Over the weekend, the Game Developer’s Club (GDC) participated in Extra Life, a 24-hour charity streaming event in which gamer’s live stream themselves playing video games in an effort to collect donations for the Children’s Miracle Network. While the event is officially set to start on Saturday at 8 a.m. and end the following day at the same time, the club has had a longstanding tradition of making the event last the entire weekend. The event started on Friday at 6 p.m. and ending at the same time on Sunday, for a total of 48 hours (49 if one accounts for daylight savings time).

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For the entire weekend, the participants gathered in Burke and live streamed themselves playing video games on the popular video game streaming platform Twitch, to elicit donations from people online. In addition, participants were encouraged to collect donations from their friends and family for the charity.

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All the donations collected by individual members of the club go directly to a local Children’s Miracle Network hospital, which is, in this case, St. Vincent’s Hospital in Erie. “We took a tour recently, seeing all the equipment that they bought with the money that we raised,” said GDC president Joe Craig, a senior Software Engineering major. “It’s really eye-opening, that we’re actually doing good work,” Craig later commented. The club set forth to raise $1000 over the course of the weekend, which they managed to exceed by $127, for a total of $1127 raised as of Sunday night. “I was very surprised because this wasn’t the biggest turnout that we’ve ever had since I’ve been in the club. A couple years ago we had a lot more people, but this group raised more, and we hit our goal,” Craig stated in response to the club exceeding their goal. Craig explained, “We set our goal pretty high, and we also surpassed the previous years that I’ve been here,”

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In response to the turnout for the event, Craig said that he wasn’t expecting a large turnout, due to a lack of advertising outside of the club. “We got a lot more people than I anticipated,” Craig elaborated. He also stated that about half of the people present were not active members of the club, mostly from the Behrend Gamer’s Club (BGC), as well as some more members outside of the club.

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True, to their name, the GDC has had a long-standing tradition of creating physical games to be played in Burke and live streamed from people’s phones during the event as well. “Our physical game was not as good,” Craig admitted. “We were trying to plan a game, within the limits of the maintenance staff. We were trying to make their lives easier. So we weren’t doing any running. We were trying not the throw things,” he explained in reference to previous years where participants had tried to play games of that nature. “We tried to make it a very subtle game, but it ended up not working as well as we wanted it to.” Despite those issues, Craig stated that he thinks the club learned a lot from the experience.