Does playing Call of Duty: World at War or Modern Warfare inspire children to grow up to be soldiers and Navy SEALs? Does Grand Theft Auto inspire young people to go out and let their wild side out? Does Farmville inspire young layabouts to pick up a spade and do some gardening?
Apparently, that’s what Marriott International thinks. To inspire a new generation and to sell them on the idea of accepting hotel jobs, the hospitality giant has created a new online game that it hopes will make the hotel industry look like a good place for jobs to young people.
If city building games like SimCity 3000 can inspire people to invest themselves in the nuts and bolts of building a whole city, Marriott hopes that a game like My Marriott Hotel, where players have to scramble about managing money, keeping the restaurant kitchen well-stocked and ordering groceries, can inspire a new generation of reality gamers.
The idea is that once young people are given a window into what goes into the running of a hotel, they’ll find something somewhere that they like that might inspire them to take up a job in the industry and .
If the idea that the videogame could inspire anyone to do anything in real life sounds a bit silly, you need to look at how in the past, people have provably responded to videogame recruitment tools.
About 10 years ago, the America’s Army videogame that the government introduced proved to be cheap and effective. The game itself was supremely popular and it did send the number of potential recruits up.
The whole online game recruitment idea has proven to be so powerful that there are all kinds of companies that are jumping in with games of their own to stimulate interest and job applications.
How about a factory job? Could anything be more unglamorous? Well, that’s why Siemens, a company that builds factories for other companies, has a game out called Plantville – that they hope will glamorize the whole thing to potential job seekers.
There are other games that try to get you to run a diner or be a busboy at a hotel. It must the Tom Sawyer’s rule of life – if you have to actually paint a fence, nothing could be more boring.
Try to make a game out of it, and suddenly, everyone will actually pay to do it. Pretty soon, you’ll have a janitor’s game on Facebook that players mop floors and clean toilets on.
Back to the Marriott game, the hotel brand needs the game because it’s expanding quite strongly in regions like China and India. These are not places where hotel industry jobs aren’t regarded well. A game, the hotel chain feels, might make its jobs more attractive to a new generation.
