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A Norwegian programme makes academic esports the entry point for young people who are looking for education, employment and training, showing how universities, policy makers and businesses can make video games an invaluable tool for re-engagement and help achieve key EU youth and jobs goals.
In 2025, one in nine young Europeans between 15 and 29 were not in education, employment or training.
Policy has a four-letter acronym for them: NEET. Although the label is accurate, it is also empty. It records an absence, and absence is all it allows us to see. But we can view the same young people through a different lens: LEET, looking for education, employment and training.
One letter changes the question institutions must answer. Where NEET asks what is wrong with these young people, LEET asks what they are searching for and what stands in their way. GAME ON, a re-engagement programme developed at the University of Agder in Norway, shows what happens when the second question guides design.
To see why this matters, consider who sits behind the acronym. The deficit story – of an unmotivated, unskilled and disengaged cohort – rarely survives contact with the young people themselves.
As it happens, gamers have long used the word ‘leet’, as slang for ‘elite’. And indeed, many LEET young people belong to Generation Gamer: a group defined not by age but by a shared passion for gaming.
They bring strong digital competencies, social identities rooted in online communities and collaborative abilities honed through thousands of hours of team-based play, from coordinating roles under pressure to sustaining long-term commitment to a team. Yet these competencies remain invisible to the institutions that decide what counts as ability.
The result is not a lack of ability but a lack of translation. Because education and work are also where identity and belonging are built, the consequences run deeper than economics. Many of these young people are not refusing education and work so much as looking for a version of it in which they can recognize themselves.
GAME ON treats this translation gap as its core task. Co-designed by the University of Agder, the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV), the work-integration enterprise Varodd and local businesses, the programme reaches young adults outside education and work through the one interest they reliably share: gaming.
What participants enter is not a gaming room but a structured academic year on campus, with full student status, in which community play is paired with guided reflection, mentorship and work practice in real businesses, and with predictable pathways onward. In 2025 it gained approval as a Work Preparation Training programme, the first of its kind in Norway. Early cohorts have moved on into jobs, work training and undergraduate studies, and completion rates are rising year on year.
The programme works because the game is the entry point, never the destination. It meets participants in an environment where they already feel competent and connected, so that the first experience of re-engagement is winning a match with a team rather than failing another test. It grants them the status and social identity of students, rather than that of clients.
And it scaffolds the gaming deliberately. Through reflection and mentorship, what was privately experienced as ‘just gaming’ is reframed and documented as teamwork, communication, emotional resilience and strategic thinking, competencies that employers and admissions offices can read.
The contrast with ‘gamewashing’, the superficial bolting of game elements onto unchanged structures, could hardly be sharper. In GAME ON, identity, recognition and direction are the programme, and the game merely opens the door.
In esports, players speak of the shifting metagame. This is the game beyond the game, the evolving understanding of what works, rewarding those who adapt first.
Europe’s metagame around gaming has shifted. The European Parliament has recognized the societal potential of esports, universities run degree programmes in it and employers increasingly value the competencies formed in play.
Youth policy has yet to catch up. When we presented GAME ON at the 2026 EUA Annual Conference in Istanbul, the question we heard most was whether it would work elsewhere. The honest answer is that nothing in the model is uniquely Norwegian. Every region in Europe has a public employment service, work-integration and youth organizations, local employers, and young people who game.
Gaming is arguably the most pan-European youth culture there is, with the same titles, servers and communities spanning the continent. What is usually missing is the anchor institution. That is the role of the university, which brings learning design, research-based evaluation and, above all, the institutional status that turns a labour-market measure into a place where someone becomes a student.
The EU aims to bring the NEET rate down to nine per cent by 2030. It will not reach that target with measures young people avoid; it needs to open doors they will walk through voluntarily.
GAME ON is not an argument that gaming is vocational training, even less one than more screen time cures social exclusion. It is an argument that recognition is infrastructure: if a generation builds real competencies in digital worlds, education systems need deliberate, structured ways of translating them. A young person who is looking for opportunities needs an open door, not a diagnosis.
Envision a Europe in which every university region offers such a door, in which the first step back is a game played with peers rather than a form filled in alone, and no talent left unseen for want of translation. For many young people, gaming is not a way out of education and work. Done deliberately, it is the way back in. From NEET to LEET is more than wordplay, it is a pathway. Game on.
Note: This article is a follow-up to Rune Andersen’s presentation during a session on ‘Strength in diversity: cooperating across sectors to serve society’ at the 2026 EUA Annual Conference at Yeditepe University, Türkiye.
