14 DAY TRIAL // The headline shouldn't surprise you one bit, since Britain's intelligence agencies have started to come out of the dark recently, with UK's MI6 having placed its first advertisement for jobs in a newspaper in May, also launching its own website, even accepting job applications online in recent years, according to Yahoo News. Now, The Government Communications Headquarters (Britain's intelligence listening post) will "embed" adverts as billboards in video games.
Titles such as "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent" (developed by Ubisoft), have been mentioned within the report, while the move itself is said to be an effort for attracting "'computer-savvy, technologically-able, quick-thinking' recruits", according to Yahoo News, quoting The Times.
"We find increasingly we have to use less conventional means of attracting people ... to go beyond glossy brochures and milk-round stalls", a GCHQ spokeswoman told The Times, who reported this story on Thursday.
According to Yahoo News, the adverts "will not be written into the games themselves", but will be "fed into them" during gameplay. Whether the gameplay process occurs on PC or Xbox 360, it makes no difference as long as the respective platform is connected to the Internet.
"We will monitor the results from this campaign and are ready to change our recruitment methods ... We know we can't stand still", the spokeswoman said, adding that GCHQ hoped to "plant the idea in the heads of younger players".
The Times also report that GCHQ have failed to mention exactly how much the campaign (lasting one whole month) would cost. They do however cite industry sources as saying it would "likely" cost in the "low tens of thousands of pounds", meaning somewhere under 50 thow'.
So, are you looking forward to becoming a Government Communications agent? Surely you fit their description ('computer-savvy, technologically-able, quick-thinking'), so do your best at impressing the listening post. I'm curious how such an advert looks and sounds though. You don't reckon it features a guy behind a desk answering a hundred telephones in such a manner that it looks like he's getting kicks out of it, do you?