Child's Play Approaches Half a Million Dollars

SecureTheNet writes "Created by Penny Arcade, the Child's Play Charity gives all toy and monetary donations directly to hospitals for distribution to sick kids. There are NO administration fees taken. As the holidays approach, the donations are approaching half a million dollars!"

Comments

Re:FUCK GAMES FOR CHARITY, FEED A STARVING AFRICAN

[Anonymous Coward]

You Ignorant fucks!

The video game indsutry is solely responsible for every bad deed done
by anyone under 21! The Video Game "community" are all hethenisitic
dyke liberal gang members!

The Japanese are doing far worse than they ever did to us at Pearl Harbor
allowing this godless filth onto our hallowed land! Kids are helpless to
resist the lures of these MURDER SIMULATORS! I will sue every gamer and
game maker on the planet to insure my religious beliefs are upheld and to
ensure that no parent ever have to take any kind of personal responsability!

Charity? Please! These peons are nothing! I donate several 10's of dollars a
year to charity, and my money isn't BLOOD MONEY! They are merely trying to
make sure the next generation of children are as demented as these perverts are!
Anyone who responds negativly to my rant will be arrested and sued, in an order
to be determined later.

Yours,
    Jack Thompson
    Video Game Bible lawyer

Courtesy Link

[Skald]

As a token of gratitude for such fine charitable work, I think it'd be nice to put a link to Penny Arcade itself in the story. :-)

Re:Courtesy Link

[rosewood]

Why? You want their servers that always seem to be one more user away from failing to just implode?

Re:Courtesy Link

[bedessen]

This will be a great help for all the slashdot readers that are not already familiar with Penny Arcade.... all three of them.

Could this be free (as in beer) charity?

[postbigbang]

No load charity is a wonderful thing. The current model of huge organizations with powerful overheads taxes donations. If you consider the actions of the administrators of charity, they're much like a program in numerous ways. I'm not saying that eliminating administration can be perfected (you need audits, and program adjustments along the way), but a higher efficiency model would be welcomed. Bureaucracies tend to grow until they suck away the intent of charitable organizations. Some are far more efficient than others.... but in a future world perhaps more of contributions gets to the need, rather than the machine that services the need.

Re:Could this be free (as in beer) charity?

[TheRaven64]

I am not overly familiar with the tax laws in the US, but I believe it is possible to write off donations against tax. In this case, it would be possible for a company to fund the administration of a charity at zero cost (the money that would go to the charity would otherwise have gone to the government). With the administration overheads covered, all other donations would go directly to the causes. It may be that this is what PA are doing, or it may be that the administration work is all done on a volunteer basis.

Re:Could this be free (as in beer) charity?

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't really no administration cost charity. There is an unrecorded contribution of professional services by Penny Arcade; the administration and overhead is not without cost, but Penny Arcade is contributing those services which do, strictly speaking (by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) have a monetary value and should be recorded as income and as expense.

You as a contributor may not care as long as you know that 100% of your contribution is going for the program's purpose.

Many (though not all) charities do not spend enough in some areas of administration to become optimally efficient. There is still no such thing as a free lunch, even for charities. It is not rare for a charity to get money restricted for programs and get too little money for the good administration required to run and monitor those programs well.

Re:Could this be free (as in beer) charity?

[BrynM]

but I believe it is possible to write off donations against tax. In this case, it would be possible for a company to fund the administration of a charity at zero cost

INACPA (I'm not an accountant)... It would take the employees to file their yearly loss (because of hours "worked" at the charity instead of a job) as a charitable write-off because a charity (or other non-profit) cannot contribute to itself. Most donations that can be written off in the US have tangible value (cars, money, food), so writing off an employee's loss of income would be near impossible since it has no tangible value. Your company might be able to "donate" you to a charity and write off your salary though I bet.

Re:Could this be free (as in beer) charity?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are explicit IRS regulations providing for valuation of donated professional services.

Re:Could this be free (as in beer) charity?

[bprime]

loss of income [ ... ] has no tangible value

Hi, welcome to America - you must be new here.

