Secret Agent Man

Posted by Matt Cipriano | No Comments

Have you ever been playing a video game and thought “Gee, I bet I could be a British Spy?” Well then, most likely you were playing a James Bond game. Apparently, though the surveillance arm of British intelligence thinks there are a bunch of gamers out there who would make good spies.

USA Today reports that the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) will be placing in-game ads in to certain games to attract candidates to fill their positions. The ads will be placed online in games like Need for Speed, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Splinter Cell (Splinter Cell being the only spying game of the bunch) on billboards within the game atmosphere.

This is all part of British intelligence plan to attract a more diverse set of applicants to join the spy world. While the typical applicant is a “white, male graduates of Oxford and Cambridge universities,” MI5 and MI6 (domestic and international spy work) are looking to expand their pool of applicants to video game players and women (they are also placing ads in women’s changing rooms at gyms and on the side of some double-decker buses). The hope of the in-game ads is to reach “an Internet-savvy generation of graduate groups.” and “capture the imagination of people with a particular interest in IT.”
This is similar to the CIA ad I recently saw as a slide before a movie in a theater. To some extent it breaks the mystique of the spy community; Spies are regular people, just like you and me. At the same time it may hit qualified applicants who had never before considered applying to jobs in government intelligence. Plus, it kind of ruins James Bond to think of him sitting at home during his off-time, powering up his xBox 360 and popping online to drive a few laps in Need For Speed.

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