U.S. Navy Launched Subreddit Puzzle Game To Attract Submariners

After years of struggling to meet recruiting goals, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro announced last Tuesday that the U.S. Navy exceeded its fiscal year 2024 goals, which had been set at 40,600—an increase from the two previous years. After a slow start in FY24, the sea service still managed to bring in 40,978 active-duty enlisted recruits.

However, the U.S. Navy—and most of the branches of the military—have gotten increasingly creative in attracting talent. That has included social media campaigns aimed specifically at Generation Z.

This month, the Navy launched a Reddit-wide role-playing game that calls for players to decipher codes and search for clues to complete command directives. The goal of the campaign, which will run through the end of October, was to help the service attract the next generation of submariners. VML, the agency behind the Subreddit Hunt campaign, has said the name is also meant to be a play on the social community platform's thousands of "subreddits."

"To ensure we attract the very best and brightest future sailors, including submariners, the Navy is constantly seeking innovative ways to interact with prospective candidates on… social and digital platforms," said Rear Admiral James P. Waters, commander of Navy Recruiting Command, in an announcement.

According to a report from Ad Age, the Subreddit Hunt would seek out those with "penchants for puzzles," in which participants must complete several "directives" to finish the game. The U.S. Navy has advertised on Reddit since 2018, and over the years it has attempted to "develop a voice and style that is distinct to users of the site." That has previously included embracing May 4 as "May the Fourth" or Star Wars Day as part of a broad appeal, while the hunt is aimed at a specific type of individual.

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"The Navy is throwing a wide net here with this aptitude test and it is trying to get people interested who are normally not considering the Navy. It's an innovative approach to find people who will be stimulated by this kind of work," suggested social media and telecommunications analyst Roger Entner of Recon Analytics.

Subreddits To Attract Submariners

The new game is just the latest effort from the U.S. military to reach Generation Z via non-traditional media. In 2021, the U.S. Air Force pulled out all the stops with a minute-long video that resembled a trailer for a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. The campaign was posted to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube.

Two years ago, the U.S. Army's Special Operations Command produced another video campaign shared on social media that quickly earned comparisons to a trailer for a video game or David Lynch film. A follow-up was released this year, and the "Ghost in the Machine" campaign has looked to recruit those of Gen-Z who might be interested in a career in psychological warfare or PsyOps. When the second trailer hit this spring, the 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne), based at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, acknowledged it wasn't the usual military ad campaign.

The U.S. Navy's Subreddit Hunt is in a similar boat, just as the Army's 4th Psychological Operations Group didn't seek to recruit those who want to jump out of a plane or fast rope from a helicopter, the sea service opted not to go with the usual "Join the Navy and see the world" campaign. Instead, the Subreddit Hunt is about attracting those who may look at the world just a bit differently.

"It is an interesting way to discover skillsets that are increasingly in high demand and short supply," explained technology industry analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group.

"Using games that identify people with unique advantages in terms of solving the kind of problems that sonar operators face on a sub is a creative way to identify people that might not know of jobs that uniquely fit their natural skills," Enderle added. "Assuming they can get the right audience interested in these activities, that it could be surprisingly successful, and this practice could also be used by private industry to identify better employees for certain unique jobs as well. You typically don't see this kind of innovative thinking from the military, so let's hope we see more of it as it should lead to a stronger military."

This effort could also be in line with two broad trends.

"First, the approach recognizes that many Gen Z people no longer interact with news or advertising in platforms like television or print," said Dr. Cliff Lampe, professor of information and associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Michigan's School of Information.

"They are heavily exposed to digital platforms, however. Recent studies have shown that over 80% of the generation uses digital platforms to access news, often via aggregators like Reddit," Lampe suggested.

The second trend could be in how the military is leveraging games to determine how potential recruits can show their competence.

"There have been pieces of this over a long period of time, with agencies looking at World of Warcraft and some types of combat games to test for different types of abilities," added Lampe. "Games often can show in a behavioral way how good people are at problem-solving, teamwork, persistence, and other skills often essential to any employer, including in this case."