Project Results
Gamer-Con Social Events: What We Learned From Our Participants
Between November and December 2025, two of our Gamer-Con partners — BACKSLASH (Spain) and Unofficial Media & Training (Ireland) — ran a series of online gaming social events for young people aged 18 to 25. The results are in, and they confirm what we hoped from the start: gaming, when paired with the right facilitation, can be a genuine gateway to social connection and open conversations about well-being.
🇪🇸 BACKSLASH, Spain — League of Legends Sessions
BACKSLASH ran two online sessions built around League of Legends, a game chosen for its popularity among the group and its team-based format. Each session followed the "Check-In, Play, Check-Out" framework from the project's Embedded Well-being Guidebook — an opening connection block, a central team-gaming block, and a closing well-being conversation.
| Session | Date | Focus | Attendance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Session 1 | 20 Nov 2025 | Social connection & isolation | 16 of 19 registered |
| Session 2 | 11 Dec 2025 | Stress management & life transitions | 14 of 19 registered |
What participants told us (from 17 evaluation responses):
The most frequently strengthened skills were teamwork (53%) and communication (53%). A spontaneous WhatsApp group formed after the first session, and several participants asked for a stable Discord channel to keep the connection going between sessions.
"Seeing that I wasn't the only one worrying about the future, it really helps to talk about it as a group."
— Gamer-Con Spain participant
"That nobody judged when we talked about more personal things during breaks in the match."
— Gamer-Con Spain participant
🇮🇪 UMT, Ireland — Minecraft Build Sessions
UMT took a different approach, running 10 Minecraft sessions over roughly a month, using the "shoulder-to-shoulder" bonding model shown to be especially effective at engaging young men — who made up the majority of the group. Across the sessions, a core group of 15 young people worked together to build a holiday-themed island, with well-being topics like mindfulness, stress and anxiety woven into the building process.
What participants told us (from 14 survey responses):
Friends (92.9%) and family (78.6%) remained the group's main support networks, while work or job-related stress (78.6%) and financial worries (64.3%) were the most common sources of daily pressure — a clear reflection of the life-transition challenges the project set out to address.
"I have never really been one to share how I feel or talk about my mental state, but doing so with the group feels easier or more casual — there are no pressures or judgements."
— Gamer-Con Ireland participant
"From these sessions it has eased the fear of my future — I used to panic, but from these sessions it has given me a better outlook on life."
— Gamer-Con Ireland participant
What This Tells Us
Whether the game was a fast-paced team match or a slow, creative build, the pattern held across both countries: when young people are given a shared, low-pressure activity and space to talk without being pushed, conversations about well-being happen naturally. In both Spain and Ireland, participants reported feeling less stressed, more connected, and more willing to talk openly about their mental health — often for the first time.
- Both partners confirmed that social connections outlasted the sessions themselves, forming WhatsApp and Discord groups that kept participants in touch.
- Communication and teamwork were the two most consistently reported skill gains.
- Some participants in both countries reported initial intimidation when joining a group of strangers — reinforcing the recommendation in our Embedded Well-being Guidebook to invest in a slower-paced, structured "welcome" phase.
- Both teams recommend continuing the sessions beyond the pilot, given the clear participant demand for more.
Gamer-Con: Gaming Social Events to Support the Well-being of Young People in Life Transitions is a Small-scale Partnership funded under the Erasmus+ Programme (2024-3-IS01-KA210-YOU-000288127), running from January 2025 to June 2026, and led by Rafíþróttasamtök Íslands (Iceland) in partnership with BACKSLASH (Spain) and Unofficial Media and Training Limited (Ireland).
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