Re:FUCK GAMES FOR CHARITY, FEED A STARVING AFRICAN

[Anonymous Coward]

And why shouldn't they if our country and culture has the ability, but not the will, to alleviate the gross disparity in world living conditions? If you eat gluttonously before a starving man, with full knowledge of condition, would you not expect him to anger?

Re:That is great..

[tehwebguy]

why on earth would they give any of the money they raised for their charity to another charity?

if someone wants to donate money that will help give kids video games who otherwise couldn't afford them (i don't know the ins and outs of their charity) they can donate through PA.

if they want to donate money that will help a different cause, they can go through that other cause. people want to know where their money is going when they donate it.

Re:That is great..

[PhoenixFlare]

Dumping 500.000$ at once at an organisation that is not used to handling that kind of money isn't efficient .

If you'd actually read about the project, you'd see that the donations are split up among many different hospitals, and a large part of the donations are actually in the form of items bought through Amazon....So there is not going to be just a giant lump sum dumped on the charity or any of the receiving organizations.

Paypal

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite a lot of the donations come in via PayPal, so the article isn't quite accurate: There are no administration fees except what PayPal skims off each transaction.

Re:Paypal

[Lord Bitman]

Considering that donations go directly to hospitals, you could also say that it puts an extra burden on the hospital workers themselves. Last year PA tried to do all they could to help organize the huge flow of donations that came in, this year each hospital has to do it themselves. I'm not saying this is entirely a bad thing, but there is after all a reason "administrative fees" exist: that labor has to come from somewhere. Now, people living full-time off the mere organization of supposed "charity" work is one thing, but bringing a couple people in to move boxes around so that the people you're donating to don't have to do extra non-sick-children work, that's worth a bit of an administration fee.

Re:Paypal

[grommit]

You can (and many people have) volunteer to help the individual hospitals deal with the deliveries. Also, children's hospitals are very used to getting large quantities of toys delivered since there are quite a few charities that do this sort of thing.

Re:Paypal

[Anonymous Coward]

children's hospitals are very used to getting large quantities of toys delivered since there are quite a few charities that do this sort of thing.

That situation would result in the hospitals' hiring slack capacity just to have the labor on hand to handle these frequent donations of large quantities of toys. I'm sure they feel it's worth it, but it's not free.

Re:Paypal

[afidel]

All hospitals have slack labor capacity, they are in a very boom and bust style of business, so as long as they can work with the delivery companies to schedule deliveries during their historical slow periods they are probably acruing no additional cost.

Re:Paypal

[gbjbaanb]

I know Amazon could help out - store the gifts themselves, and deliver them in 1 go, instead of running them through the usual channels. It'd also cost me less in postage and packaging when I contribute too...

Re:Paypal

[ealar dlanvuli]

The hospital I worked at had full time employees that did this stuff.

Re:Paypal

[ealar dlanvuli]

You have got to be kidding me. You guys realize you are talking about like 90k/year worth of salaries for this whole department? That's including the benifits they wouldn't provide! Hospitals blow through that on a daily basis.

Seriously,
Perspective.

Re:That is great..

[Bootle]

Did it occur to you that these guys have a full-time employee dedicated solely to running Child's Play?

Maybe you should dig up some pics of the warehouse-fuls of donations they have gotten in previous years, before you accuse them of not being prepared for $500k...

Re:That is great..

[FunctionalMethod]

Because in all honesty people have no idea what is worth donating for. This might seems a bit cruel but it is a fact. They have the right idea , just lack the interest to find out what the "world" really needs right now. People donating to Child's Play , are just people that want to do a good thing and buy something / give some money. That is great and I admire them for that. It is more then most people do. But would they donate a GameCube to a hospital somewhere , if they knew that the same 90$ would provide fresh water for a whole village in Africa and possibly save allot of lives? Or that it would provide with enough vaccine to protect 100children from common ( in the wester world) illnesses that are ( in 2rd world countries) 50% of the time lethal?

Re:That is great..

[FunctionalMethod]

I am not accusing them for anything. You might not agree with me , but don't turn my words around.

You have got to be kidding!

