Esports has been called an industry, a sport, a culture, and a bubble. After a decade of spectacular growth and an equally spectacular contraction, the more useful question is no longer how big esports is, but what it actually changes. Who gets reached, what they learn, which institutions adapt, and what remains once the tournament lights go out. The 4th UiA Academic Esports Sem-inar takes that question as its theme: Esports 4 Change.

In FLARE, the Future Lab for Academic Research in Esports, we treat esports as a people-cen-tered arena rather than a technology product. Competitive play is where individuals learn to col-laborate, communicate, negotiate identity, and navigate digital complexity, and where those ca-pabilities become visible in ways formal systems rarely capture. Change, in this reading, is not something esports produces automatically through scale or spectacle. It happens where play is deliberately organised: in classrooms, clubs, community centres, workplaces, and public pro-grammes that give participation a structure and a direction.

There is now a growing body of practice to learn from. Esports-based programmes have re-en-gaged young people outside education, employment, and training, and in several cases have carried them into higher education and into work. Universities have built academic esports into study programmes and research centres. Clubs and federations have turned informal play into organised pathways. Employers have begun to recognise competencies formed in competitive digital environments. These are concrete claims about change, and they deserve concrete evi-dence.

They also deserve scrutiny. Not every esports initiative delivers what it promises, and impact is frequently asserted rather than measured. Access remains uneven, toxicity and exclusion persist, wellbeing is easily traded against performance, and funding logics can pull grassroots work to-ward visibility rather than effect. A seminar about change has to make room for the initiatives that did not work, the effects that faded, and the measurements that failed to confirm the story. Critical, negative, and null findings are as welcome here as success cases.

Universities, researchers, educators, and practitioners are uniquely positioned in this. Academic esports, understood as the intentional and structured use of competitive game environments for learning, research, and social inclusion, is where change can be designed, tested, documented, and scaled responsibly. The 2027 seminar invites contributions that examine how esports changes people, institutions, and societies, how that change can be evidenced, and what condi-tions make it last.