Client
Brainport
Brainport Eindhoven is the technology region around Eindhoven, home to companies such as ASML, Philips and NTS and to hundreds of high-tech suppliers. Its growth depends on a steady supply of technically educated people.
The Brainport region is home to a lot of leading technology companies, but the talents within the region are drying up. In VWO, the pre-university track of Dutch secondary school, around 60% of students choose a science profile, and only 60% of that group goes on to a technical degree.
To stop this drought, the TU/e, later joined by Summa College, Ter AA and Fontys, turned. Their request, how can we break the mold and make technical studies impossible to ignore.
Gamers are already engineers, they just don’t know it yet.
It is not the lack of interest in technology; it’s the way that it’s presented. A player who builds a working circuit out of redstone in Minecraft, the game’s in-game wiring, has designed a logic system. When a Valorant player analyzes his lost match and later on changes their tactics is debugging a process.
These players are performing highly complex engineering tasks, yet most of them would never call this technical, because nobody has connected what they do to what companies like ASML or Philips do.
Gaming is where their curiosity for tech sparks. Why does a game look better on one console than on another, or why a match lags. These are valid engineering questions. . We did not teach them to love technology, we only needed to show it to them they were already doing it.
We launched Spelbrekers, a video-first platform created to merge gaming culture with real world tech careers. In Dutch a spelbreker is a rule-breaker. For us it represents the next generation of talent, who is ready to disrupt the technology industries from the inside.
In order to maximize impact we set up a layered content strategy, consisting of three distinct formats:
FORMAT 01 ‘ZO WERKT’
This is a series made up of short explainer episodes, each one built around a question gamers genuinely wonder about, such as how can a PS5 render near-photorealistic graphics or how it is possible that you can play instantly without delay with someone who lives on the other side of the ocean.
Every episode starts with a gaming question and from there it will go into more detail and tap into the technology behind the answer.
The format uses various animations with a visual language borrowed from games. Episodes are social first, with a long-form version as secondary output.
FORMAT 02 ‘STAGE SELECT’
These are documentary-style company visits where a host sits down with an employee and has a conversation on what technology they use on a daily basis, framed through game logic, or game examples.
Each episode focuses on the output of the job, matching it with existing games or game logic.
Tapping into what the viewers understand and showcasing that what they do for fun is actually already engineering.
FORMAT 03 ‘IRL’
The IRL episodes combine gaming and technology most directly. We bring the content directly onto the campus through student interviews and gaming related challenges.
Instead of looking at it from a top down messaging, we ask students directly what matters to them, this way we can map out the connection between gaming habits and their tech education.
This way we pair insights with fun, competitive challenges and transform the traditional career path into social entertainment.
Spelbrekers leveraged the fact that young people already find technology interesting, because they use it every time they play a game. The campaign therefore had no need to persuade them that tech is cool, and could focus on showing them where that technology comes from.
Because every episode was rooted in a game the audience already plays, the content did not feel as if it was made for someone else, which is one of the main reasons youth career communication fails to connect.
Whether an episode explained the chip architecture inside a PS5 or used online multiplayer to explain latency, it treated what viewers already knew as a starting point and built on it.
The four partner institutions presented themselves under a single brand. This gave the platform the credibility and breadth of several organisations while avoiding the stiff tone that usually comes with institutional messaging.
Real students, creators and employees appeared on screen instead of official spokespeople, which meant the content performed as native social content rather than as career guidance pushed into the feed.
