The session, which was chaired by Paul Nesbitt, vice-president, global research and insights at Condé Nast, covered gaming culture and behaviours, and their impact on insights and brands.

Adam Harris, co-founder at Gaggl and formerly global head, brand partnership studio at Twitch, said that it is vital that brands understand gaming culture as a means of communicating with younger audiences.

“I prefer to think of gaming as a behaviour. And brands need to understand that behaviour more so than they need to understand gaming and the industry of gaming itself,” Harris said.

“Once you understand the behaviour and mechanics of it, it becomes easier to have a strategy that meets a certain demographic.

“If you don’t understand the language, how do you speak to them?”

Emily Porter-Salmon, director (semiotics and cultural insight) at Sign Salad, said gamification was permeating many of our experiences online these days, citing examples such as Wordle and Duolingo, noting they were also an inherent part of Asian e-commerce.

“All of these experiences are designed to engage you continuously,” Porter-Salmon said. “It is not just about a big ‘binge’ experience. You are meant to engage every day.”

She added that gaming works in different spaces of time – for example, the time available for gaming on a commute is different to time spent gaming in a queue, and games therefore adapt to meet the different demands of these times of the day.

“The really successful games, especially for kids, who don’t necessarily have a great deal of disposable income to start with, are at the lower end of the market,” Porter-Salmon added.

“It is in mobile gaming, it is in games that don’t require such an intensive input of data.”

Demands from consumers also included greater personalisation, she said: “Kids now expect to be able to represent themselves and what they want to do. Self-expression and ‘self-fashioning’ in that virtual space is more expected and simple now.”

People also grow up to be richer consumers, and therefore buying a pair of trainers in a game could mean tat younger consumers choose to buy them in real life further down the line once they have more disposable income.

“We’re creating a scaffolding of nostalgia for tomorrow,” Porter-Salmon explained.

Ben Austwick, senior executive – streaming and gaming at Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity, said that gaming had a strong reciprocal relationship with wider culture.

“It’s not just that culture is adapting to games, but games are adapting to culture,” he said.

“It’s not just because attention spans are getting less, but because people don’t have time these days. A lot of games these days don’t want our time for the entire day – a two-to-three hour session on a mobile is not quite realistic, while something you play for 10 minutes to tick off would be.”

Gaming can be very good for younger people, he added, and used the example of gaming within the charity’s hospital, as the devices are easily cleaned and help provide somewhere that “feels like home” for young patients, as well as escapism and a means of connecting them with their friends.