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Mental Helse Ungdom Ingame Brings Mental Health Into Fortnite
Mental Helse Ungdom's Ingame campaign is a Norwegian public-interest initiative launched in November 2018 in which gamers Noobwork and Niklas Baarli hosted candid mental health conversations with boys aged 12 to 17 inside the video game Fortnite, with five episodes distributed free on YouTube and no paid promotion budget.
Hausmann, the Oslo-based agency behind Ingame, identified a structural barrier at the heart of the brief. Young Norwegian boys were not engaging with conventional mental health outreach. The campaign's answer was not to create a helpline poster or a classroom resource but to enter the space where those boys already spent their time. Fortnite, at the peak of its cultural reach in 2018, became the venue. The game's built-in anonymity — players communicate through avatars and game characters rather than face-to-face — gave participants a measure of psychological distance that conventional formats could not replicate.
The format functioned as a gaming-based panel programme. Joachim Noobwork Haraldsen and Niklas Baarli, both figures known to the Norwegian youth gaming community, hosted conversations inside the game on topics including body image, friendships, divorced parents, self-image, bereavement, transitions, infatuation, phobias and worries. Five episodes, each running approximately 15 to 25 minutes, were released weekly from 30 November 2018 on Noobwork's YouTube channel. The case film, titled Takk for praten gutter, was published on Kampanje on 30 January 2019, according to Tv Kampanje. In Norway, the campaign received a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100 on Clapboard.com. The campaign was subsequently recognised as a Finalist at the New York Festivals Advertising Awards in the Social and Environmental Good category for Charity and Non-Profit work, as confirmed by nyfadvertising.com.
Mental Helse Ungdom identified a specific gap in Norwegian mental health communication. Young boys in Norway were significantly underrepresented among young people seeking mental health support, a pattern consistent with broader Nordic public health concerns documented by Regjeringen No, the Norwegian government's official portal, which has noted the importance of targeted youth mental health initiatives as part of national health strategy. Ingame was designed to address the structural reluctance of adolescent boys to self-identify as struggling or to enter clinical or formal support environments.
The strategic logic was rooted in a simple behavioural observation. Boys who would not attend a school counsellor or call a helpline were spending hours each week inside online gaming environments. According to adsoftheworld.com, Ingame explicitly had no paid promotion budget, which meant its distribution model depended entirely on the organic reach of Noobwork's existing YouTube audience and the credibility those hosts carried with young Norwegian gamers. This was not a limitation treated as a constraint — it was built into the campaign's design as an authenticity signal. A slickly produced paid media campaign would have undermined the conversational, peer-level register the format required.
In the broader Norwegian public-interest landscape, mental health campaigns targeting youth had historically leaned on broadcast and print formats, according to research documented on regjeringen.no. Ingame represented a deliberate departure from that tradition. Comparable international campaigns, such as the UK's Campaign Against Living Miserably known as CALM and Australia's ReachOut platform, had begun moving toward digital-first youth engagement, but neither had embedded mental health conversation directly inside a live gaming environment of Fortnite's scale. Hausmann's approach in Norway therefore occupied genuinely new territory within the public service advertising category in 2018, meeting the audience at the point of leisure rather than at the point of crisis.
Ingame's creative execution rested on one formal decision: the conversation would take place inside Fortnite itself, with boys participating through their game characters rather than revealing their identities. That single constraint shaped everything — the camera framing, the pacing, the tone of the hosts, and the subject matter that participants were willing to raise.
Hausmann built the production around the natural register of gaming content rather than the clinical or educational register typical of public health materials. The five episodes, each between 15 and 25 minutes in length, were structured as extended conversations rather than scripted segments. Topics moved across body image, friendships, divorced parents, self-image, bereavement, transitions, infatuation, phobias and worries — a breadth that reflected what boys themselves were willing to discuss once the protective layer of anonymity was in place.
