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General: The Spirit of Sharing
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
MMORPG.com's "Player In Residence" Jaime Skelton writes this look at gamers and their participation in various charities.
It's Christmas, and the holiday events around the MMO world are in full swing. My inbox has been full over the past few weeks with announcements of parties and exclusive Santa costumes, of how to save reindeer or bring smiles back to the fantasy world – and let's not forget the free gifts for everyone. There's hardly a game that hasn't taken up the Christmas spirit, even if that spirit is heavily biased toward the commercialized holiday of candy canes and flying reindeer.
The season, however – no matter how you celebrate it – is not just about a carnival in red, white, and green. Call me a sap, or a traditionalist, but I do believe that the holiday season is about sharing and giving, which is why I love seeing charitable works spring up in the MMO community. We are, after all, one of the most social groups of gamers that the gaming industry has known, and that puts us in a great position to come together and work toward the good of others.
Read The Spirit of Sharing.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
Am I the only one who cant get to the article page? All of these links take me to the home page, and unless this quote is all there is to the article, Im all out of ideas.
Just hadn't activated the article yet
you were a step ahead of me.
Should work fine now.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Just hadn't activated the article yet
you were a step ahead of me.
Should work fine now.
What do you mean I have no friends and nothing better to do on new year's eve than to lurk around mmorpg.com?
Oh wait...
*runs away*
=P
Some of us do these things all year long.
www.sleepercartel.com
Happy New Year!
I'm a typical person that says, Why should I care ?
In the Netherlands we have a system like the people that work pay a significant amount of money In their lifes and for who ? For schools for older people that can't work or disabled people and lots of more.
In the Netherlands we have the motto, The stronger shoulders should carry the most weight. No offence but I find that already a big charity myself.
The saddest thing is that the MMO companies that help charities are often the smaller companies. Bigger companies seem to rarely start charity drives. I am sure many gamers would really latch on to bigger companies that run MMO charity systems.
Call me heartless or whatever but.. dont we have enough charities already? You cant shake a stick without hitting 2 to 10. Most are used for tax exemptions or down right committing fraud to some degree or other. And lets not even get into the biggest charity of all in the US IE welfare. Where does it end?
Some would consider all the bailouts we just did to be charity. Frankly, I am just a tad bit tired of giving.
In 2004, I--as an avatar named Bhodi Silverman--joined with several other Second Life "residents" to create a proof-of-concept nonprofit organization known as VERTU (Virtual Economies Realizing True Usefulness). We had fabulous success organizing a series of campaigns to raise money for real world nonprofits by raising the currency (Lindens) and selling it on Gaming Open Market--a currency market that turned Lindens into United States dollars. It operated much in the way that IGE does, except that it had the blessing of Linden Lab, the company which owns Second Life.
We were very successful, and our largest campaign raised over five thousand dollars for people impacted by Hurricane Katrina. (We were not raising money on behalf of the Red Cross, but raised the money and THEN offered it to the Red Cross, which is a very different thing.) For a variety of reasons, VERTU only lasted for about six months, but we were very proud of the work we did. In that time, we raised over 10,000 USD for three charities: the EFF, Heifer International, and The Red Cross. You can read about our work in this article from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2005/aug/15/gamesarethen
I'm a firm believer that the real opportunities for nonprofits in the gaming world will come from player-created initiatives and require that companies drop their ban on the conversion of game cash into real world currency. I know it's currently an unpopular idea, but only when players are fully empowered to create and trade value in game worlds will the potential for game-based philanthropy be realized.
V
And in so doing, you open MMO's up to Tax law. States and other countries are at this moment salivating over MMO economies and waiting for any reason to impose taxes on in game currency. History is full of short-sighted ideas like yours that have lead to some of the worst laws on the books. I applaud your willingness to do a good deed, but to do your example would end up costing other gamers millions.
I'm all for money going to charitable causes but....
I've also worked in the for-profit-organisation-leeching-off-charity industry and it's a little bit ugly.
If all of the proceeds for an RMT item go to charity then I'm 100% for it. But eg. WoW's pets for charities where only half the proceeds do.... It's great that money is raised for that particular charity - but WoW is also profiting from players' charitable intentions.
I know that WoW are a business, but couldn't they work the time it took to create the pet as a charitable tax write-off?
So I'm really incredibly pleased to read that all of the money players spent on the Wizard 101 Meowmodon pets went to charity. And while I'm not a fan of RMT, I definitely would use it to support a charity in the way that Wizard 101 presented it.