The Speed Gamers Raise Over $26,000 For Charity

Levonn Lawrence writes "Moving into day four of seven, The Speed Gamers (TSG) continue to play a Final Fantasy marathon for an unusual reason: charity. The guys at TSG are playing through every main Final Fantasy game, from one to twelve, over a period of seven days in hopes or raising $50,000 for ACT Today (Autism Care and Treatment). The marathon is streamed live for people to watch. ACT is a charity helping to financially support families effected by Autism. The marathon started 6pm CST, Friday, July 17th, 2009 and is going until Friday, July 24th 2009. So far they've raised over $26,000 (not a typo) and they're only 89 hours in."

Comments

Slashdotting

[sopssa]

Its a video stream site and states even before this slashdot story "Please help us save our server from overloading and click the TSG Button instead of refreshing the entire page when the video starts to lag."

And now slashdotting it? Let the fun begin!

Fundraising

[kevinNCSU]

I've never understood our culture's need to have people do something entirely trivial and unhelpful before we're willing to donate to a worthy and important cause.

Imagine if we had volunteering for habitat humanity marathons to get people to donate for autism research instead or something like that. But I bet people wouldn't be willing to. you mean your going to build houses for homeless people and then you want me to pay you money for autism research? No, I think I'd feel more comfortable if you walked 3 miles in a circle for my donation.

Re:Fundraising

[Darkness404]

Because our society is based on the founding principles of equivalency. Therefore rather than giving people money for no real reason, we prefer them to "earn" it by doing something else. Generally your going to have a lot more people wanting to run a marathon than you would people building houses. The reason being is that there are a lot more people who A) feel like they accomplished something by running a marathon B) have running a marathon as one of their "life goals" and C) there are a lot more people who can run marathons than are competent in carpentry. While I myself, (like many geeks) am not good at running a marathon nor am I really that skilled with wood, a Final Fantasy marathon would be something enjoyable that I would do.

Re:Fundraising

[brkello]

If we all donated to worthy causes we would all be out of money. So after awhile, charity is just background noise...another person trying to take our money and mismanage it. These causes bring attention to the charities in a fun way. Then you think "oh, that's cool, I should support that cause". It is basically an attention grabber. People asking you for money all the time just turns them off.