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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!"
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
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. :-)
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
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.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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?
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.
-- lol pwned
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.
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?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
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.
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Fifty-Million-Penny Arcade!
qntm.org
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.
Vae Victus.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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
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.
The cake is a pie
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...
Does that figure include "Jack Thompson's" donation?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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.
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.
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?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.
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?