[Anonymous Coward]

You Ignorant fucks!

The video game indsutry is solely responsible for every bad deed done
by anyone under 21! The Video Game "community" are all hethenisitic
dyke liberal gang members!

The Japanese are doing far worse than they ever did to us at Pearl Harbor
allowing this godless filth onto our hallowed land! Kids are helpless to
resist the lures of these MURDER SIMULATORS! I will sue every gamer and
game maker on the planet to insure my religious beliefs are upheld and to
ensure that no parent ever have to take any kind of personal responsability!

Charity? Please! These peons are nothing! I donate several 10's of dollars a
year to charity, and my money isn't BLOOD MONEY! They are merely trying to
make sure the next generation of children are as demented as these perverts are!
Anyone who responds negativly to my rant will be arrested and sued, in an order
to be determined later.

Yours,
        Jack Thompson
        Video Game Bible lawyer

Surprising

[mfh]

I'm surprised PayPal accepts donations for PA. Remember when PayPal shut down the SomethingAwful.com Katrina aid drive without so much as a consideration for the victims? I thought their response was that PayPal doesn't support charities? Or was it a conflict of interest with one of the major charity groups that PayPal is contracted with?

Re:Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Given PA's general level of planning and professionalism (No, that's not sarcasm. Really. I promise.) I would guess that they actually contacted PayPal and cleared everything with them before going ahead with anything. I believe SomethingAwful.com just put up an account and had people donate, which raised a bunch of red flags with PayPal. SA could have gotten their money back eventually, but they were in a hurry (understandable, what with people being immediately in need). Child's Play, on the other hand, has a very long lead time to make sure things get handled properly. Note that this is not a criticism of SA in any way, just noting that PA has a much easier situation.

Re:Yeah, but...

[Ronin_Bic]

I doubt it since Microsoft is one of the Plantium Sponsors

Re:That is great..

[grylnsmn]

You know, that's quite a condescending attitude to take. Yes, there are many different kinds of charities out there, but you shouldn't be insisting that one charity give up its proceeds to another type of charity, just because you think that the other charity is a better choice. All of those kinds of charities fill specific needs.

Is the Make a Wish Foundation not a worthy cause because they focus their efforts on bringing cheer to the lives of children with cancer? They bring in millions of dollars a year for much the same purpose as Child's Play. Should they instead be giving their proceeds to The American Institute for Cancer Research?

The charities that provide fresh water to villages in Africa, or help provide vaccines to third-world countries are needed, as are the ones that provide funds for research. At the same time, the charities that focus on bringing a little joy into the lives of those who are suffering are also needed.

UK Hospital Added

[FalconZero]

Child's play added a UK hospital: Alder Hey childrens hospital. So UK gamers/nerds out there should get over there and donate (if you havn't already).

Direct Links

• Alder Hey Wishlist
• Child's Play
• Penny Arcade

Ah...

[SamSim]

Fifty-Million-Penny Arcade!

Re:That is great..

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. You've managed to be the "What about starving kids in Africa?!" guy *and* the "aswell"/"allot" guy in the same post. All you need now is use of the word "hegemony" and you'll be all my favorite annoyances in one. I tell you what, you stop telling me how to be charitable with my money and I'll stop making fun of the way you write. Okay?

Re:Charity and economics

[funwithBSD]

Vae Victus.

Re:FUCK GAMES FOR CHARITY, FEED A STARVING AFRICAN

[PunkOfLinux]

Erm... i think that he CAN sue the poster now...

Re:Charity and economics

[drn8]

I'm guessing you mean Vae victis.

(from wikipedia)
Vae Victus Robotics is a high-school FIRST robotics team in Falls Church, Virginia. It's students attend George Mason High School, part of the City of Falls Church school system. The team, started in 2004, derives it's name (adopted in it's second year) from a mispelling of the latin "Vae Victis". This was not intentional.

another identical charity

[mliu]

It's pretty weird that there's another charity that does almost exactly the same thing as Child's Play. In fact I can't really see any difference other than the fact that Child's Play has the publicity associated with Penny-Arcade.

