Charity Begins at Home
by BONZO, HSM guest contributor
Video games events for charity fund raisers have been around for some time. It is only logical to tap into this multi-billion dollar industry to give back to the community and worthy charitable organizations.
The earliest known instance of video gamers giving back to charity occurred January 2nd, 1981, when several high school students played a five-day marathon of Asteroids to raise funds for the funeral costs of a man they never met. During the marathon they collected donations for Leo Wampole, who died of pneumonia complicated by cerebral palsy. Since then others have stepped forward to use the gamer dollar to raise funds for various causes. I recall participating in an event in 1992 where the owner of a local Laundromat held a competition and donated all the proceeds from the Street Fighter II arcade machines for the funeral costs of a local student. The fund raising and charitable contributions have only expanded from the consumer to the developers and continue to grow.
Many game developers make several charitable contributions a year, and hold gaming events to raise funds. SEGA held a charity auction to benefit the relief efforts following the devastating tsunami that struck Japan March 11, 2011 following the earthquake. Sony was also among the corporate contributors for the relief efforts. Bungie released a limited edition Halo 3 Xbox console which was auctioned off on eBay to benefit the Make A Wish foundation. Zynga held promotional events across many of their popular facebook games to raise funds for the Japan Earthquake relief efforts. Konami and Sojo studios recently made headlines when they launched free to play social games, Food Force and WeToppia respectively, benefiting the World Food Programme and several organizations including Save the Children, Children’s Heath Fund, and Build On Foundation.
Home has made its own charitable contributions by engaging participation from its users. The New Orleans Saints’ Drew Brees’ pink ribbon jersey was a limited promotional item donating proceeds to his foundation which raises funds for breast cancer research and awareness. LOOT made its own contribution with its Save the Ta-Tas avatar items donating proceeds to aid cancer research.
Brees' Dream Jersey
The organization Miracle Network awarded participants with an avatar accessory item to encourage participation in the Extra-life video game marathon which raises funds for Children’s Hospitals. Home users have taken it upon themselves to join the fight by organizing events within home to raise awareness for breast cancer during Breast Cancer Awareness Month by wearing LOOT’s Save the Ta-Tas wardrobe items, the Brees’ Dream Jersey or just any pink, including the avatar label which changes even the avatar’s dialogue box pink.
Groups within Home have been major contributors to the Extra Life fund raiser, as well as the Child’s Play fund raiser which donates money to improve the lives of children in hospitals. Sony however allows us to donate not just money; our time in Home and through the fundraising events, but also our idle processors in the Stanford project that allows anyone with a PS3 or a computer to donate their processor towards a global project that amounts to the worlds largest distributed supercomputer through folding@home. On your XMB (cross media bar) under the network icon, at the very bottom is an icon for Life with Playstation.
Extra-Life
If you have never clicked on this icon before, what it does is it downloads an application with a couple of functions divided into channels. You can browse news, watch game trailers, use it as a gorgeous screen saver or use Folding@Home that allows your PlayStation 3 to be part of the distributed network of computers across the world. You can also download this application for your personal computer. It then becomes part of a supercomputer that simulates protein folding. If you have never heard of this, it is the study of the way proteins in our bodies assemble themselves or fold to go about the task of breaking down food into energy, regulating our moods and fighting diseases.
(Editor’s note: this publication wishes to commend the Homeling Collective, in particular, for their outstanding Folding@Home work.)
When proteins don’t fold correctly it can result in serious health issues, including diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. This application uses your PC or PS3 processor to join the distributed network over an internet connection to run computer simulations to better understand the process.
Clubs within Home participate by joining folding groups; if being part of the cause isn’t enough for you, there is a leaderboard and point system to compete with your friends over whom contributes more. Your can monitor Points Per Day (PPD) on sites like Kakao Stats and Hard Folding. To join or start a group once running Folding@Home on the PS3, press the triangle button; under the identity setting you will see the option to start your own or join an existing team. Folding is a great way to give back that doesn’t require you to donate money, other than the electricity costs of running the PlayStation. Personally I run it while I sleep; you can always turn the TV off and leave the system running. If your television allows you to turn off screen only, you can listen to soft music or music from your personal library while it runs. For more information on this, visit folding.stanford.edu.
A similar and more gamer active project involves an online game dubbed Foldit, in which online gamers work on solving puzzles by folding molecules and rotating amino acids to create stable 3d protein structures. It took gamers three weeks to solve the structure of a protein cutting enzyme of a retrovirus similar to HIV. The researchers reasoned that humans have a better understanding of spatial reasoning than computers do, and gamers love a challenge, so pairing the two to solve the problem was a logical step.
Gamers and game developers are giving back, with money, with time, awareness, and doing no more than simply joining a network. Home has shown that it cares, and has allowed us to give back, and I hope it expands from that. I would love see more options in Home that would make me hesitate less to spend more. It would be fantastic to see a virtual zoo within Home, and avatar items we can purchase that would donate proceeds to the World Wildlife Fund. An Animal Shelter public space where you can buy companions with a portion of the proceeds helping American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), or just a portion of what I spend for a companion benefiting these organizations. Pink tokens in the Gift Machine that would benefit cancer research, with Cancer Awareness items to gift each other. Cancer awareness wristbands for our avatars.
There are countless possibilities to allow Home gamers to contribute more, but until then we can continue to take part with the current organizations in place like Child’s Play and Extra Life. One can only hope that options for charitable donation will in some way be further integrated into the microtransactive structure of Home’s economy.
April 8th, 2012 by BONZO | 7 comments
BONZO is an editor and artist for HomeStation Magazine.
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Great article! I’ve been trying to get more PS Homies involved in supporting cancer awareness for about 3 years now, and I’d still like to see more developers release content that donates the proceeds to charity. In the 1st post of the 2011 BCAM thread, there is contact info for many of Home’s top developers. I urge everyone to contact their favorite devs and let them know that you’d love to buy items from them that support charities!
http://community.us.playstation.com/thread/3896791?start=0&tstart=0
(And slight correction: only a *potion* of proceeds from the Save the Ta-tas items went to charity.)
Oops…portion, not potion. Guess that’s what I get for correcting people! :p
good point and thank you for providing those links. No worried on typo we all got what you meant
I have covered some of the breast cancer awareness events here in Home. I think it is wonderful that people take the time to organize and monitor such events. I have a friend whose done a walk for this every year. There is so much more that Home can be capable of than it is already doing. Charity begins at home is an old saying, in Home it is true!
Good article Bonzo!
Very nice article.