The choice of Noobwork and Niklas Baarli as hosts was itself a creative and strategic decision. Both were credible figures within the Norwegian gaming community rather than mental health professionals or celebrities imported from outside that world. Their presence on screen — or rather, their presence as game characters alongside the participants — maintained the internal logic of the format. The case film subsequently released under the title Takk for praten gutter, published on Kampanje in January 2019 per tv.kampanje.com, documented the production and its reception. According to adsoftheworld.com, the creative direction for Ingame was led by Ida Fjeldbraaten and Tone Humblen, with Marcus Hassel and Torkel Skjolden contributing to the project at Hausmann. Distribution required no broadcast infrastructure. Noobwork's existing YouTube channel served as the sole platform, with episodes released weekly from 30 November 2018, grounding the campaign entirely within the media ecosystem its target audience already inhabited.
No verified performance data for Ingame is publicly available. According to adsoftheworld.com, the campaign carried no paid promotion budget, which means standard media metrics such as paid reach, impressions or response rates were never part of its measurement framework. Organic viewership figures for the five YouTube episodes have not been published by Mental Helse Ungdom, Hausmann or Noobwork in any source documented by adsoftheworld.com, Kommunikasjon Ntb No or clapboard.com.
What is independently verifiable is the campaign's industry recognition. Ingame was named a Finalist at the New York Festivals Advertising Awards in the Social and Environmental Good category, specifically within the Charity and Non-Profit classification, as confirmed by nyfadvertising.com. For a zero-budget Norwegian public service campaign distributed exclusively through a single YouTube channel, that recognition represents meaningful external validation of the approach.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness case rests on format fit rather than scale. By embedding conversation inside Fortnite rather than placing it adjacent to gaming through pre-roll or banner advertising, Ingame removed the friction between the medium and the message. Boys who participated did so voluntarily, within an environment they controlled, under conditions of anonymity they could sustain. The case film title Takk for praten gutter — translated as Thank you for the conversation, boys — suggests that qualitative response from participants was a primary indicator of success for Mental Helse Ungdom. Ingame holds a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100, reflecting its originality and strategic clarity within the public service category.
Ingame is a Norwegian public-interest campaign created by Hausmann for Mental Helse Ungdom in November 2018. It embedded mental health conversations for boys aged 12 to 17 inside the game Fortnite, using anonymous game characters as a protective layer. Five episodes were published on Noobwork's YouTube channel with no paid promotion budget.
Fortnite was chosen because it was a space young Norwegian boys already inhabited in 2018. The game's avatar-based communication gave participants anonymity, enabling conversations about body image, grief and friendship that boys would not typically have in formal mental health settings. The format was designed by Hausmann to remove the stigma barrier.
Joachim Noobwork Haraldsen and Niklas Baarli hosted all five Ingame episodes. Both were established figures in the Norwegian gaming community. Their credibility within that world, rather than any clinical or celebrity status, was central to Hausmann's strategy of reaching boys through a trusted, peer-level register rather than an authoritative one.
Participants discussed body image, friendships, divorced parents, self-image, bereavement, transitions, infatuation, phobias and worries. Topics were broad because the anonymous Fortnite format lowered inhibition. According to adsoftheworld.com, the five episodes ran approximately 15 to 25 minutes each and were released weekly from 30 November 2018 on Noobwork's YouTube channel.
Ingame was named a Finalist at the New York Festivals Advertising Awards in the Social and Environmental Good category, Charity and Non-Profit classification, as confirmed by nyfadvertising.com. The recognition is notable given the campaign operated with no paid promotion budget and distributed its five episodes exclusively through Noobwork's existing YouTube channel in Norway.
According to adsoftheworld.com, creative direction on Ingame was led by Ida Fjeldbraaten and Tone Humblen, with Marcus Hassel and Torkel Skjolden also contributing at Hausmann in Oslo. The campaign was produced for Mental Helse Ungdom and launched in Norway in November 2018 as a digital public-interest initiative targeting boys aged 12 to 17.
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