November 21, 2022
Gaming means so many different things to so many people.
Gaming’s accessibility means that anyone can dive right into it, straight away. Gaming’s helped keep kids entertained across the world for years, and helped them to make friends with people who share their hobby.
Gaming is used as a tool for older people to help them keep their cognitive abilities high. (Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training on the Nintendo DS gets a lot of credit here!)
On a mass scale, gaming was hugely important to helping people pass the time, keep relationships alive and make new friends across the world during lockdown at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic (take a bow, Animal Crossing).
The point is, there are millions – perhaps billions – of stories out there about the incredibly positive impact gaming has had on people’s lives over the decades.
And just one of those positives is helping people join the workforce in the UK. The Game Academy is a government-supported mission designed to help gamers build their dream career.
The Game Academy does that through… well… gaming! Users can log onto the site and take a free online course, completing various gaming challenges to see where their natural talents lie and where they’re best suited in the world of work.
Beyond games, too, The Game Academy has support in the form of Discord servers and community MVPs to help them talk to like-minded people and grow.
It’s a cutting-edge programme that shows gaming at its absolute best. With the right approach, too, it’s something your studio or brand could also implement.
The business benefits of gamification
At its most basic level, The Game Academy is a form of ‘gamification’.
Gamification is a term used to define bringing gaming elements into non-gaming situations, such as lead generation or – as can be seen on The Game Academy – helping people into work or education.
Depending on what your goals are and how you wish to use gamification, it can lead to a vast number of business benefits.
It can be used with your in-house training materials to improve employee engagement, for instance, and as The Game Academy shows, it can also be used by gaming studios to identify and recruit new talent.
For gamification to have a serious effect, though – whether on attracting talent, retaining it, lead generation, education or other medium – it pays to work alongside a creative agency that has gaming at its heart.
TAKEOFF’s global studios have worked with some of the largest names in gaming, producing creative campaigns for years that have used innovative techniques to reach out to their audiences.
Gamification is part of our services, with our creative and technical teams creating intricate, fun games across a variety of different channels and mediums to reach out to target markets and deliver messages in ways people haven’t seen before.
That also includes custom, gamified spaces at events and exhibitions that people can access themselves first-hand, playing on custom software to interact with brands in unique ways to discover more about their products and services.