I wasn’t always a process guy. Back at the start of my career I was very much fueled by the physical production of creative and tangible projects. It was only after going through dozens of these projects that my attention started to turn to, “How can we make this better?” instead of just “How can we make this?” Fast forward a few years and my creative time in the trenches is now spent helping a project and a project team work better rather than always being hands on. It is rewarding for sure, but it’s different type of thrill than the one that comes with creating something from scratch. Needless to say, I still need that fix of “making something” every now and again.
That itch never went away and led me to strike out on a different type or project. A year ago I founded a video game editorial site with some close friends of mine, and the site continues to grow well beyond it’s original intention of just being a outlet for our video game geek outs. As satisfying as that has been, I still wanted to do more. I turn my hobby into something that could help others.

Image courtesy of Nuvo.net
It seemed a bit daunting at first. We were a group of writers scattered throughout the midwest without a good way to bring everything and everyone together. Indianapolis isn’t exactly a hot bed of video gaming culture, but I did find one surprising outlier in a local video game cafe called NetHeads. NetHeads caught my attention as I discovered it was hosting a summer camp for kids and introducing them to basic video game design and development. I reached out and quickly became good friends with the manager, and one of the first conversations we had was about hosting a video game event to raise money for charity.
I was pretty excited, but I had also been here before. Great conversations. Great ideas. No action. I wasn’t about to let the opportunity slip by and I had learned with the successful launch of our website the year before, that’s it’s all about milestones and accountability. We set ourselves a timeline and agreed that we needed to do the event before the end of the year in 2011. We just had to follow through.
As summer turned to fall, the event started coming into focus. NetHeads was the perfect venue not only to host the event itself, but it also gave us the opportunity to livestream video to better promote the event. We decided that the event would be a 24 hour video game marathon that we could blog about and utilize social media to drive traffic to a donation form for a charity that specializes in providing games and toys for children’s hospitals. As we began spreading the word about the event, it became clear that there was much more good we could do through gaming. I met with my team and we decided to form a community service organization that could pursue these opportunities in the future.

On October 14, 2011 the A Call to Gamers (ACTGamers.org) website was launched and the 24 Hour Charity Gaming Challenge began that evening. After 24 hours of gaming, tweeting, blogging, and video coverage we managed to raise over $1,000 for the Child’s Play Charity.
ACTGamers more than tripled the original donation goal that I had set back in the spring. Not only did it feel great to make something and have it be a success, but thanks to support of our donors it was incredibly humbling to have the fruition of that idea actually benefit others. I hope to have an even bigger impact next year through the organization.
After the event we put together this video summary of our coverage and plan on doing another event in the spring.
This post is part of Think Kit 2011.