May is charity month, and I can’t talk about charity without talking about Headshots from the Heart, naturally. It’s coming up in just a few weeks, and it’s going to be amazing. LAN party, webcast, auctions, all for children’s hospitals. But this isn’t an impassioned plea for you to help children (for my impassioned plea, go here). It’s a look at the idea, and the process.
One day, I told a joke. Some friends were visiting and we were talking about Borderlands, a game we’d been playing together. “Wouldn’t it be cool,” I said, “If we live streamed us playing Borderlands for a day straight, and added a mechanic so 
we had to play really well? We could get people to donate every time we made a headshot.” I was kidding. No one would go for it. Besides, we weren’t really charity people. We’d donate time or talent now and again, but never run our own thing. Six months later, we had a website. Six months after that, we were sitting down to play with a bunch of volunteers and a table full of auction items, ready to go. As ready as we were going to be, anyway.
One of the things that continually struck me was how easy it was. Don’t get me wrong, it was a lot of work, and we just happened to have the right skillsets. Amanda is a diligent and excellent project manager, as well as having an array of technical and crafting skills. Dave is a skilled tech guy and brilliant artist, and Joy is a great PR person. And there was just the four of us, not even all in the same city, putting this thing together. The groundswell of support that we got from our community, both locally and online, was amazing. People loved it, and wanted to donate things to help out, or come down and volunteer. We worked with crafters and designers from all over the world, people put within our reach by a single email who were more than happy to raise money for children. We did our best to pay it forward by posting how-to’s, and trying to help other people doing the same thing, the way we got help from Desert Bus and Mario Marathon.
We learned a lot from it. We learned how to ask, and how to say thank you. How to fundraise, how to organize, and how not to organize. Our biggest goal for this year isn’t to raise more money (though we want that too), it’s to learn from everything we did last year, and to really give gamers the opportunity to give back not just by donating their treasure, but also their talent and time.
But it started as an idea. Every charity event does. A couple of people sitting around saying “Hey, I think we could make this work.” I’m enormously grateful to the amazing people I’ve been able to work with, and I’m already excited for next year, even though this year hasn’t happened yet.
Join us on May 18th at headshotsmarathon.org, or by joining our Minecraft server, or by raising some money and coming down for our LAN party. We’re the largest charity videogaming event in Ontario, and we want to give gamers the chance to help children heal.
