What type of charity event should we run?

Question

Since people are in favor of doing a charity event, let's decide what we should do. If you have a suggestion, please provide an answer with the following details so that people can vote on things:

1. What is the basic premise of your event?
2. Is this an online event, or an event at a specific location (or at multiple locations)?
3. Why will people donate/watch/participate in this event? (Make your case)
4. How will donations be accepted? (Logistics don't need to be specified, just whether people will donate online, or in person, and if they donate before or during the event)

Voting has closed. Winner is Top Tag Marathon!

Answer 1

I don't have the idea fully fleshed out, but it would be cool if we could setup a "celebrity expert" Q&A event. People would submit questions along with a donation amount. We would line up celebrity experts to answer the questions in order of the amount donated. Donating doesn't guarantee that your question gets a celebrity answer (due to time constraints), but donating more improves your chances, and of course all questions would get added to the site to be answered by members.

Celebrity experts would be creators/developers of games, famous players of games, or other people that are well known and knowledgeable in a certain game community.

In terms of logistics, I think we would need to determine what experts we could get, and limit the games based on that. Rather than sending questions directly to the site, people would submit them on a special page ahead of time, along with their donation (we'd need to wait to "collect" donations until someone had verified that the question was appropriate for the site). We would then have a time period for each game where the questions are posted to the site, and the celebrity experts post their answers. Since people may have a hard time coming up with unique questions, we would also allow them to choose questions that someone else has suggested (or existing questions on the site?) and add a donation to them to improve the chances of getting a celebrity answer to it.

I think this would be great not only because it would add a lot of great content to the site, but I think many people would donate in order to have their favorite question answered by the game's creator or other famous people. The hardest part would be finding celebrity experts for well-known games that would be willing to participate.

Answer 2

Top Tag Marathon

This was suggested in the other thread, but I'll add it in here as well.

The idea is to go through our top tags, and run a marathon, streaming our progress online. With this there are two options for how we might want to do this. The first is to do a distributed stream, where a few people from around the world take a game or two to marathon and do it. We can rotate in and out people, and take a similar format to other marathons or speed runs, only distributed online. The second is to find a more centralized location for a few of us and have a group of us do a marathon. This one might be harder, as the meetup showed, we tend to be fairly spread out. But, I also feel that it is more fun to do it all in one place, and will probably raise more money seeing as how it isn't just playing from 9-5 in your timezone, but going out of your way to stay up and marathon through the night.

Other marathon runs actually have a lot of success in doing this. It is just a way for people to come watch us play some games, and contribute. We can take the approach where more money equals more games, or more percentage of games. Or we can take the approach where people donate towards us playing a game, and we play whatever has the highest donation amount. For the Gaming.SE twist in this, it was recommended we use the top tags here to determine our list of games to marathon, which I think is a good idea.

Donations

Personally, I like the idea of people voting with donations as to what games we play. This would be run through a website, and we can just have people donate directly to the Child's Play account. The site would mostly for promotion of the stream before hand, and hosting the stream as it is live.

As with the other post, I have hosting we can use, and am willing to donate a domain name if we find one we like. As for site design and coding, we can figure that out in the next stage of planning. We can do it collectively or we can have some ambitious people take on the brunt of it.

Answer 3

Online Tournament

The premise is pretty simple, we run a tournament online and people can sign up. We take donations as entry fee, and we offer up prizes for first, second and third place or something. The basic idea is pretty simple, people sign up, we put them in to brackets, and we play until there is a winner. We'll need to set up rules for the tournament around forfeiting, scoring, griefing, teams, etc. but that can be decided later.

As for what game we would have the tournament for, that would be TBD based on the next step. The basic requirements for a game to qualify for tournament play would be:

• Is played and scored online
• Scores are viewable online after the game (in some form, even if it is just replays)
• Clear victor in a game (sorry Minecraft)
• Must be able to be played in a reasonable amount of time (we can't run a tournament for a game that takes days to complete)

Good candidates may include areas such as:

• Established tournament settings/rules
• Spectator or observer in the game
• Popular
• Can be live streamed with relative ease

Places like MLG and other gaming tournament organizations would probably be a good place to look for candidates for games.

Donations/Sign up

For this, we'd likely need a website or something to allow people to sign up and donate. The site would be a way to track progress throughout the tournament, see how teams are doing and maybe watch replays if supported. The donations would be taken in through the Child's Play Paypal directly, with no handling of money done by us (similar to how Mario Marathon does it).

Creation of the site and resources is something that can either be done by someone willing (I can if need be), or by a few of us collectively. I've got hosting we can use, and we'd just need a domain name or something. They are cheap and I'd be happy to donate one if we can pick one we like.

Prizes

Prize levels will probably depend on how many people there are, what game, and what sort of response we get. I'd be willing to chip in for some prizes, though if we can get more people chipping in, we can get more. This will be the tricky part, seeing as how we won't know ahead of time how much money we'll be able to raise, but entry fee (or minimum donation) will probably dictate how good of prizes we shoot aim for.