Guest Editorial: Gaming and Giving—Where Is the Will?

Ryan Sharpe is the president and co-founder of the Get-Well Gamers Foundation (www.getwellgamers.org), a California-based 501(c) (3)-certified public charity dedicated to bringing electronic entertainment to children's hospitals for the benefit of entertainment and pain management since 2001.

It has always struck me as somewhat odd when for as much as it crows every year how much more it's making than the film industry, the game industry has what I think is an embarrassing lack of philanthropy associated with it.  When the recent catastrophic earthquakes hit Haiti, the industry did rouse itself beyond its usual torpor, but not by much.

Bungie sold a number of items from their store whose proceeds went to the relief effort, and PopCap similarly had a day where everything sold went to Haiti. From the biggest of the big (Microsoft's $1.25 Million donation) to the smallest of the small (apprelief and indie+relief), coalitions of indie developers coming together to pool the profits from their games to donate) the game industry has responded to Haiti. What’s sad is that in a single telethon the film industry managed to blow us away with fifty-six million dollars raised.

I guess the root of the problem is the lack of industry charities. Yes, there's the Entertainment Software Association, but compared to the multitude of film industry charities like the Roy Rogers Foundation or the works of Danny Thomas' St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital or the many, many others, one almost has to follow mention of the ESA with an expectant "...And?"

You might ask why I'm neglecting to mention Child's Play Charity, the Gamers Outreach Foundation, or even my own Get-Well Gamers Foundation, and it is for one simple reason:  None of these charities have to do with the actual game industry.  Grassroots in the purest sense, these gaming charities were started not by professionals, not by developers and publishers, but by the gamers themselves, who saw an opportunity to help using their favorite pastime as a vehicle.  Interestingly enough, when approached the developers and publishers seem amicable to helping out these smaller charities, but any sort of impetus on their own to use their considerable clout and resources for charitable causes is conspicuously absent.  If the game industry is doing so much better than the film industry, why are we so much more proportionately tight-fisted?  Especially in an industry so frequently and wrongly maligned by the rest of the world, you'd think it would be in our collective interests to paper the walls with our good deeds to help dispel the myths.

Where are the giants of our industry in all this?  Where is EA, where is Ubisoft, where is Activision?  Meaning no disrespect, but if Richard Garriott can spend thirty million dollars to go into space and John Carmack can field a fleet of Ferraris, where is any of that money going that's not to themselves?  If Sony can spend several million dollars on an E3 Booth, why not spend some on charity as well? 

Granted, I can't claim to know everyone’s finances and perhaps they are very philanthropic and I've just never heard about it, but that still underscores the basic problem:  There's no network in place to do good with or through the game industry, at least not anything that's getting out to the world at large. I know it's tacky to gloat about one's generosity, but there's a minimum acceptable level just so people know and can help, too.

In my opinion, the sad and simple truth of the matter is that the game industry, by and large, is stingy. Whether it's simply never occurred to some of these development and publishing companies that they are no longer working out of their garages and need to start acting like mature companies that are a part of the society they live in, or they still live in fear of the next bomb of a game wiping them out to their last cent, or they just simply don't care, something needs to start happening from the top down in this industry to unite us towards common causes, more than the ESA's once a year Nite to Unite.  Believe me, there probably aren't more than a handful of people who know what good videogames and gamers can do for this world than I; there just needs to be more collaboration, more stepping up.

Collectively, the game industry has the motive and the means.  It just needs the will.