I first read about this other one because Microsoft made some sort of a large donation to it recently. Apparently it's been in operation since 2001 however, incorporated in 2003.
http://www.gaming-age.com/news/2005/12/2-3

Re:another identical charity

[Alistar]

Child's play is a little different. I read the site you linked and it looks like Microsoft donated nothing but games.

The Child's Play charity gives entertainment gifts in general, including books and movies (educational ones too, there is a book on the amazon list about Sir Cumference and the Order of Pi I think, I love that title).

Although there is a gaming theme, the purpose of Child's Play is not directly gaming, but helping sick children play and have fun.

Re:another identical charity

[ebuck]

Not unusual at all.

If you look around, there's a lot of charaties that perform similar functions. Sometimes they target the same demographic group, sometimes they are bound by the same activity, sometimes they are tied to the same organization.

For example, there's more than one charity that caters to childern in hospitals. Toys for Tots, Child's Play, Get Well Gamers, Candlelight Foundation, Make A Wish Foundation, and The Shriner's Organization. Apologies to those I've missed, as I can not even begin to list them all.

There's more than one charity that appeals to a particular activity. Runners can attest to every race being tied to one charity or another, the organization coordinating the race basically survives and coordinates the race by taking a small cut from the charity proceeds. It's not illegal or unethical, as few runners will pony up charity money un-prompted but most will not gripe about an entrance fee if a portion is going to promote public goodwill. Bingo is a simliar activity driven revenue source for charities, with bingo parlors happily donating a protion of the earnings to charaties to offset ill will towards gambling in the community, and the players love it as they can soothe their losses by knowing that some of the money went to a good cause. I know of bingo parlors in Texas where every game donates to a different charity.

Organizations are another binding agent in the distribution of charity money. If you donate to your alma mater or local college / university, you often can put stipulations on the donation which effictvely makes the organization a multi-charity. One example is to specify that the dontated money is to only be spent on the library, or the departement of Biology, etc. The US Goverment also accepts charity money under such circumstances, and have a departement to distribute charity funds to the correct recipients. I have known a few people who have placed clauses in their wills to have their assets forwarded to paying off the national debt.

So it's not a great travisty to have identical, or near-identical charities competeing in their various arenas. Without competition, even in charaties, they would soon fall prey to the problems inherit with any monopoly. For charaties, that would spell beaurocratic processes for donation, department-based "kingdom building", excessive administration, and less of the donation arriving to its intended recipient.

Be glad you have a choice, one day you may find that a charity is very inefficent in distributing funds, and you might consider changing charities to another that still fulfills your wishes, but is ran by someone else. Consumer reports did a published study of charity comparison, and it was shocking to see how some squandered over 60% of the funds in (mis-)management of the distribution of such funds.

There's an excellent description of the problem at http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/personal-financ e/charity-watchdogs-1205.htm

And if you want to donate, http://www.charitywatch.org/ is useful in separating out the dogs from the winners.

Re:another identical charity

[JAYOYAYOYAYO]

I say, what really differentiates these two charities is that Child's Play allows you to buy stuff on Amazon.com, which will be shippped directly to the Children's Hospital of your choice. For me, that is much easier than setting up a PayPal account to be able to donate to Get-Well Gamers.

Re:That is great..

[Anonymous Coward]

and paying all sorts of money to the rotating heads of the 'loaded' charities in over-inflated salaries is efficient?

'no-load' and 'no-bias' charities are the best.

Re:That is great..

[Anonymous Coward]

Because in all honesty people have no idea what is worth donating for....They have the right idea , just lack the interest to find out what the "world" really needs right now.

Oh, but you know better, huh? You wouldn't happen to be aiming for a career as a politition, would you? Because you seem to have the right mindset to fit in. Perhaps you could just skip that step and become emporer of the world, and tell us all what's good for us.

Chucky's Back

[cpt_rhetoric]

And he's pissed you're not donating!

Re:Chucky's Back

[eluusive]

Exactly what I thought at first.

Re:FUCK GAMES FOR CHARITY, FEED A STARVING AFRICAN

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember kids: You can only become a successful country through centuries of rape, pillage, invasion and racism!

