular game, you tend to have a bias, you see it through a narrow focus,” MacDonald said. “That’s why it is important to gather unbiased opinion and reaction from people who do not have the same attachments to these games as we do.”