You are What you Play! Game Academy’s founder on the learning (and recruitment) potential of commercial video games
Irina Agafonova is founder of Game Academy, the new talent tech company for players of video games.
As Irina launches the first early access version of Game Academy— a platform that looks to enable players to make the most of their in-game skills out of game — we caught up with her at the venture’s base in Shoreditch, London.
Prior to Game Academy, Irina was co-founder of the #1 career advice platform in Russia and a VP at the world’s largest youth-led NGO. She has a PHD in Management, has taught at BPP, London and the Russian University of Economics and graduated recently from Zinc, a venture builder programme supported by LocalGloveVC, Atomico and the London School of Economics.
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Interviewer (David Barrie, Game Academy): Tell us more about Game Academy and the early access version that’s now available.
Irina: Game Academy’s early access service is for game players looking for personal or professional development. We analyse your steam profile and — a little like a personality assessment — we can tell you what you’re good at and, in particular, your probability of getting a job in tech or management.
The early access service offers an online course in effective decision-making — an essential skill for any occupation — and we encourage you to use the games that you love. Once you’ve completed the course, we have partners, advisors and employers who can help you find a new or better job — including one of the top 10 esports companies in the world, a global apparel company and the founder of several specialist, top-flight digital recruitment agencies.
Can Game Academy guarantee users of the service a job?
We guarantee top class career advice and a mock interview with feedback. Beyond this early access version, Game Academy will offer more and more placements, permanent and temporary positions, as well as directions to educational resources.
What’s the basis of your career predictions?
The calculation made by our analytics tool is based upon a dataset of game players’ profiles linked with their online employment profile at LinkedIn, CVs and other sources. From your steam profile, we can compare your gaming stats with our Gaming-Employment dataset and predict your probability of building a particular career based on your gaming habits. In our next product release, we’ll add a feature that will correlate your game play with particular skills —and we’ll also add analysis comparing you with other players (rankings) and challenges that you like.
Commercial video games are entertainment, right? How can they be credible as a tool for personal development?
Players express their mindset, attitudes and skills every time that they play a game. What’s more, when you’ve been playing for two years, five years, twenty years, your personality traits are set down and clear. It’s hard to lie.
Of course, gaming is recreational but it’s very different to watching a movie. You participate in progress and the process. You make decisions yourself. The experience is immersive.
What’s more, gaming has become such a big part of so many peoples’ lives — even more so now that cloud computing and social gaming have arrived — we should be reaching for popular commercial games as a learning tool.
But how can participating in a fictional environment express talent in our non-fictional world?
David, what’s fiction? And what is real? I’ve heard so many stories of people pretending to be someone else at work and when they come home, that’s when and where they can express themselves. Also, you know, people play games for so many different reasons and the number of people who play to escape you know is not as big as you think. What’s more, when you take a long, hard look at the choices that people make in games — what they play, how they play, what they achieve in-game — you have more or less a great profile of that individual.
Is there a personal dimension to your faith in the value of games?
When I was a child, I was always playing games with my father. I saw how games positively impacted upon him and his life. Puzzle games, card games, chess, computer games, we always played together — and he was always beating me!
You’ve describe Game Academy as ‘the University of the Future’. What do you mean?
I see Game Academy as a University because commercial video games can have an educational purpose. Away from formal education, players can play games, grow their (meta-) skills and through analysis of their performance and participating in online courses upskill in life - and in game.
What’s more, as the workplace becomes more digital and jobs of the future more complex and reliant upon ‘soft’ skills, Game Academy will become a source of outstanding, highly relevant talent. We’ll also encourage the recruitment industry to be more forward thinking. To date, the industry has relied upon candidates’ previous experience, yet very often there’s little correlation between the skills of the past and demands of the present.
How can people have access to the early version of Game Academy?
Easily! Go to http://gameacademy.co, register, use the analytics tool to translate your in-game achievement in to a possible career and take the online course in decision-making, playing the games that you love. The early access version will be available until December 1st, so hurry!
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For further news and updates on Game Academy, sign up at http://gameacademy.co, follow us here on Medium and join our private Facebook page. We’re always keen to talk to partners, collaborators and testers, so don’t hesitate to mail us if you would like to get involved, or have a question: team@gameacademy.co
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