Re:That is great..

[ucblockhead]

But they aren't doing that. They are asking hospitals to put up Amazon wishlists containing what they want and having poeple buy off that. It's great, really, because the hospitals get what they want, and no one spends much effort. What's great about it is that it is NOT giving money. It's not like most charities where you fire off twenty bucks and have no clue what happened to it. I went on the list, saw that the Oakland Childrens' Hospital needed certain videogames. By making the purchase, I know that they got one of the things they needed, and I know that 100% of my money went to some kid having games.

just suprised

[fonephux]

Doesn't seem like to many of you have a very positive attitude about this.. I think its awsome.. they did a wonderful job their first year and I believe this is their 3rd year doing it. just so you know there is a team of people who manage the childs play charity, not just one person lol. Its definately a worthy cause, and there are certainly thousands of other charities who are also worthy of your dollar. But theres certainly no reason to knock them for doing something that will really cheer some of these kids up for what might be their last xmas...

Re:Charity and economics

[neildiamond]

While I hate giving this kind of argument any weight, just so you don't have any more excuses not to help those less fortunate (because you're clearly helping them by sitting on your ass) consider this charity...

Heard of Heifer International?

I donated this year. I still doubt you would give what you could, even armed with this information. To some extent, I do feel that the poor in this country could (with a great deal of effort) turn things around for themselves for the most part. But outside of the West, I don't believe that's always the case.

Re:Charity and economics

[thesupermikey]

I fully agree. Its imporant to find a balence between pure charity and assistence in economic develepment, at least when in comes to helping the 3rd world getting a leg up.

But helping sick kids in american having something to do while in a hospital is a little differant than helping sick kids in africa not die of bad water.

I also undertand...or at least hope...that you are being sarcastic

Question

[sharkey]

Does that figure include "Jack Thompson's" donation?

Re:Question

[Hannah E. Davis]

It shouldn't, because they didn't donate that money to their own charity -- they donated it to this one.

cost in volunteers, do you know the end users?

[fantomas]

Cost in volunteer time - if there's a website - somebody built it. Volunteering is fine if a couple of hours a week but what if it needs 2 years full time work? I think volunteering is crucial and can work but often you require some paid staff to make critical things happen. I don't think the big charities are an evil conspiracy - maybe research what their model is.

An interesting organisation is the Royal National Lifeboats Association in the UK - all the ship crew are volunteers, these are the guys who save drowning seamen off UK coastlines. But their headquarters support, their R and D, these are all paid staff.

Plus - do you know the end users? can you always balance the urgency of needs? Some cases of need might not be as "attractive" as others. What touches your heart strings might not be the most urgent case. Might need neutral professional in the middle, i.e. charity workers, who are better informed about where aid should go. Personally I'd rather have full time paid professionals working out who's most needy than some wealthy semi-retired housewives half way across the planet making life or death decisions for tsunami victims or rural Pakistani villages needing shelter *now*.

Flamebait, false comparison

[happyemoticon]

Balderdash. Raising your spirits helps you get well - that's why there's a statistical link between religion (or optimism) and health. In one case (no, I don't have a link to support it), a double-blind study showed a correlation between a negative attitude going into heart surgery and dying in said heart surgery.

There's a difference between charity to save somebody's life - be it giving toys to a kid with cancer so he doesn't die of despair, or giving clean water to somebody in Africa so he doesn't die of dysentery - and charity to finance somebody's continued economic indifference and unwillingness to support themselves. A living person at least has a chance of economic contribution but a dead person has none, unless you're talking soylent green.

Re:Flamebait, false comparison

[mboverload]

Atheists and Christians have the exact same deathrate.

Just my little fun fact...

Re:Flamebait, false comparison

[Lotharus]

Yep. 100%. They all die eventually.

Wait, no, Christians have a 99.99999999% mortality rate, if you count the couple folks that were raptured as non-deaths.

I know, the percentage is probably wrong. I don't know exactly how many people can be said to have been raptured, nor the complete total Christian population since the dawn of time.

s/Christian/God's chosen people/ where necessary.

