Herald employees engage in marathon gaming run for charity

I never expected to watch the sun rise through the Herald office windows, nor did I expect to play video games on a giant flatscreen TV at work.

It was around 7 a.m. Sunday morning, Oct. 16, and I was alone in the office, cold, hungry and wrecked. I was tired of looking a bright flashes and listening to electronic chip music. I had played video games for at least 22 hours at that point, and I felt like praying for the next hour to pass quickly. Video games are fun, but playing them without sleep is torture.

Yet the sunrise meant I was almost done with the Extra Life charity. I told people that Herald staff would play video games for 24 hours straight and I was tantalizingly close to finishing the 24-hour marathon for children’s hospitals.

 Gaming for children

There are few things as satisfying as giving to others by doing something you love.

Playing video games is obviously something I love. I’ve written before about how I grew up with games, how I believe gaming is an increasing part of our society and our lives. I never thought much about using my love to do something charitable for others. Until this year, that is.

I heard about the Extra Life charity one or two years back. It’s the nerdy couch-potato equivalent of a walkathon. You collect pledges from people to play video games for 24 hours and that money goes to Children’s Miracle Network hospitals. I remember hearing about it last year and wishing I was a participant or writing/documenting somebody who was playing for a cause.

Extra Life snuck up on me this year. I learned about this year’s Extra Life less than two weeks before launch day and I wanted to write about it. Yet no one in Mower County was part of it, not even my good-natured fellow geeks at GameStop.

So I decided to sign up. Moreover, I decided to ask my editor and publisher to have the Herald sponsor a team for Extra Life. I didn’t know we’d have such success, but the Herald raised $512.01 for Extra Life, surpassing our goal of $500. Not bad, considering we raised the money in nine days.

I had reservations about signing up. Journalists are supposed to write news, not make it. Mower County is the land of 10,000 charities, with many good causes (United Way campaign, AHS students partering with the Red Cross, Salvation Army food shelf, etc.) for people to donate to. Finally, the money we would raise would go to Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare in St. Paul, the only CMN hospital in the state, and not to Mayo. It’s charity dogma that people won’t give as much to a non-local cause.

Yet I knew the money was for a good cause. My family is pretty familiar with Gillette. I had neck surgery there when I was 13 to correct a muscle that contorted my face. When I was 16, a car struck and killed my 10-year-old sister, Emily, while she was riding her bike, though Gillette doctors did everything they could to save her. I had incentive to raise some cash.

My coworkers have similar stories. One of my co-workers used to take her children to Gillette all the time when they were young and a couple that work here have an autistic nephew who gets help at Gillette.

Raising the money was the easy part. Playing video games for 24 hours straight is not as easy as it seems. My coworkers were too busy to play games starting at 8 a.m. Saturday and ending 8 a.m. Sunday. If we were going to do this thing, I was going to carry the weight.

We set up a fairly nice gaming room using the Herald’s conference room, a nice leather couch, some food and a large flatscreen TV that shredded my checkbook (but looks really good in my living room).

We threw down with Super Nintendo, PS3 and Wii games like no other newspaper. There were classic games like “Donkey Kong Country,” “Donkey Kong Country 2,” “Super Mario World,” “Final Fantasy 6,” “NBA Jam,” “Mega Man X,” and more. We had new games like “Borderlands” and “Child of Eden,” “Bulletstorm” and “Mario Kart Wii.” There was even a little “NCAA Football 12” thrown in the mix.

I’d like to say I dominated my coworkers at a few games, but we didn’t really compete against each other.

My editor smoked me at “NCAA Football” (stupid Gophers), but I mostly played a lot of “Borderlands” with reporter Matt Peterson. The nice thing about Borderlands is the game is never too difficult for someone to jump in and play.

“Borderlands” is a shooting game with RPG elements where players customize a post-apocalyptic warrior to beat gross alien monsters and rabid angry mutants. It’s a little more cartoony and stylish than most shooters, which is why many people play.

When my coworkers left me stranded at about 6 p.m. Saturday, I was left to play as many Japanese RPGs as I wanted. I could play “Disgaea 4,” a crazy strategy RPG with ridiculous animation and juvenile humor all I wanted. I could play “Vagrant Story,” one of the best PS1 games ever made, well into the night. The graphics are a little dated, but few games today can match “Vagrant Story’s” plot and engrossing gameplay.

I could play fun, immersive single player experiences, the type of artistic game that’s akin to feeling faith at church. “Child of Eden,” a music game disguised as a futuristic shooter, is an otherwordly experience. It’s almost haunting to play, as you travel through time and space destroying fantastical beings of light in order to save the universe. The music you create through the beings you destroy is oddly peaceful in the dead of night.

Yet there comes a point where gaming at night no longer feels like a euphoric rush. I hit a wall right around 4 a.m. where my body sagged and everything felt heavy. I couldn’t concentrate on the screen in front of me and I was losing badly at “Mario Kart” to people on the other side of the world.

That’s when the dawn came. I was too busy trying to be interested in “Little Big Planet 2” to notice the sun’s first rays but I started to stare when I saw shades of blue and orange sky.

For me, there was only one game to play to pass the time. I started “Flower,” another immersive, artistic game. For those of you who don’t own a PS3, “Flower” is like spending an afternoon in a park reading a book. You play as a small flower petal, determined to bring flowers and life to a drab and dying world. It’s the world’s most peaceful, meditative game and the best thing to play when the sun is rising.

Playing “Flower” meant I didn’t notice when 8 a.m. came and went. I got to finish my level, pack up my games and wind down the Facebook blogging I did throughout the night. I was tired enough to hibernate for the rest of the day and ready to collapse on my bed.

Being tired was a small price to pay for helping sick children. The Extra Life charity broke more than $1.1 million in donations this year for children’s hospitals, including the Herald’s contributions. Knowing that my coworkers and I helped improve someone’s life through sitting on our butts and playing games was worth it.

The Herald’s Extra Life by the numbers

• 24: hours Herald staff played video games.

• $512.01: the amount Herald staff raised for Gillette Children’s Hospital.

• 2: number of Donkey Kong games played.

• 5: hours Herald staff played Borderlands.

• 48-14: Final score in an NCAA Football game between Adam Harringa and Trey Mewes

  Games we played:

SNES: Donkey Kong Country, Donkey Kong Country 2, NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, Final     Fantasy 6, Super Mario World, Super Street Fighter II: Tournament Edition, Mega Man X, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 4: Turtles in Time, Raiden Trad.

PS3: Borderlands, NCAA Football 12, Disgaea 4, Flower, Child of Eden, Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes, Mortal Kombat, Castle Crashers, Vagrant Story, Super Stardust HD, X-Men.

Wii: Mario Kart.