As video games continue to grow in popularity, defence forces have started looking at the possibility of some of these gamers transitioning into real-life military careers.
To help get more gamers interested in this potential career switch, the U.S. Marine Corps and its long-serving agency Wunderman Thompson teamed up with four popular gamers for a unique piece of content.
The campaign, “Inside the Battle: Battle Tactics” got games Melonie Mac; Strange Rebel; WhosChaos and WarOwl – all of whom have a significant following – to spend four months at the Marine Corps Base for some very legit training.
The gamers learnt to shoot automatic weapons and also had them training their bodies with pull-ups, crunches and runs. They were also thrown into simulated combat sessions to see how their gaming skills translated into the real-world.
“Inside the Battle is a strategic opportunity for the Marine Corps to connect with tech-native Gen Z’ers through the world of gaming,” said group creative director Alan Whitley of Wunderman Thompson Atlanta. “The gamers’ cognitive abilities, such as critical decision-making skills and fast pattern-recognition, are skills Marines demonstrate in real-world training scenarios in Quantico.”
You can check out how each of them performed here.
“It kicked my butt. In my head I thought, ‘Okay, so we’re going to have mentors, they’re going to teach us stuff. And then we’re going to do this again and see how much better we got,’” WarOwl said. “I thought that was going to be it, but they surprised us with a whole other adventure far beyond that.”
“I think the focus was about the tactics of what Marines do when specifically doing training exercises that involved us taking on the role of a squad leader and having a leadership position while planning things and creating tactics,” he said. “So a lot of it came down to the mentality, the different skills that they use and that they learn. There’s a lot of information to learn. It wasn’t just like doing pushups. We had, there were whiteboards with information on them that we were trying to memorize really quickly. I definitely got a sense of the seriousness of what we were learning and what we were doing.”