Fundraising at Laurier

[fa1uzure]

A campus club(Kult of Gaming) I belong to at WLU in Waterloo, Ontario was doing fundraising for this charity. I don't know the total amount we raised, but we got the creater of VGcats to come out and do a signing for childsplay, where the profits went to the charity, yesterday.

Re:Well

[heinousjay]

It's a shame, really. We have the charity to help sick children, but there's no foundation I can fund to give you your missing sense of humor back.

Won't someone think of the humorless jackasses?

Thompson

[dacarr]

This is a little somethign that'll also piss off Jack Thompson. Good show, guys.

Re:Thompson

[IamCarrots]

Some of you seem to either not take this seriously, or have decided to bash it, or joke about it. What the hell are you doing for kids with terminal diseases and disorders this holiday season? Anything? I doubt it. While I don't agree that video games are the answer, it's not just video games/systems that are being donated, so stop generalizing it. If I were a little boy dying of cancer stuck in a damned hospital bed for Christmas and someone gave me a free GBA to play with, I'd be estatic and thankful. So to hell with all you trolls, and kudos to the PA crew, because at least their intentions are good and they trying to do something for the less fortunate. Goddamned cynics. As far as the 'hospitals having to put forth man hours to execute this event', it's not called a charity for the hell of it.

Re:Thompson

[lewp]

If anything the comment you replied to was meant to be 'Funny'. Chill out, douchebag, everybody knows Child's Play is a good thing. One of the motivations for its creation was to show gamers are decent, normal people, who care about others; and as a big 'fuck you' to Jack Thompson and people like him who think they're just deviates training to blow people up by practicing on their consoles.

It probably does get under his skin on some level, and, as long as the kids still come first, I can't see anything wrong with that. Can you?

Re:Thompson

[dacarr]

Jack? Is that you, trolling on Slashdot?

Re:Thompson

[IamCarrots]

Sorry, hit wrong reply button. Wasn't meant to follow your post up. I had no problem with your post.

Re:Thompson

[dacarr]

No worries, crap happens. =^^=

Re:That is great..

[NFNNMIDATA]

You have missed the point of this charity. This is not about saving lives, never will be. This was started on 2 premises: (1) kids in the hospital have huge amounts of time to spend doing nothing, it's boring and scary at the same time, and (2) this is a huge fuck-you to the media/politicians who always seem to get behind the "gamers are bad people" stories.

Anyway, from my perspective this is an awesome charity because it's all about raising the quality of life for these sick kids - and you get to pick out the exact items you want to buy for them on amazon.

Re:Yeah, but...

[The Spoonman]

We should also be saving their souls

Gee, and who says Linux isn't a religion? Seriously, it's just a computer, it's not important.

Re:FUCK GAMES FOR CHARITY, FEED A STARVING AFRICAN

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

How many starving Africans have you fed?

Not all charity has to go to people close to death halfway across the world. Everyone has needs. Everyone can use donations to make their life easier. If you saw a dollar bill on the ground, would you pick it up and put it in your wallet, or pick it up and mail it to the Red Cross?

Re:FUCK GAMES FOR CHARITY, FEED A STARVING AFRICAN

[mrbooze]

Why hasn't that worked for Africa, then?

Re:FUCK GAMES FOR CHARITY, FEED A STARVING AFRICAN

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, they should've been born in America instead of in Africa. Geeze, it's such a simple decision, you'd think they would've made it correctly when they were given the option.

How it helps

[CustomDesigned]

We are not poor, and have health insurance, but we were a small recipient of something like this. My 3 year old daughter had her shoulder dislocated in a playground accident. Not too big a deal - just needed to be reset and take it easy for a week. However, the X-ray machine was incredibly scary for her. We finally got her to hold still when the hospital staff got a teddy bear from some toys for sick kids (sorry, I forgot the name), and I stayed in the room. (Just one dose for me is not as bad as multiple daily doses for hospital staff.) She wouldn't let go of that bear for weeks.

Bah Humbug!

[Anonymous Coward]

...to whomever modded this troll. Hit a little to close to home, did it?