The Reason to Write: Extra Life

     Yes, even the children of Rohan have tree houses and swings for playtime -- but I'm not here to write about the fictional children in Middle-earth, even though this is a blog about games. I'm here to write about real children in need of real help. I'm beginning my fifth year of participation (and sixth year as a donor) to an extremely important charity: Extra Life.

     Extra Life is a non-profit charity where gamers play games to raise money for Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. Each participant chooses a hospital to raise funds for, and they ask for people to make donations on their very own donation pages in order to sponsor their game time. Some people game all year long, with many of them streaming their video games via Twitch or YouTube. Others do it all in one exhausting Marathon day designated by the charity -- typically in October or November.

     I have done both over the years of my participation, but in this past year I hit a gigantic bump in the road that challenged me to find an alternative to my previous habits. I had lived in an apartment and was free to hog all of the bandwidth my high-speed internet offered, until I moved several states away onto a winding road outside of town where the available internet options were few and very slow. I now have to make the best of a prepaid hotspot which affords a meager 5 GB per month. That clearly prevents me from doing any kind of streaming on Twitch or even uploading videos afterwards. So what was I to do?

     I had toyed with using Twitter and a Steam group this past year, doing regular tweets as I played games on the Marathon day, and keeping people aware of when I was playing games through the Steam group announcements. Neither of these were terribly effective at reaching out to people, so I'm trying a different tactic: a gamer blog.

     If you're thoroughly bored by this prospect, I thank you for reading this far. If you'd like to follow my gaming throughout this year, I encourage you to bookmark this blog. You can, of course, follow via Twitter and the public Steam group.

     Help me be a hero for the kids this year!